The stories we tell ourselves

Every single creature on the planet does it. Every human being does it. Every bird. Every bee. Every dolphin. Every tree. Communication. The one trait that binds us all. The one trait that allows every creature to make sense of the world around them. Humans take it a step further. We communicate, not only to make sense of the world but also to imbue it with a semblance of meaning.

We do this through an elaborately devised and mutually agreed upon system of arbitrary sounds and symbols called language. Languages leverage lofty meaning through their ultimate weapon, stories. That is how stories were born. From the desperate desolate desire of a young and promising species to make sense of the daunting and seemingly apathetic world around us and all that happens within it.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” ― Joan Didion

We huddled around the bonfires at night, trying to find solace by stringing together erratic sounds. All cultures have stories to explain the natural phenomenon. We created fiction to explain facts. To explain the seemingly inexplicable world around us we weaved elaborate stories to put our racing monkey minds at ease. It allowed us to project meaning to a world swimming in chaos and uncertainty. And we never stopped.

With time, fact began to engulf fiction. Fictional stories gave way to factual ones. Speculation gave way to science. We continued with our stories though, to explain another enigmatic part of existence, our lives. To date, we craft elaborate mental narratives every day about every aspect of our lives.

We talk about our likes and dislikes. The food we eat, the people we hate. The roles we play; be that of a data scientist, a father, a volunteer, a thief, a painter. We tell others about our habits, our plans, our hopes, and our fears. We lay down our plans and ideas in front of others. All of this to thread together the random events of our lives and ensure they continue to connect. All of this to give our self a sense of identity with a dimension of tangibility.

Through these narratives, we lay down the plots, subplots of our life. We predefine our psychological, physical, and interpersonal characteristics. Through these narratives we become not a human being with life but reduce ourselves to a character within a story. By telling this story over and over again to ourselves and others, we bury ourselves into our narratives. We become the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives that we build in our heads.

It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” — Patrick Rothfuss

You have hundreds of different characters living within you. You are none of them and you are all of them. Don’t confine yourself to one. Don’t confine yourself to any. Embrace the many characters with their many personalities, idiosyncrasies, and identities. Live many lives all at once. Don’t be a static character in a story. Be a human being as dynamic and electric as the very life inside of you.

Our stories and narratives span across time, originating in the past infecting the present and spreading to the future. We alter our past and carve out a future to fall in line with our warped stories. We feel obliged and inclined to reinforce the narratives that we have created. After all, we have created these stories to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. We cannot afford to let our stories be wrong. Eventually, our words become our chains. Our beliefs and ideas about ourselves and others, our constraints.

Storytelling, like all art forms, is a lie to point towards the truth. It cannot tell you the truth, only show glimpses of it. The truth that life is chaos; that there is no plot. It is a random sequence of events that we bestow with the pretense of meaning through the literary device of the story. Life is not to be narrated, it is to be lived. It is too wild, ferocious, and free to be contained by words, ideas, and beliefs.

“If you get the message, hang up the phone” — Alan watts

Don’t fall for the lies, use it to see the truth. Don’t believe your story, the fabricated character. There is no story. There is no one character. You are as ever-changing, ephemeral as life itself. You are not even the same person you were a day ago. Like life, you cannot be illustrated and explained by language. It cannot be described by words. The future is not set in your head. The past is immutable. There is, and always has been, only the now.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus

This urge to tell stories is intrinsic to humans, stitched into the very fabric of our being. It originates from where comes all art, from the insatiable yearning to create. It is what separates us from the rest of the creatures. We are the only story-telling animals on this planet. We communicate not through languages but stories. So if you’re unable to resist this urge to tell your story, then scream it out. If you are going to fall for the fiction, fall hard and fall well.

You are the creator of your story. You define the character, you decide the plot. You are responsible for the flow from its origin to its end. You shape its future and you carve its past. You can be the oppressor and the victim. The hero and the villain. The slave and the master. You can be the lock and the key.

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” — Terrance McKenna

A story is always about its characters, it is never about the plot. The character births the plot. An extraordinary character elevates the most trivial and banal of plots. It matters not the setting, situation, or identity of the hero. The only thing that matters, the only thing that makes a story is what she does and how she does it.

If you are going to confine yourself into a character, be that character. The character that makes you gasp, hope, and wonder all at once. The character that jumps out the page and sets fire to the story. The character who makes you want to never stop turning the pages.

A plot emerges solely from the major struggles of the character’s life. Never shy away from struggles, run towards them. Embrace them, revel in them, and accept them. Make yours the story where the character emerges victorious, having conquered his struggles and in the process, having conquered himself.

Never ever give up. Never believe you cannot turn it all around. That you cannot change yourself and everything around you. Never stop believing in yourself and never stop believing in your story.

At the end of it all, to tell and become stories is inevitable for us story-tellers. At the end of it all, we are all stories. Make sure yours is worth writing and reading.