Once Upon a Time When the Stories Were and Weren't Mine

We are a sum of our own stories, and the way we choose to tell them determines our past and our destiny. Basically a heavy theme of all writing and history, but let me take it under my wing for a minute.

We live. We eat. We screw. We fight. We make friends. We fall in love. We have babies. We die. It's all pretty pat, but the detail's where it gets so deeply and transcendently rich. 

Our stories are those details set a'dancing. It's in the relationship of parts that our identities - common and individual - extend and take on meaning. And when we say who we are via who we've been, we say who we'll be to ourselves and others. A good story is always flexible and open to reinterpretation, but it retains a stubborn kernel of self that fends off dissolution of multiplicity that exists in each of us.

Who gets to set those details? Which demi-god gets to cast them in just such a constellation?

 In a sense we all do. Story isn't a finite resource exactly and the material is infinitely arrangeable, but certain stories stick. Certain stories influence. Certain stories edge out other stories. Who gets to make those stories.

As an attorney, my favorite job was dealing in stories. People would bring me their personal accounts with all their facts. I'd make them answer specific questions and look for specific details hiding in the answers. And then I would take all the hearsay, all the feeling, and all the actual evidence and spin it into *a story*. A legal story meant to hit every note while feeling compelling, credible and in line with the character expected of a good parent/spouse/whatever. I was never a ghostwriter because my voice was always there, but it was always their story in its best legal light. They always had final say on what was included and omitted, but I felt deeply moved and strangely powerful having so much of their stories laid in my hands. And my telling had power. My telling unlocked certain results. My telling adjusted and influenced the course of their lives.

“Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside.”

We can never tell our story without telling others people's stories. And we can never really tell another's story without putting ourselves into it. We can't tell any stories without both of these elements. Maybe we can't even hear or read them without our own stories mixing in.

I've been lucky to read two works in progress from friends recently (back stage pass to the creative process that gives me this participatory infusinon of storybuilding and always makes me feel a bit like the Angels must have upon creation), and both in their ways have added layers of awareness to these dynamics.

The first is a biography written about the author's grandmother. It's a fascinating and amazing life rich in reflection on the American experience and Puerto Rican identity through the 20th Century. Super fun to read. And interesting because the author often makes it a story about himself as well. The learning and investigation and his experience of family lore. It's not uncommon to make the narrator a part of the story, but it has different weight and investment when it's a narrator you know personally and a quest I also have followed through various emails and other correspondences. The experience of being the friend of a writer and the experience of being a reader of his writing overlap and blend.

The second is a very personal account of a meaningful experience in the author's life. Reading a personal account by a person you know has a dual experience - both immersing yourself in the perspective of the story and possibly playing against the outside impressions and information you previously held. It's not the same blank slate experience, although I have a certain ability to suspend the latter for short whiles. In the telling of background, it refers to an experience that we shared many eons ago. Only so barely making me experience both myself as self and self as other at the same time, Maybe one of the first times in recent years that I've found myself on the other side of the looking glass. 

I have definitely heard my friends or hubba relate their perspective of a shared experience (you thought I thought what?? I did what?? no way!). When the anecdotes come, there's often more of a verbal consensus building around what exactly happened before it came. They feel faster and less thought out. And what our friends and lovers see of us against who we are is a whole 'nother story, but one you start to glean over time. The written word has its own solemnity and reflection that add cohesion and shape narrative more deeply.

It's strange seeing an essential and emotionally/ethically complex situations of my life condensed down to a concise paragraph, one serving as faint counterpoint in the elaborate and unfamiliar fugal patterns of another's life. Eerie even. The skeleton of significance that can be adorned with any variety of detail and meaning by any number of people who were present. A dizzying fractal of significance and self. 

"A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper..." (L. Durrell)

It reminds me I live in a world where I seep into the stories of others by mere virtue of existing and relating. Stories as pivotal to some people's lives as the stories I tell: they cast me in all manner of roles and shed light onto aspects of identity I overlook, withhold, or am blind to. Stories that are ultimately no more mine than somebody else's when the telling comes time and to that sense, some part of my self is not truly and exclusively mine. 

There are therapists and friends and spouses and lord knows who else I've never met who know my name and personal details; people who know me as a character. I know this because I've met these other-people from time to time. Me and not me, of course, but still drawing from me and carrying an essence through the looking glass. Sometimes holding more of me than I present to the world or recognize.

