Story Itself

I’m not really using Mastodon for anything these days, having settled into Bluesky because it’s where all the people I used to want to be around on Twitter have ended up, but I do (for some reason) still follow the #Blogging hashtag there, and that’s where I saw a former wellness coach posit that you are not your story.

So, a counterpoint.

The tricky part is recognizing when you start telling yourself such a story, then being able to separate your actual, present self from the version in the narrative. Start by realizing that you’re constructing the story around past events. Because that’s all you have to build them around, events you remember and can put yourself back into in order to sort out what’s happening now. […]

[…]

Now step back from the story you’ve constructed and realize that this is not who you are. This is an event from your past. Your present self has learned from that past event and is attempting to translate what happened and make it relevant to the present.

This is, in fact, all we are: the sum of our experiences and our reactions to them. We very much are our stories. What the coach describes instead is what happens when we let the story go awry. When we, to pick just one example of error, overweight the external gaze when evaluating our own story.

This narrative self in fact is “considered important for psychological wellbeing”, and something with which I struggle because my severely deficient autobiographical memory subjects me to some obvious degree of “derailment”. I’ve discussed this more than once, in fact, even if in the specific context of blogging, which for me in essence is a physicalizing of telling myself into existence.

“You are a process,” I once wrote to explain how I write myself toward self-belief. “Being a person is a process.” That process necessarily is one of storytelling. Our experience of the world is divided up into narrative experiences and database experiences, and our self-experience had better damn well be the former or we are unmoored.

“Nothing happens for a reason,” per the coach quoting Megan Hollingsworth, “but everything that happens has purpose.” That purpose, however, is something that only arises from our story. It’s not sitting there somewhere to be found or uncovered in some psychological geocache, let alone an external one. The purpose of a system is what it does, and we ourselves are a system. Our purpose is what we do, and what we do is embody and enact the ongoing story of our being, in one way or another, for better or for worse.

Stories take many forms: poetry is story, and music is story. Stories don’t just consist of words, or necessarily consist of them at all. Stories consist of experience. We are experience made flesh. It isn’t just that we are our story, it’s that we are story itself.