The Story of Myself

Yes, I would want to read a novel about my life, but I think it would be simultaneously enlightening and very frustrating.

When we write narratives, we are forced to make sense of things that might otherwise be jumbled in our heads. Narratives are full of causality. Things happen for a reason. In telling a story we must extract this elusive backbone of cause and effect and—importantly—figure out what we think about it. It is for this reason that I think reading a story about myself would be revealing. I would enjoy hearing someone else’s interpretation of why the events of my life have unfolded in the way that they have. Am I competitive because I take after my father, my chip-on-his-shoulder, aggressively ambitious father? Or because my best friend growing up couldn’t do anything without looking over her shoulder and seeking approval? Or because, like my mother, I reveled in athletic achievements as a kid? Having someone analyze the reasons why I am how I am would, for me, be interesting.

This is especially true because I’m so self-analyzing and hyper-aware. In my head I am almost constantly creating narratives for myself, creating and editing and recreating the world around me and what I like and who I like and why I like those things. I do it to the point that I impose this crafted narrative on myself, even though it oftentimes proves false. I remember once someone asked me if I want to be a doctor because I was really sick in middle school. I said no and was almost annoyed by the presumption. Years later, I can say that it’s so obviously true, I just wasn’t aware of it. It’s little learning moments like this that would be so interesting.

I should clarify that I’m not making the somewhat presumptuous claim that my life is in any way a brilliant one worthy of a novel. Instead, I just think it would be an interesting psychological experience to see how a single life can fit into so many different narratives depending on who’s telling them. This summer, I read the incredible novel Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman. The story is told from seven different perspectives. It’s fascinating to see how these different characters have such different (yet compelling) perceptions of the same sequence of events, and to identify what—hubris, love, shame, insanity—drives these differences. We’re all so stuck in our own heads and caught up in what we want that sometimes it’s hard to see what’s really going on. I think if someone could somehow watch a video of my entire life, his perception of it would (obviously) be very different from my own. It would be interesting to learn said perspective, but it would also be incredibly frustrating. There would me so many moments of intentions misjudged. Still, learning about these moments might help us better align how we act and how we want to act, might help us create narratives of ourselves in our own heads that come across to other people as well.