“There are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.” (Franzen)

We all feature in each other's dreams and fantasies. Sure it doesn't really matter because it isn't me acting out those dreams and fantasies, and my image is sometimes just a symbol if not a total random storm of input in a churning brain. But BUT. People process fantasy the same way as external reality. What "I" do in somebody's head impacts how they view "me" outside of their head. There's this slight shred of connection to all the different versions of me created in this world and others. A trail of self that projects beyond self and reminds of the influence we always have on each other. 

Sometimes I fall into believing I have a peek-a-boo connection with the people around me: when we are interacting I exist and have impact, but I simply cease when we are out of that connection. My impact feels limited to my presence. Love and affection occurs when Schroedinger's kitty kicks out of the box. Any pain I might cause only endures as long as I am ther inflicting it. Even realizing that much is untrue can occasionally take me aback.I almost fainted the day I realized that a love interest who had featured relentlessly in my fantasy life may well have had his own where I may in fact have... naw even now, naw! 

Complete skepticism about my lasting impact on the world definitely has given latitude to minimize neuroses aaaaand also to avoid a ton of personal responsibility. Kind of a mixed thing, really!

“But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.” (Murakami)

And then story enters into the external world and seeks to communicate. Stories as art tell us who we are, but also seek to lay fingers on licks of eternal truths and universal experience as they've sped past us.

Prose and poetry say the things we can't explicitly say either through prohibition or mere impotency. But there's risk in that. A creation infused with your experience can tell more things than you ever imagined. Truths about both self and other. There's two-part process of telling and interpreting a story. There's the chance that what you never meant to not-quite-say is what somebody else takes as said-but-not-said. And it may well be as true as anything you intended to say-but-not-say. 

When I wrote short stories compulsively, I instinctively captured the little details of the selves who surrounded me long before the urge to pen it down occured.. Once those parts were absorbed into me, they became mine to play with. Sometimes in painful ways. My words could arrange themselves just so to capture the weaknesses and absurdities of my closest friends and relive their personal shames and hurts in unanticipated venues. It caused deep pain sometimes. 

As life wore on, experiences happened that upped the ante in terms of discovery and complexity. I tried to write about certain experiences and couldn't. I wrote and it wasn't right.

"These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean." (Durrell) 

In time, I learned that people can never be captured in words. That even for my own story's purposes, some experiences will always pour over and far beyond any dams of narrative and structure. To write a story is to willingly sacrifice the totality in favor of a specificity that is and isn't quite it. Necessary to continue living, but always a destruction in the creation.

Even more, relationships require a discretion that storytelling repudiates. The deepest and richest moments that catch my literary itches are often the unspoken things that leak through a certain series of details.Presenting them just so said everything I couldn't, but that included everything I shouldn't. The limits of communication brushed up against the importance of personal relationships.

Dancing felt purer in this regard. A story told beyond words with a co-collaborator who became audience and subject and narrator all at once. Both more deeply intimate and more fantastical and contextually limited. When I started dancing, I stopped writing... as much. Some things are not containable and my need to wrestle the world into my patterns is compulsive. 

 I did mostly abandon fiction around that time because it felt more honest about my limitations to forfeit the omniscience of narrator for a wholly owned "single perspective." I still managed to inadvertently end a fragile friendship with an indiscrete blog post. And I've intruded into my relationship's space beyond discretion from time to time. Because I sometimes still play peek-a-boo and forget that I impact others even when I can't see them. 

 I still was/am spinning stories. And my story is always woven in with those who surrounded me. Sometimes I still tell a lot of somebody else's story. Sometimes I really have to sit with the details and how they will impact the people around me on a personal level. Some stories I may actually tell years from now. If I make it to the Old Folk's home, it's on, man.

Before I was married, I told *my* story interspersed with incidents of those who came in and out of it. Now, my story is intertwined with my family's story. It's a slow understanding what onus is put on the story teller to respect that. Yeah, I find that limiting. And I find some of my entries less powerful than they could be. But it's a valuable balance. I also used to say that I stopped writing because it required a certain level of misery, but maybe it's more a certain level of estrangement and connection even in my connections.

Often when I've faced challenges that are difficult to talk about, I immediately write about them publicly and in detail. This is both in the spirit of openness and commonality and an attempt to tell the story first. I want to set the own terms of my infertility, my anxieties, my health things. All the things that are easy to imagine in the details. 

As best I can I tell the most of my story that I can in the context of a world of stories and relationships. But if you see any lost stories lying around, please go ahead and send them my way. I wanna play god for a day!