I’m ten minutes early for my second appointment with someone I’ll call Anna who found me through the friend of a friend. At our first meeting, she shared that she has felt like she’s been wrestling her way through a life transition, one she jokingly called an “identity crisis.” “I feel like a cliche,” she says, “just one more middle-aged woman who looked in the mirror one day and no longer knew who she was.” Anna races through her story with practiced ease: a privileged childhood with two white-collar parents, college, marriage and a couple of kids (now grown), a professional career where she’s excelled. “I feel guilty that I’m even sitting here now. As if I could possibly have anything to complain about given everything that’s going on in the world. I mean, I’ve had—I have—an incredible life!” In fact, she was so insistent on acknowledging her own privilege that, at that first meeting, we barely scratched the surface of her concerns. Mostly, we just explored Anna’s beliefs about the nature and value of beliefs themselves, specifically of the stories we tell and believe about ourselves. It’s a really simple method of self-inquiry, but devastatingly effective for folks with the courage and inclination to go along with it.
A crass way of considering the relationship between storytelling and identity is to recall yourself at a party or on a first date, wanting to impress another. Maybe you highlight the plot points in the story of you so as to emphasize your precociousness and special talents: “I started singing arias when I was three-years-old. By the time I was seven, I was performing at bar mitzvahs and weddings.” Maybe the story you rely on is one of workaday competence and reliability: “I’m the oldest of three kids with a good job. I drive up to see my aging mother in Ontario every other Saturday and have always been there for my siblings whenever they’ve needed me.” Paradoxically, the story many of us rush to tell includes strong elements of victimization, highlighting not just our resilience at overcoming difficulty but a sort of specialness at how much suffering we have endured and of the scars we continue to bear: “I grew up poor. My parents were raging alcoholics. I’ve been in therapy for 30 years and don’t ever expect to be done with it.” Indeed, the temptation to remain attached to a story of suffering, to identifying as being a victim, is one of the greatest hurdles on the spiritual path. This also helps explain, I think, why Anna was so reluctant to tell anything but a “positive” version of her own story.
When it comes down to it, Anna does not really even believe she deserves to have a story at all. This is both because she imagines she has not suffered enough to have earned one—think of all the devastating disaster memoirs that are so popular—and because she believes it’s unattractive and unspiritual to complain or be “negative.” And so, perhaps inevitably, the story she initially shared with me was brief and anodyne. Not surprisingly, when I invite Anna to retell the story of herself from the perspective of someone else, a hypothetical objective observer, say, it is quite different. Then she describes the trajectory of an adopted mixed-race little girl in a very white neighborhood who felt tremendous pressure to succeed. This version of Anna was verbally harassed by her track coach in high school and regularly threw up before exams in college. This iteration of Anna was on auto-pilot through much of her ten-year marriage and felt relief when “he left me for a prettier, more spontaneous version of me.” The Anna of this revised story was in therapy for five years in her 30s —which she’d found to be very helpful—and successfully fought an addiction to prescription painkillers in her early 40s. This Anna has struggled and suffered plenty and is more than a little pissed off at the “good girl,” easy going, gratitude-oriented version of herself that she so often feels compelled to trot out to the world and to persuade herself that she is.
I’m not suggesting that the second, grittier version of the story of Anna is the “true” one. To the contrary, there are a variety of different stories we could tell about ourselves that might more or less correspond with the historical facts of our lives. And, with that in mind, it’s worth asking why we are inclined to highlight one story over another. Better still, if we can also ask why, in some cases, we may pledge our allegiance to the most repetitive, disempowering story possible. I cannot write this without thinking of my own father whose primary identity story was rooted in the rage and pain he experienced at the hands of his alcoholic, abusive father. Even when he was in his 70s, my father—who had created a life of great success, including by his own standards—could become animated with rage when he spoke of that long ago little boy who was alternately neglected and beaten by a selfish drunk. To be clear, this wasn’t just a story my father told to impress (in some sense) others, but one he had apparently been telling himself—hypnotizing himself with—for his entire life. A huge part of who he fundamentally took himself to be, his core sense of being, was as that abused little boy, the one who never got the attention, love, or care he deserved. It was a story that fed my father’s drive to succeed, but it also fueled his anger, resentment and dedication to the belief that the world had let him down.
To be clear, this is not a diatribe against telling stories. We are, it seems, story-telling creatures. It’s an ability and compulsion that may even form part of the crowning glory of our species. And so we write and read novels, watch movies, and sit across from one another in cafes and candlelit restaurants sharing ourselves through narratives. “And then what?” we ask, holding the hand of a friend or lover as she recounts her history, and maybe even becomes stronger through the telling. Our stories of ourselves can surely bring us closer to others and to ourselves, especially as we give voice to the hardest parts, both the most shameful shame and the most boundless, effervescent joy. But no matter how sticky the story may feel, no matter how addicted we may have become to putting it on and wearing it yet again, that story is not who we are. To believe otherwise is to reproduce a terribly common fallacy, one we may quickly recognize in another when they have become swallowed up by a narrative loop of “he said” and “she did” about some distant happenstance. “Are they ever going to let it go?” we may wonder. But when I myself am the actor on the stage who has actually come to believe she is the character she has been playing night after night, how long will it take me to recognize my own madness?
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