I am fortunate to be a gifted storyteller. For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed spinning tales of fictional fact and factual fiction for the enjoyment of others.
I learned some time ago that my gift of storytelling extended beyond the thousand words I write here every week or even the stories I write for my job or my clients. I seem to be so good at it that these days I’m speaking regularly to audiences about the power of story.
We all have a gift for stories, of course. It’s how we deal with our past. It’s even how we keep the past in our present and future. Like giving a dead patient CPR, we continue to breath life into things that happened in the past, falsely believing that they will keep us warm, safe and secure in this world of ours.
It’s not that the stories are bad, mind you. Some of them are really good, in fact. We don’t even have to distance ourselves from the stories we tell and can continue to tell them to anyone who is willing to listen, including ourselves.
But as I’ve learned so well, these stories about our lives are very different from the events that actually transpired. What happened happened. It’s really that simple. An event took place and it was completed. It took place in our past.
The story attached to it isn’t what really happened. We add it after the fact so we can make sense of everything that transpired, in order to give it meaning. In fact, the story may have changed over the years to suit our own self interests or needs. Once it no longer works for us, we embellish it, switch it around, add some mythical lore and whip it into a riveting tale that we can relive day after day.
Again, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with a good story. Nearly two-thirds of everything we communicate in a given day is a story – stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell others. We are meaning making machines and stories help us give meaning. The only danger occurs when the lines between what actually happened and the story we tell about it become blurred. They become one. We can no longer tell where the actual event ends and the story begins.
This collapse is what keeps us locked in the never-ending story of the past. We continue to loop around and around because we are no longer able to realize that stuff just happens. Some of it we have control over, other stuff is totally beyond our control.
Yet, we still allow it to control us because we breathe life into it regularly. We won’t let it die, no matter what. I have certainly been guilty of this. My memoirs are filled with these stories, wrapped around events that actually transpired. They are great stories. Memoirs usually are.
I’m not saying the events didn’t happen as stated. But I can’t always be sure that the stories I’ve created around them are indeed absolute fact. The same can be said for any story in our own lives.
I have come to discover this first hand. Let me tell you, it’s pretty profound. The technique is pretty simple and straightforward, but damned hard to practice, at least initially, because, well, we get caught up in a new story every time. It’s a racket. We want to stay in the story, because it allows us to be victims of our own lives rather than be responsible for what happened.
As you think about something that took place in your life, try to separate the fact from your own fiction for a change. Take out all the editorial you’ve created. That means all the feelings, all the backstory, the justifications, the whys, the blame, the endless cycle of becauses. Also, take everyone else out of the equation. It’s so easy to create a story where someone else is to blame. They may have truly been at fault, but they may not have been as well. It really doesn’t matter as you can’t control what they did anyway. It’s in the past and quite frankly, those you blame may be telling an entirely different story from the one you’re telling and continue to tell it long after you’ve realized that that’s just what it is, a story about something that happened.
I wrote a RobZerrvation a week ago about life in the funhouse mirrors. I might put it up here, I might not. Stories are a lot like those mirrors. We create them so that we don’t have to really admit that what happened, happened. It was a shitty deal, but it’s in past. Rather than simply move forward, however, we walk through the funhouse, lost in the reflections of our own stories, all because we really don’t want to go forward. We kind of like the stories because we don’t have to be accountable or responsible for the way our life turned out. Rather, we can say it was those damned events in the past that have shaped us into what we become, not the stories we created about them instead.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I haven’t come out of this whole thing story free or a hater of stories. And I don’t have all the magical answers.
What I can say is that the truth really does set you free and the stories aren’t the truth. Only the actual events that occurred are the truth, and even then these can be kind of shaky because we see them through our own filters. There is no objective observer available. It’s only how we see life and events. We don’t have the luxury of seeing it through the eyes of others.
I for one am glad that I can see this now. I finally woke up no longer haunted by anything in my past. The past is just the past. The stories are just that, stories, and some of them are real doozies. And like any work of fiction, they have no actual power over me unless I choose to let them.
It’s an extremely peaceful feeling. And it’s something that I am going to continue to work on, separating fact from my fiction, which I once sold as fact.
In the Emerald City, the past finally in my past,
– Robb