Writing the authentic self
Where does your narrative begin and end?
Never mind inciting incidents and resolutions; tell me where the borders are in your story about who you are, what people are like, how the world works and where you fit in it.
If we assess our self-narratives we often find their boundaries blurry, or non-existent. Instead of constructing purpose and meaning for ourselves, we make demands, assumptions and judgments about external individuals or circumstances.
This leads implacably away from the self-awareness and apperception to be gained by crafting narrative and into a murk of unsupportable surmises and baseless premises.
Narrative identity
After reading Success in the Present Tense, a friend shared the essay Who Owns Your Story? by the wonderful novelist and essayist Aminatta Forma.
The essay is subtitled: Transcending the Trauma Narrative.
Forma argues for the power of language to heal and create meaning, drawing on researchers Dan McAdams and Kate McLean’s work on narrative identity — that is, a person’s self-narrative that “provide[s] life with some degree of purpose and unity.”
“Elements of a narrative identity,” Forma notes, “can be associated with higher levels of mental health and wellbeing. Chief among them are agency and meaning. This puts into clinical terms something writers have always known.”
Her concluding point is eloquent and apropos:
None of us can avoid pain. But we can change the way we look at our suffering, from a place of despair to one in which the past is not forgotten but transcended, and a future of fulfillment remains in sight.
Whether speaking as an individual, a writer or an educator, I whole-heartedly agree.
Narrative frameworks
The case Forma makes on her way to that conclusion, though, gives me pause. My brain’s been chewing it like cud since I first read the essay last week, and every successive read has forced deeper consideration.
She argues that “in Western societies, we have begun to conflate every difficult experience with trauma” and that the term is overused.
Once the word trauma was reserved for men coming back from Vietnam, men who had experienced such horror they could barely function. Today it is used to describe almost any kind of deeply felt hurt, and even some not so deeply felt. This tendency has left us with no words to describe the truly damaged. And it has made it harder for people to break out of the loop and respond resiliently to suffering.
She quotes a child psychoanalyst who wrote her to say:
“‘trauma’ has been overused in ways that erode the significance of real traumas and undercut the ability of people to cope with truly terrible, stressful experiences.”
Boldface italics, in both quotes, mine.
Who, may I ask, has been ordained to arbitrate who is “truly damaged,” what constitute
“real traumas,” or what count as “truly terrible, stressful experiences”?
Forma’s failure to interrogate her interlocuter’s language, or her own, suggests she is not transcending one narrative so much as investing in a more pervasive and insidious: the narrative that says some feelings are more valid than others.
How much does it hurt?
Physical pain is hard to quantify, even on the standard medical scale of 1 to 10.
“Because pain is subjective, it is difficult to explain what you’re feeling to another person—even your own doctor,” notes the Shreveport Hospital. “Familiarize yourself with the levels before your procedure… If you want your pain to be taken seriously… take the pain scale seriously.”
The professional challenge of managing bodily pain pales in comparison to the task of accurately assessing psychic wounds.
“The very same brain centers that interpret and ‘feel’ physical pain also become activated during the experience of emotional rejection,” writes Dr Gabor Maté. “On brain scans they ‘light up’ in response to social ostracism just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli.”
Given that emotional and bodily hurt is felt in the same way, it stands to reason that individual’s vary as much in emotional perception as they do in physical sensitivity.
For many, a bee sting is a fleeting irritant; for some, it is a do-not-pass-go shortcut to death’s door.
Most of us put our feet up when we sprain an ankle; ultrarunner Scott Jerek ran a 100-mile mountain race instead.
Every body is unique, which makes any attempt to define “real trauma” or what is “truly terrible” pointless at best, pernicious at worse.
Pernicious, because such categorization allows society to dismiss pain it finds inconvenient as unreal or not true, thereby excusing itself from acknowledging or addressing the causes of those hurts.
Implicit narratives
A staunch libertarian once explained his aversion to diversity, equity and inclusion to me by saying it promoted “victim narratives” and that identifying someone as disadvantaged or disabled “takes away their agency.”
