Everything is a Story

Who is writing yours?

STRAWBRIDGE image with Image Creator

Professor Dan P. McAdams wrote the following:

Human beings are storytellers by nature. In many guises, as folktale, legend, myth, epic, history, motion picture and television program, the story appears in every known human culture. The story is a natural package for organizing many different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our world to others.¹

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Everyone here should be aware of the impact of stories. I believe it will help each of us to think of our writing efforts as stories of some kind. Even if everyone disagrees, this will remain my approach to writing.

The topic for the immediate future is the importance of stories and the different usages of the term. In graduate school, I began to view my research papers, the books we read, the anecdotes one hears at some social gathering, the tales woven by some family member, and literally everything else with characters, action, and purpose, as part of the same art of expression.

If that was not clear enough, allow me to say this: anything that meets very basic requirements is a story. It does not matter from what source or the setting in which we hear, read, or watch them. Stories might be filled with “big words” or contain folksy, everyday language. None of that matters as to how we classify what they mean to us.

As a student and teacher of History, I learned that advanced historical studies are not about terms to memorize and are instead opportunities to compare and contrast how people process factual events in some narrative structure. Some will argue this is too simplistic. It might be, but it is at least a good place to begin.

However, this story is not about History. So first, let us think about how stories impact our understanding of time.

Nothing is greater or worse than time. It is all we have, and one might use that phrase “the cards we are dealt.” Time is the only card we are guaranteed to receive in life.

Reality is terrible in that time is limited, and time is also wonderful for the same reason. There would be no sense of time whatsoever if it did not come with an expiration date. So, things experienced would have little meaning without time counting down to some ending place.

We make sense of time/events through stories. People are surprisingly forgetful and have this blessing or curse to remember mostly what we prefer to believe. As people get older and memories erode, details become difficult while our interpretations of whatever occurrences remain strong and consistent. At some point, it does not matter how certain elements change or what new, untruthful parts of the story are invented. The purpose, theme, or resolution is what counts and is why the story is told in the first place.

Our beliefs are really stories in disguise. Our thoughts on anything in life, especially the “big questions” of what should be done with our time on earth, do not drop out of the sky and land submerged in our brains. No, there is always a backstory that comes via a set of assumptions, learned wisdom, or teachings from others, that tell the story of why we prioritize X as true instead of Y.

One’s political persuasions and choice of lifestyle are embedded in History—which again are collections of stories. Yet, there are decisions we must make about what to believe, that pierce the heart of our sense of self and determine what purpose we transpose onto the time we have.

The ultimate story of any human being’s life is how he or she will find an immortal legacy. We cannot accept that existence ends with our total annihilation. That we are wiped away exactly like dust is too disheartening a story to form the basis of a contented life.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Clifton advanced the idea that we have five methods of securing some sense of future relevance beyond death. Below I will list these while offering a little of my interpretation of what these story-concepts mean. It is not my intention to stray from Clifton’s ideas, but it is my goal to relate them to the topic at hand.

1. Biological

   This one is simple. By having children, people determine that part of them will live on with the promise of an unending line of descendants.

2. Theological

   For most religious people, death is only the transition to some eternal afterlife. In Western Civilization, the common expression of human permanence is the continuation of a person’s soul.

3. Creative

   This story of immortality demands we make an everlasting legacy through the creation of something important and meaningful. Think about an artist who is primarily concerned with creating some kind of representation of his or her life that will endure. Or another example is an architect who designs a structure of great significance that others will cherish in some way.

4. Natural

   The last two are the hardest to understand and probably the least influential. This story of immortality is based on a reverence for nature and a feeling of connectedness with all living things. So, as long as the trees, flowers, forests, oceans, and all else lives, we do as well as some part of it.

5. Transcendent experience

   This one is all about an event of overwhelming emotion. Transcendence cannot be planned beforehand and is not a product of our rational minds. Therefore, we cannot use reason to rise above death, as we must be swept away by some current that is not subservient to time and death. Yes, this might be communicated as a profound religious experience.

