You are not your story

On being too much. Original painting by Lynne Cameron.

This week, I’ve listened to other people telling ‘their story’. I’ve noticed how sometimes the story I hear is exactly the same over several re-tellings. The same words, the same sequence of events, the same ending.

And I’ve been asked several times to tell people ‘my story’. I resist. I begin with a warning that “I don’t believe in stories”. Each time, what I tell is different – a different collection of fragments and episodes, in a different sequence, with different highlights, and no ending. Some of the ‘tellings’ have been more powerful than others, some of the sequences easier to make sense of.

I could now sit down and compose a better story – I could edit and shape and form something with a beginning, middle, and end that it is easy for people to grasp. So many personal development programmes urge us to do this.

I resist.

I have done that story-making in the past. I have told my life in stories. I have forced a thesis into chapters that follow on from each other and hold together from start to finish. I have done the same with books. I have written stories out of messy research interviews. Each time the struggle reflects the forcing into an unnatural format, the necessary editing of things that might have mattered. Manufactured fictions.

These manufactured fictions have their place. They can work to create effect and impact.

They are not enough to tell a life, or to change a life.

A story simplifies, edits, closes, fixes. Our lives are complex, uncertain, dynamic, and always open to some level of choosing.

You will always be more than ‘your story’.

We are this, and we are that. Original painting by Lynne Cameron,