I've been discussing this question with artform for some time: What does it mean to see your life as a story?
When asked, many people say, "Of course not. My life is my life."
Is there a difference between those who understand their life as a story and those who don't?
I'm very much not a fan of this line of thinking. Stories are narratively contrived. It's even a maxim of storytelling: "focus on the most interesting time in the characters' lives." Stories have beginnings, middles and ends and they have nothing to do with the lives of the characters. By thinking about your own life in terms of arcs you are forcing an undue amount of importance on unimportant events. More than that, you're looking for an end and trying to redefine your beginning. Finally, by considering your own life a narrative you're forced to consider the audience who, by the way, doesn't give the first fuck about you. I'd go as far as saying that considering your life a story is unhealthy to the point of detrimental. Life is a journey. You know when and where it started, you rarely know when and where it will end. Everything else is subject to change and if you're constantly trying to arrange your existence to please some external structure you are literally wasting your life.
I guess I didn't read it the same way. The way that I see it, is that my life is a story whether I like it or not. It has a beginning, things happen, and then there will be an end. Looking at it that way, I feel an impetus to make it one worth relating. I definitely don't worry about arcs. That would probably just be an avenue for excuses, and I don't buy into an Owen Meany kind of purpose. What I do feel, is that if I spend a day on the couch watching TV, then that is one page of the book that wouldn't likely survive an editing process; but there is no editing process, so the story is just a bit worse off for it.
It's the "a story" that bugs me. To the people I went to school with, I was a happy kid, then a depressed teenager, then I disappeared never to be heard from again in the most amazingly weird car my town had ever seen. To the guys in my engineering classes, I was the angry dude who transferred in, taught them welding and then threw my life away by never joining them at Boeing. To the guys in the club, I'm the guy with the annoying girlfriend that skunked Switchblade Symphony and then succumbed to the 9-to-5. To the people I knew in consulting, I'm the former club engineer who couldn't take the pressure and ran off to join the circus. To the guys I know in location audio I'm the guy who bailed on TPS reports but can't quite hack it mixing live so I have to mix post. To the guys I know in post I'm that dude who is wasting too much time on writing a novel. To the guys I know from screenwriting I was a promising talent that eventually threw in the towel when he failed to get anything made after seven years. We won't even discuss Reddit. Well, we'll say this - I used to get hate mail making fun of me for not being Unidan. Again - you don't get to pick your perspective. It's really easy for me to see myself as a failure from seven different directions but the fact of the matter is I mixed Death Cab before they were Death Cab, Slash between GnR and Velvet Revolver and Christina Aguilera on a Wendt X5. I've been featured in Mix Magazine, The Economist, Wired and the Daily Beast. I optioned two screenplays, am represented for fiction by one of the best boutique agencies in the world, ride an Italian hyperexotic and learned to skateboard at 40. And I'm "daddy." The whole line of thought is toxic - if I had to pick a narrative out of the mess above I'd be hosed. Everyone else will pick based on what they can see, not on what they know and if I choose to worry about that I'm choosing to fret over meaninglessness. I get what lil is trying to say - "look for meaning in your life." There's a hell of a difference between "meaning" and "story." Seen Julie & Julia? For Julia Child, it follows the heinously boring period between not working for the OSS in India, China, London and Istanbul and not becoming the country's foremost expert on cooking to two entire generations of women. It's literally the "huh, I'm bored, maybe I'll edit a book" chapter of her biography. I'm a storyteller. I can make anyone's life interesting or boring, purposeful or meaningless. Turning this process into some sort of Zen exercise accomplishes nothing. I finished the car and drove it 1800 miles. I arrived at 4am, having successfully navigated a vehicle I built from the frame rails up from home to my uncle's house and to college. I had 36 hours before I could head to the dorm... and literally nothing to do for the first time since 8th grade. So I slept until noon, took a shower and watched a Johnny Quest marathon until the sun set. I still tell that story.
Thanks for your comments. Also in light of your comment, I changed a line to make the idea clearer.if you're constantly trying to arrange your existence to please some external structure you are literally wasting your life.
I agree with this 100%. I do NOT suggest contriving a story out of your life while you are adventuring. That would be ridiculous. Life is a journey.
Afterwards, though, a person might want to look back and see a narrative in that journey. Doing that might help them see that their choices, issues, and struggles may also have been an allegorical journey from fragmentation to integration (and perhaps to fragmentation again).