Sometimes we hear someone say '“she is very spiritual,” or “he is career driven.” These are examples of when a person has chosen a particular type of story to define who they are.

We must make these choices ourselves—it is natural and healthy to do so. The alternative is either to stumble through life without a purpose or allow others to define who we are and what our past means. So, if anyone remarks that a person has no sense of self, is a people-pleaser, has no identity, or anything in the same ballpark, what really is being communicated here is that a person has lost control of their own story. It is being told without his or her input.

Who you are is complicated. But all the ideas and events that compose you can only be explained through a series of narratives. This is like currency that is exchanged between people.

So most agree that identity is important. And I see identity as, most of all, a summary of storytelling. Without a story, a human being is merely a subject that others act upon instead of an agent who thinks and acts based on self-interest and personal reflections.

It is revealing that manipulators and gaslighters refuse victims authorship over a self-defined configuration of what their past, present, and future means. This is how people conceptualize their lives—with what has happened, is happening, and will happen all merging together as if they are taking place at the same time.

Abusers work to make the people they seek to dominate dependent instead of independent. Rather than living out one’s story as imagined, manipulators supply that story to the person they are trying to control.

To further my point of view, we have to return to History for a little while.

The work of tyrants who command a nation have much in common with the prerogatives of gaslighters, or abusers, or whatever we choose to call them. Actually, we are seeing the same process enacted with the difference being that malignant dictators work on a much larger scale than the average.

Every iron-fisted leader of any nation, at least that I know of, must rewrite the story of those people under his dominion. Books are burned. New ones are written with an overwhelming bias and lies that confirm whatever story the tyrant wants to be told. Stories have the power to halt all progress and degrade people, over and over.

Even in the American system, we cannot agree on the meaning of stories and which ones should be emphasized. I am guessing most now view Christopher Columbus as a villain instead of a hero. The statues of famous men are coming down all over the place. Books are not being burned as far as I know, but many Americans now work to censor some of the books and keep them away from impressionable minds.

Really, the American concept of democracy is yet another form of storytelling. Please let me explain.

The founding generation indeed broke with centuries old traditions in more ways than one. For most of history, it was a laughable notion that common people had stories worthy of respect. Emperors, kings, and aristocrats were the people who mattered, and the masses were only identified as a group of simple-minded worker bees.

I’m saying that ninety-something percent of folks had no individualized status at all, so therefore why would elites care about or record their stories?

Early American leaders, though far from egalitarian, set in motion a new way of thinking about the individual. In my opinion, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (to a lesser degree) are stories about the self-determination of people to author themselves.

The DOI is a document listing grievances about the old system with a commitment to a future where people can dictate more of their own lives. In History this is called the “bottom-up” approach rather than the “top-down” point of view where elites have a near-monopoly on the significant narratives.

You see, without the knowledge of History, or we could just call it the story of mankind, the founders would have lacked the knowledge to begin to correct what was wrong.

When any group of people are intimidated into silence, the resulting story will only be a half-truth at best.

Well, I have talked about History more than I intended. But, I am going to give myself a break. Hi-story and what we do on a daily basis, interpreting what we see and feel while contemplating the past and the future, have too much in common to ignore.

I would not say there is a common thread, because thread signifies only a slender link between the two.

Your story is important, so do not let anyone gaslight you into submission. This is when we regress and become subjects rather than agents. Even the events retold as amusing slices of life actually are symbolic of things greater than that.

I have put in lots of work to author my life. Part of that process is every word that I produce on this writing platform. Everything is a story, and the main plot is you. And me.

1. Dan P. McAdams. The Stories We Live by. (Guilford Press: New York, 1993), 27.

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QUESTIONS: WHAT KIND OF STORY ARE YOU AUTHORING? DO YOU HAVE A FIRM IDEA OF THE PLOT, THE ACTION, AND THE MAIN CHARACTERS?