Everything was rainslick that morning so I hadn’t noticed the pool of water before I’d tapped my brakes, sending the car’s rear sliding out into the oncoming lane of the bridge I was on. The foghorn complaint of a semi-truck bearing down on me and time slowed to a lazy crawl like an old woman backstroking her way across a pool. My car returned to its path in an instant and all was still. PJ Harvey singing “this mess we’re in” and the dawn-orange sky reaching toward me from the horizon. My pounding heart unclenched its grip on my throat and began to ease back down into my chest and I reached for my water, struck by how my hand trembled, chemical and energetic aftershocks rippling out of my body. Almost as soon as the danger had passed, I could feel an itch arise, a temptation to build a story around what had just happened. A thought appeared: “It hadn’t even rained that much.” And then another thought: “I had just bought brand new tires.” And then the thought that the story should include earlier elements, like how I’d braked only because of that guy back at the truck stop complaining about “idiot drivers in the rain.” And then another thought, a higher order one, or so I imagine: “You are in the process of overlaying a mental construction over your experience rather than just being present to it.”
By “story” and “narrative,” I have in mind a more or less elaborate and coherent set of thoughts that frame and shape what arises in our awareness, giving it a kind of form. It’s happening most of the time in subtle ways, and in a pretty obvious way in conversations full of interjections like: “….and then I said, ‘I can’t believe that you x, y, z.’ And then he said, ‘I don’t care what you believe.’ And then I said ‘x, y, z.’ For some, this overt narration mode simply IS “conversation,” although most reading this essay can easily identify it as a speaker having slipped into “spigot” mode, delivering a performative, habitual, pre-digested litany. When we’re on the receiving end of such shallow streams of verbiage—no matter what the ostensible topic or theme—we may go into pretend-listening mode, perhaps impatiently waiting to turn our own faucet on. My earliest memory of this phenomenon is of my mother on the phone with a chatty friend. She would set the receiver down on the kitchen table for long stretches as her friend ran her repetitive story spigot. It’s this memory that still rises up when, in the midst of “conversation,” I realize that I’m not only boring my interlocutor, but myself as well. Fortunately, many of us develop enough self-awareness to recognize that too much of such shallow “sharing” can be tedious. It may not keep us from doing it altogether, but we’ve probably gotten better at noticing and shifting gears when we do. It is way more difficult to notice in its more subtle forms, especially when our narration includes cosmetic embellishments of authenticity or thoughtfulness meant to distinguish it from rote prattle.
And we don’t turn on the story spigot only, or even primarily, with others, but also—as I did on the slippery bridge that morning—when “we” are conversing with “ourselves.” It’s when you drop a metal bucket on your foot and the thought arises that you should have been more careful. And how you probably should have used the plastic bucket. Without a pause, this voice may add how you shouldn’t have been wearing flip-flops and how you would have been wearing real shoes if your partner hadn’t moved them. And why is he always moving your things anyway? And then the internal drama escalates: “God, have I gotten involved with another person who’s bossy and controlling?” Or maybe your internal narrator starts awfulizing, writing a story of how you probably broke your toe and how you’ll have to give up running for the summer and find someone to walk the dogs. Depending on your mental habits, all of this can happen in an instant, serving both to distract you from the present pain of an injured foot and deepening your addiction to the narrator within you, one always focused on the non-existent past or future, and frequently seeking to blame or excuse. And, indeed, avoidance of the direct experience of pain—be it physical or psychological—seems to be one of our internal narrator’s primary goals. Some will spend their lives with their attention glued to this distraction. It’s like sitting through an entire movie focused entirely on the sound of a woman smacking her gum behind you.
Unfortunately, once we learn about the egoic, shallow roots of this sort of narration—which comes in subtle and grosser forms—our next temptation may be to latch onto yet another story, a super-egoic narration of how I am bad for substituting in thinking—especially “negative” thinking—for direct experience. This high and mighty narrator insists that if I were truly spiritual, then I would have no need to frame and reframe what shows up in my consciousness, to put labels on it and maybe also pass it around to others like a bong at a party. And if we’re very earnest spiritual practitioners, this super-egoic narration—so full of lofty shoulds—may be followed by a super-super-egoic narrative about how, if I were REALLY spiritual, I would not be distracted by my internal super-egoic critic. Indeed, sometimes it seems like we gauge our level of spiritual development by the degree to which we are ascending in levels of self-critical narration: “A spiritually developed person would be more accepting of herself,” it might begin, but then quickly shift to how a TRULY spiritually developed person would accept herself for her failures to be self-accepting. That it is possible to apply countless layers of self-judgment helps illustrate how invested the ego is in keeping us from direct experience. The ego seems quite happy to pile on endless layers of conceptualization—including heaping portions of word salad if necessary—to keep us from facing the imagined horror of our true, unmediated selves. Its greatest trick, though, may be to persuade us that trading our “negative” self-talk in for self-affirmation is a form of deep realization. This helps explain why so many become stalled out in the “positive thinking” trap—which, for sure, feels better than its negative counterpart—even though this too is still just more narrative overlay.
At risk of stating the obvious, there is nothing wrong with weaving narratives. We humans are storytelling creatures, and being able to discursively frame and mold experience can function both as an important tool and a delight. This capacity is, evidently, not only critical to the development and maintenance of human culture, but also to human survival. Be they the “stories” of history, a novel, or a friend’s cautionary tale, narrative is a glorious aspect of being human. The problem arises when we mistake narratives—internal or external—for the experiences themselves, or when we become so enamored of the narrative overlay—often, perversely, a self-defeating narrative of suffering—that we forget a deeper level of reality exists. In this sense, we are more or less like actors who’ve been playing our roles for so long we’ve come to speak and to move 24-7 as if we actually ARE these characters. Amy Martinez “loses herself” to such a degree that she actually believes she is Lady Macbeth. To those who know and love Amy, this is felt as a loss and a tragedy, and frustrating too, especially when they cannot shake her from her identification with the character she has studied so hard to “become.” With this in mind, it makes a lot of sense that so many spiritual masters insist that spiritual awakening depends solely on the sincere exploration of one itty bitty question: Who are you really?
Of course, unless and until we are willing to be relentlessly honest about what that question unearths, we will splash around in the shallows, moving between one narrative and another: “I am a good person. I am a bad person. I am happy. I am sad. I am old. I am young. I am ugly. I am beautiful. I am stupid. I am smart. I am married. I am single. I am damaged. I am whole. I am weak. I am strong. I am a professor. I am a woman. I am gay.” And rooted in this narrative mode, we will connect to reality—including to the reality of other people—primarily through their narrative attachments too, especially in ways that seem to support or provide counterpoint to the stories we are “telling” through our various identity commitments. From this point of view, we agree (or not) to accept roles in others’ stories based, not on who we really are, but on what will fit into the narratives we’ve agreed to. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, it is the basis on which many salubrious social and political affinities are formed and nourished. It’s just that such thought-based identifications do not reflect the direct reality of who we are. This is perhaps why, when we meet someone who seems to peer behind the curtain of our narrative, it can be both unnerving and exhilarating. Because although we long to be directly seen by a loving other, we usually fear it too. Just so, we may hunger to fall into the reality of our own true selves even as we cling to the scripts and costumes that will protect us from such raw intimacy.
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