But why one? Why "a" story? A skilled storyteller can pluck a cornucopia of tales from one set of events. Everyone's a villain, everyone's a hero, everyone's a martyr, everyone's an oppressor. Yeah - as you near the end you better be able to look back and find some meaning... but in the end, it isn't up to us to write our stories, it's up to our loved ones.
I was driving to work today. I took a long meandering drive because it's Monday and I was early and I could afford to be a little lazy and enjoy the drive to work. The drive goes past my parents' house and I used to take every day. As I was driving, I thought: Parallel universes where every option is explored, eh? Many stories. Not quite what you meant but still, also, interesting to ponder. I write a lot of "What-if" scenarios. Like, "What if this exact thing happened...but then this?" There is a _refugee_ who didn't move out of her parents' house this May. I wonder what life is like for her.
He could also have said, "I went to work with the belief that my story could speak in some way to how growing up on an island affects how one lives in the world." or any number of entrances. In any event, I'm not so much talking about writing our story (although perhaps it doesn't become a story until it is told or written). This meditation is more on taking the randomness we experience and finding a structure in it - seeing it in stages that take us from innocence, say, to experience; from a fragmented to an integrated self. I speculate this: If there is no grand breakthrough and no change, if we keep destroying ourselves in the same way over and over again, it might be difficult finding an allegorical journey in our story or even a point. This particular question arose from another one that I am working on called, "When did you smarten up?"But why one?
Yes, there are many stories. If we are writing it, we have a multitude of entries to choose from. In the preface to Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father (p. vii, 2004 edition), he writes this: [I] went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.
Beginning with that mission and that belief, he chose aspects of his story that particularly addressed race, identy, and culture.but in the end, it isn't up to us to write our stories, it's up to our loved ones.
Yup, especially if we're gone. Some people, though, want to make sure they have their say.
I reject your structure. I reject your meaning. I reject your integration. My wife was bored one weekend she was home from college. She took a class in MS Access at Comp USA. It meant nothing until three years later, when that one weekend class caused a division that wasn't hiring at a place she interviewed at (for a completely different job) to call her in. She ended up as a software architect for a great lady that ended up leaving after being sexually harassed. Three years later, though, my wife performed the wedding ceremony for her ex-boss and her new husband, whom we ended up going to Vegas with. Then we didn't see them for a while because they moved to Arizona. Then they moved to Los Angeles and we saw them every six weeks or so. Two weeks ago they moved back to Washington - they're going to beat us there. Our relationship with that couple is driven almost entirely by coincidence but it started with a free weekend seminar at CompUSA twenty years ago. How will it end? Who knows. I'll say this - when we were worried about trademark infringement with a large grocery chain, the husband called up the legal counsel of the large grocery chain because they're golf buddies. I would literally go insane if I had to parse our relationship for meaning.
My outlook is very similar to yours, white. I see my life as a story. I have a goal to have an interesting story, and when I make decisions it helps me to think of what will make for the best story possible. It also helps when facing difficulties. In the best stories, the hero faces terrible difficulties and these are most often preludes to something to come that is even better than before. I wonder sometimes if our lives are a static sculpture in multidimensional space, and what gives action and consciousness in life is a higher dimensional "being" running a spark of experience along our story line, like someone watching a video if you will, and it is this that creates the illusion of time and experience. If that's the case, and there are countless lives in which to experience, then why did this being choose my life to follow? It must be that my story is a good one, and terrible tragedies will be followed by magnificent triumphs. It's a silly thought I know, but I find it comforting nonetheless. I don't know if there is a difference between those understand their lives as stories and those who don't, but I think that thinking about life as a story makes for a better life.
I do. I think it's helpful to do so, at least for myself. - I don't want my story to be boring and I don't want it to be a tragedy. I try to make sure it's not boring and I don't frame it as a tragic story on the whole - some of the chapters are sad and it wouldn't be a good story otherwise. - The bad times in my life are chapters, and I allow myself to close them and move on the next one. - It gives me a sense of self-determination. I get to choose how the story progresses: I am the author and protagonist. - That said, it'd be a bad story full of delusions of grandeur if I felt I made everything happen. The gristle of my character development comes from the ways I respond to and address the things that are out of my control. This reminds me of a client I had. During a lengthy delusional manic phase he felt that some "entities" were controlling time and everything that happened within his life. He said he felt that he had no free will whatsoever: everything was controlled by these entities (who wanted to ruin his life...). After he had some medication adjustments he came to look at that month as a funny chapter in his life as opposed to a strange and sad one that spun out of control and left him alienated. Perspective is everything.
