My life has had an unreliable narrator.
I have begun reading Amy Schneider’s book, “In the Form of a Question.” What a great read! She is every bit as spunky, unique, and beautiful as I thought she would be. How fun is it that she has formatted her biography into a series of questions. Very Jeopardy of her.
One of the early questions in Amy’s book asks when she knew she was trans. Surprisingly (to me, as I didn’t know a lot about her), she shares she didn’t know until she was 30 or so. She goes on to remember and share times when there were signs. Then explains that her life’s narrator was unreliable in the years prior to her coming out. There was a story that the narrator was telling. And it wasn’t true. And/or it was a twisting of the truth. The quote is:
“When I started to question my gender identity, I had to question everything. The entire story of me, which I’d been writing my whole life, now turned out to be severely flawed, or at least to have had an extremely unreliable narrator. And so my story was going to need some serious retconning.”
That let me into a conversation with my own unreliable narrator. The one who creates the story of who I am. Like Amy, I can look back now at the times in my life when the wrong story was being told. I can see the hints of what was real, and at the same time I can hear the voiceover that turned them into something else.
Sometimes, my narrator was a bit of a ventriloquist dummy, mouthing the words others put in her mouth. Big ones … like … “Of course your husband is beating the shit out of you. You are a poor excuse for a wife and need to do better. Then he’ll be nicer to you.” Those were the words of the Catholic church. Smaller ones, too … like … “I really like that bright and fun dress, but I’d look slimmer in a dark color.” Those would be my mother’s words.
But she wasn’t always under the influence of others. Sometimes, the stories she told about my life rose up from within me. From the places that didn’t feel good enough. The places where I felt like an outsider. The places where I feared being myself. The places that didn’t even know who that was. She told tales based on my perception of myself as flawed and inconsequential. No one else was scripting her in those times. It was my own writing.
And that narrator isn’t just the voice of my past … she haunts me still. Not as often. As so many of my younger self-perceptions grew into a sense of who I was that included self-love, self-respect, and the courage to wave my me-flag and be true to myself. But every now and then that bitch is still telling stories about me. Where the heck she gets her information, I don’t know. (Well, I do … but I am not always aware enough to own up to that.)
She’s actually trying to dictate a story at the moment. One that says I am too old to take a big leap into the possibility of a new and different life. That I am better off staying with what seems safe and predictable. That change is not a good thing. That the status quo is where it is at. She is manipulating my fears into a story that feels real. At least, it feels real until I challenge her stage directions.
Thank you, Amy, for giving me the opportunity to face my own narrator. It is about time I dealt with her. For way too long she’s been a destructive prattler in my life. It’s time to muzzle her.
And I also thank you, Amy, for the new-to-me word of retconning. I admit I had to look up its definition.
From Merriam-Webster –
“Retcon is a shortened form of retroactive continuity, and refers to a literary
device in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.”
You know, like when the TV show Dallas wanted to bring back Bobby, so retconned his death into, “it was just a dream.” What had been … well, it wasn’t really … it was something else.
But retconning can be pretty powerful when it comes to our ongoing lives. Often, what our narrators told us in the past was a figment, not always based on reality, and often based on whatever-the-heck our narrator felt like saying at the time. Here and now, especially if we hush our narrator and experience our lives honestly and directly, new perspectives and new facts about our past reveal that our personal history sometimes contains immense headlines of fake news. Attention-grabbing in their day and in the present, as that is the way of fake news. But we can use discernment to see through to the truth. Our narrator is, after all, nothing more than our psyche’s talking head. It is a very bad journalist. It takes on a different personality according to what our levels of fear, worry, stress, and insecurity are. It’s quite the chameleon. It rarely reflects reality, but that’s the way it is for purveyors of fake news. To them, it is all about the drama. And if there isn’t any … well, then – you create some.
Thanks to Amy, I had a bit of a sit-down with my narrator. And did some active retconning of my life to explore my perception of where I am and how I got here. Yes, I am nervous about the possibility of making a big change in my life. My narrator was chanting, “You can’t. You don’t have it in you. It will go wrong. It’ll be a big mistake. You’ll regret it.” But I saw her for who she was. A troublemaker. I decided to reimagine my narrator into a voice of pragmatism. I like her better when she looks at my life and makes a story out of it that is more along the lines of, “She made decisions. She got on with it.” The headlines then move from fake news to “She stayed true to herself, and she did the best she could.” There might be some paragraphs in the story beneath that headline that report gargantuan failures, but it would be honest-to-God real, and there would be paragraphs that celebrated victories, too. Not as exciting as the old headlines … but the source of it would be in reality; not in storytelling.
What is your narrator saying?
(You really have to read Amy’s book!)
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