Everyone has a story, their story. My story is that I was a small white child growing up in an Hispanic neighborhood in El Paso. My parents were hard working poor people. My dad died when I was young and I started taking care of the family at 19, etc.
Well, all of that is true. But there are literally millions of details that I left out of this story, some of them probably more important to describing who I am than the details I picked. Even if I gave you the long version of my life (I have a book, laugh), the details are picked by me to reflect to you who I think I am. In fact, they are the story I tell myself to convince me that I am who I think I am. I have no mention in my story of myself of the times I have been an asshole. I didn't think it was important.
We are our most creative when we make up the story of our love lives. Unlucky in love, the casanova, the savior, the abused, the deserted, the wronged, the divorcee, the single long suffering single parent, man-hater, the fool, etc. My story of myself is that I love love and intimacy, not always with just one woman. Early in life my mate would say don’t ask Robert something unless you want to know what he thinks. I considered myself honest, that was my story, because I never told a lie -- out of my mouth at least. A lot went unsaid and my actions did not live up to the expectation of my partner. 
My partners have had their own story about their past and past relationship. Obviously, I just had one side of the story, and more simply I had a fictionalized version of their story. It is kind of like when you go to a movie derived made from a book you have read. If the book represents the truth, then the movie represents a fictionalized story of the truth.
Both of the stories I told on our first few dates in my latest romance were not only one-sided, and non-representative, but in some ways they were just pure fiction. They didn’t really come close to representing my past relationships, me, or what was important to me. The stories were convenient, entertaining, and portrayed me to the world as I wanted to be portrayed. One would think our stories put our best foot forward, but in fact most of our stories about ourselves don't even do that.
What makes a relationship work is to constantly tear down the fictional stories that we make up about ourselves and others. Every story we make up is fictional, but we try to pick those details that makes the truest story we know how to make. Couples seldom agree completely and they should grow to realize that our stories are very feeble in representing the total picture. It is not that we are weak minded, it is that we are open minded enough that we can see many aspects in each story that are not being represented by the current version of the story. To realize that my mate's version of the story may hold as much truth in it as my version of the story is tough at times, especially when that feeling of righteous indignation descends on us.
We do this same kind of story making for our country. From the republicans we have the story line Obama is destroying our country, from the democrats we have the story line that the Republicans have no plan but to say "no". These are broad judgment stories that fail to get down to any useful detail on any issue including immigration, modifying entitlement programs where they can be solvent, balancing the budget, etc. And on each of these issues each side has a fictional story they present as the truth that captures the details of the issues that they want to tell.
And to ourselves and the rest of the world we tell the story of our country as the land of the free, home of the brave. Since we have more people in prison per capita than any other civilized country perhaps we need to modify the story to capture this detail. When we say it is a country of opportunity perhaps we need to include the detail that we have wealth inequality that is worse than China -- and we know the story of how bad it is there. Or is there a miracle happening in China?
And to ourselves and the rest of the world we tell the story of our country as the land of the free, home of the brave. Since we have more people in prison per capita than any other civilized country perhaps we need to modify the story to capture this detail. When we say it is a country of opportunity perhaps we need to include the detail that we have wealth inequality that is worse than China -- and we know the story of how bad it is there. Or is there a miracle happening in China?
The bottom line is pretty simple. What comes out of our mouth as the story of our-self, our party, and our country is fiction. The story can not be captured by one liners, by broad judgmental proclamations, and by overt righteousness (a whole other story). The real stories are complex, detailed, nuanced and incredibly hard to capture with words. Often the story or opinion we proclaim as being insightful is simply a story we like.
When we figure out that own story is fiction, then what? My guess the first response should be a strong dose of humble pie. But, what most of us do is to double down on our story adding some more details, carefully selected, to show that our story has some validity and that at least some of our righteousness is justified. But, if challenging your own story is too painful for you, for me, perhaps we can start by listening to the news and first asking why out of all the billions of things that happened yesterday, why were these stories chosen. Do they happen to fit into the bigger narrative/story told by this station? Do they fit reinforce the culture/righteousness of their audience? 
Once you get a hang of what news from this new perspective, use this new skill first on yourself and then with the cooperation of your partner, look at the stories that the two of you tell. Can a more realistic, and perhaps more helpful story be told? And once your story is altered and improved will it help your life evolve to something richer and more rewarding?
No comments:
Post a Comment