Latest / Truth + Conversation / Truth + Story
Transcript
- Your story isn’t something written down in a book. It isn’t a screenplay, a record of your past or a neat account of everything that has happened to you. You speak your story every day. You think it, act it and live inside it. It shapes what you notice, what you dismiss, what you believe things mean and what you can imagine for your future. The language you use may feel like a description of your life, but every utterance is also creating your experience of it. Heidegger called language “a world-forming power.” Sartre observed that a person sees everything that happens to them through their stories and tries to live as though telling one. Those aren’t merely poetic observations. They point to something fundamental about being human: you don’t first experience a complete, objective version of your life and then describe it. Language is already involved in shaping the world you experience. This week, Gary responds to an email from Fran, a 59-year-old woman recovering from a serious health crisis caused by a brain lesion. After five months of relearning how to walk, write and practise her trade as a jewellery maker, Fran feels ready to begin again. She is taking small steps and can see that she is making progress, yet something continues to hold her back. She describes fear, disappointment, anger and frustration. She is grateful to be coming through the other side, but she is also mourning “the me I used to be.” She feels as though she is waiting for something, even though she cannot identify what that something is. Fran believes she is describing what happened to her. But within that description, she has created an entire world—and become trapped inside it. Her future begins with the brain lesion, the recovery, what she has lost and everything she now believes she must overcome. When she looks forward, she compares what might be possible with the life she had before. Inevitably, the future looks harder, more limited and less inspiring. The problem isn’t that Fran’s physical circumstances are imaginary. Her body has been through a serious event, and there may be limitations, responsibilities and unknowns that must be managed. The critical distinction is whether those circumstances become practical considerations within her future or the source from which that future is created. Gary uses the example of Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to summit Mount Everest. Weihenmayer didn’t begin with blindness and ask what kind of future it allowed him to have. He began with the possibility of climbing Everest. His blindness then became something he had to account for and build into the plan. He didn’t deny his circumstances. He became responsible for them. That reversal changes everything. When you begin with your circumstances, you stand inside them looking towards the future and wondering whether you can get there—or whether you are even inspired enough to try. When you begin with possibility, you stand in the future, look back at your circumstances and ask what must be managed, accounted for and put in place. One approach tries to squeeze possibility into a life already defined by what happened. The other organizes circumstances around a future worth fulfilling. Fran doesn’t need to recover the person she used to be. She cannot create a future by trying to reconstruct the past. Her life doesn’t need to begin again. Her life is already here. The questions are: - What are you up to now? - What is the game you have in mind? - What possibility is compelling enough to organize your life around? - Given that possibility, what do you need to manage? - What must you account for? - What are you willing to become responsible for? This is also the work Gary continues to do privately with people: getting underneath the circumstances and into the language, conclusions and assumptions that constitute their world. Until you can recognize a narrative as a narrative, you will continue to experience it as reality. Listen closely to the language you use when you think you are describing your life. Listen to what you say happened to you, what you decided it means, what you believe you lost and what you insist must change before you can move. You may think you are describing the world you live in. There’s every chance you are creating it. You’re not trapped because your story is true. You’re trapped because you don’t know it’s a story.