That baffled me.
Does calling 911 when someone gets hit by a car take away their agency?
Does sheltering to someone who’s lost their home in a natural disaster promote a “victim narrative”?
It seemed to me that he, like Forma, was conflating the experience and the reaction.
To identify an experience as trauma doesn’t imply anything
about how the person affected will react.
If someone is robbed, it is the robbery that makes the victim, not the statement, “they were robbed.”
If someone is abused, the trauma is the abuse, not the acknowledgement of it.
To say that someone has been harmed by institutional racism, sexism or transphobia does not make them a victim; racism, sexism or transphobia do that.
If conventional discourse tells people that suffering equals trauma, then it becomes more likely that suffering will be experienced as traumatic” — Forma writes.
How delightful it would be if we could prevent pain simply by telling people: what you experienced doesn’t count as trauma.
But that’s not how pain works. Medical science does not, as evidenced by the slippery 1-10 scale, know exactly how it does work but it is not under intellectual command.
Telling someone, you shouldn’t feel that does not inculcate agency: it denies the most fundamental agency — the right to feel and express one’s feeling.
That is not empowering; it’s crippling.
Don’t deny. Explore.
It is no straightforward task, though, to craft an authentic narrative, one that slices through the flesh of received ideas and embedded mores to the skeleton of self.
A few years ago, I was teaching a high-school essay-writing course.
One student wrote about a minor incident at summer camp that meant she spent an hour or so alone in an emergency room before her parents arrived to whisk her home.
This so distressed her that she was subsequently had months of therapy for PTSD.
Are you SERIOUS? I was livid. Not amused. Not exasperated. Not irritated. Furious.
Contractually, I had 48 hours to return her essay with feedback. But every time I read it, my ears turned to teakettles.
Floundering to make sense of it, Narrative 1 emerged: How absurd that I, a grown-up worldly person, am being forced to indulge some spoiled brat who got PT-FRICKIN-SD from spending an hour alone in a hospital. ARE YOU KIDDING? How could she be so obtuse and narcissistic? Doesn’t she know other people have real problems.
The nonreptilian part of my brain knew this was over the top, which triggered Narrative 2: What kind of terrible teacher/human being gets ANGRY at a kid’s story. What a jerk! Even if you don’t think it’s so bad, it obviously was to her, and you’re a real you-know-what for reacting like that. Have some compassion, for chrissake. Or at least be an adult.
Neither of these narratives felt great and — on closer inspection — it’s clear why: Narrative 1 was me buying and applying the “real trauma” trope, which justified my emotional reaction, but did not explain it.
Narrative 2 was me lurching to another received idea: that being “good” means not being angry, thus my emotional reaction made me a bad person.
Narrative 3 understood my response as rooted in unacknowledged pain.
I wasn’t really mad at my student; I envied her.
My parents never rushed to comfort me. Mostly, I don’t think about that because it hurts. Her essay made me think. My anger was real, but the kid wasn’t its real target.
Pursuing truth
If I’d accepted either of the boilerplate narratives that first presented themselves, I’d have never reached the insight that allowed me to extend genuine compassion to my student, and to myself.
Thus, as we tell our tales, we must ask, where does my narrative begin and end?
Authentic narrative identity cannot be crafted from incursions into other people’s stories. Whenever we judge, categorize or discount another’s experience, we can be sure we are failing to go deeper into our own.
And until we are willing to sink to the depths from which our emotions, reactions and attitude arise, every wave of feeling will leave us churned up and spitting saltwater.
Write it out
How do we arrive at the truth we seek?
By asking questions.
As a journalist, I’m partial to the five Ws.
These are some of questions that help me:
Where did that feeling come from?
What am I really saying when I say _____?
Whom does this version of the story serve?
What if _________was/wasn’t true?
Why is this important to me?
When did I start thinking that?
What changes if I rewrite this?
The beauty of a narrative identity with clear boundaries is that, because it impinges on no one, no one has a claim to or against it. And that is true freedom.