This is fascinating to me. Almost everyone here is saying that they view their lives as a story, but I really don't. Actually, up until now I haven't really given it a lot of thought. I guess I always found my life far too dull to qualify as a 'story'. When I think about it, what makes a great story to me is often not the story itself, but the way it's told. I remember my high school English teacher saying that the best short story she's ever read by a student was set in a waiting room of a clinic over a span of about 2 minutes. You can turn almost anything into a great story just by the way you tell it. When I think about it from that perspective, I could actually begin to think of my life as a story. I suppose my problem was thinking of my life from the perspective of an outsider looking in. From that point of view, my life is definitely mundane and uneventful. However, when I think about trying to "tell the story of my life", all my thoughts and experiences make things that look mundane from the outside fun and interesting to myself. It's incredible that just by that small shift in perspective; viewing my life as a story rather than a series of events, that I feel I could build a better appreciation for it.
It's incredible that just by that small shift in perspective -- viewing my life as a story rather than a series of events -- that I feel I could build a better appreciation for it.
Yes, you can look at it from different angles and lenses, depending on the story you want to tell. You can be a hero or a victim. You can tell a story in which you are powerless, or you can tell the same story in which the outcome was determined by your choices. It depends on what details you pick.
Maybe when you see your life as a story, you also have the compassion to see other people's lives that way. One type of therapy called narrative therapy teaches people to see their lives as various stories they tell about themselve. These stories can lead to dysfunction. The therapy teaches you to re-author your life story.
My life is your life is everyone's life. We're all actors and actresses in a grand comedic tragedy.
nice addition, thanks ref Nodus tolens is a profound realization. I have phrased it this way on occasion: the realization that the road you are on is not related to your desired destination. Some people call it a mid-life crisis - which perhaps can be summed up as the realization that your needs have changed. Everything that you thought you wanted and worked for all your life has not fulfilled you. Somewhat different from the quarter-life crisis in which you realize that everything you learned in school may not have prepared you for what you need to know and when you take away the structure of school, you are adrift and have to author your life anew (certainly related to the nodus tollens). Which gets us back to stories.Nodus Tollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore-that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don't understand, that don't even seem to belong in the same genre-which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.
Less a story, more of a koan: it incites within me a great doubt. :P Really though, it's a somewhat problematic question for me to answer. On one hand, I'm the author of my own mind and decisions, like how I'm writing this out instead of sleeping. On the other, the recounting of past events tends to be done via narrative - you can't convey every single sensory detail of any single past event, so you make a story out of it. In that case, if I am the storyteller, what is my life? Perhaps less a narrative and more an anthology of parable, fable, and vignette. It is a patchwork of events with characters that come and go, and you can construct a "story" using any which set of them. Or perhaps I'm naught but a fool. Then again, what is the Fool but the start of the journey? Thanks for sharing, lil.
To a degree, though primarily I've focused on the Fool and Magician. I've also been poking around with a few interpretations of divinatory tarot as well. At the end of the day, though, the symbols are what they are. It's the personal interpretation and ascription that open doors and provoke one's journey.
Somewhat, I guess; it's a story that other people see only glimpses of, though. It only comes close to being a full story to me.
One of my mantras in life is this : "Be the hero of your own life".
Not always possible of course, but sometimes it helps to take a step back and ask what the hero should do.
Just noticed that OftenBen said something similar - GMTA.
I try not to think of my life as a story because it makes me feel delusional. It's such a flawed, human thing to see recurring patterns or themes in your life when there isn't really anything there. At the same time it's hard to keep yourself from reflecting on "how far you've come".
If the recurring pattern is you continually getting into certain kinds of trouble, dwi for example, then you have more control over your story than you imagine. If the recurring theme in your life is having abusive partners, then perhaps you can change that story.It's such a flawed, human thing to see recurring patterns or themes in your life when there isn't really anything there.
For example, if it seems that every time you leave the house a black cat dashes in front of you, then yeah, probably there isn't anything there.