Rough Drafts

I’ve spent my life studying stories, retelling stories and observing patterns, analyzing language and extracting meaning from texts. What I have discovered in reading literary theory, doing the work of literary criticism myself and studying Buddhism, is that all stories possess a degree of fiction. While there may be truth or “truths” in a story, in order to tell it, we have to make decisions. To make a literary argument about a story, we have to decide what theoretical or close reading thread we are going to pull. It’s the same with our own stories. The moment we begin to tell our stories, we are making decisions that may be beneficial in some ways, but our choices create narratives of, at the very least, half-truths. We decide what to include, what to exclude, from what perspective to see a situation, and so on. We use language that implicitly tells us whether we are passive or active or survivors or victims or criminals or mothers or academics or crazy or wise. We decide. And the moment we decide, we are either perpetuating a samskara or maybe we are working to create a new one. Usually, the stories we tell are the same stories we have told before.

If we see that stories are in fact fiction, and that, as Claude Levi Strauss declared, all of our histories are in some way a fiction, we might see that even telling a story is a habitual behavior. Of course it is. Most of us understand our lives as a narrative, and a fairly traditional one at that, without any postmodern mixups in the timeline or unexplainable non sequiturs. We are born. We have a childhood. Then, we develop and settle and ultimately we die. It’s quite linear. If we were to look at our lives, our stories, with honesty and with nonattachment to the concept of a narrative, many of us may see the challenges to the timeline, mixups, non sequiturs, even years that we have forgotten. Once, when I was in undergrad, my friends and I were “rolling” on a particularly favorite ecstasy blend called Omega. During a conversation with a friend, smack dab in the middle of a sentence, I left. Not my body, but I left this timeline and lived for a couple of years at least, in another completely separate but parallel universe, until I finally returned to the present moment. And not only that. I returned in the middle of the sentence, right where I left off. This isn’t proof of alternate timelines or universes per se, but it’s proof that stories are messy. It also illustrates how easy it is for me to tell a story about myself that looks different from the complex multifaceted person that I actually am. It’s easy for me to create a space for myself that I can’t get out of.

My first Buddhism teacher talked a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. I try not to tell my story. Not yet. My story contains so many stories, so many versions of me and the people that I have loved and hated and only known for a second or two. My story is a Charles Bukowski short story, a musical, a fucking Ken Burns documentary, and an 80s after school morality tale. My story is an underdog story and a story of privilege. It’s broken and sad and traumatic. It has so many climaxes and denouements. It has me remembering me as an ugly redhead that everybody made fun of, and as a stone cold freckled-faced wordsmith, who never lost an argument. It stars a PhD, and a diagnosed bipolar. She’s also a sister and a homeless twenty-something, and a broke yoga teacher trying to figure out how to share her knowledge. She’s a homebody, a published author, a tv binger, a mother who will never be called a mother, and a lifetime instrument learner because she can’t stick to just one.

I have lived in three countries and traveled to at least twelve because I crave experience, wisdom and knowledge. And I possess quite a bit; however, it doesn’t matter how many books I read, conversations I have, experiences I live or attempts I make to sympathize, I can’t feel in my body what it feels like to be another ethnicity in the world or to be a Vietnam veteran or a divorced Pakistani woman. There is so much about the world that I can never fully know. I’m so fully aware of my ignorance that I find I approach conversations from an entry point with that in mind. I’ve also spent my entire life learning--either through formal education or through my “storied” life experiences--that I find myself coming from perspectives that others haven’t yet considered. This isn’t always the case, and yet even this can become a story I tell myself. As I’ve explored educational experiences outside of universities, academic libraries or research centers, I’ve discovered that I feel less comfortable communicating in groups because my words have been misconstrued.

There are ways for me to work on correcting this. I have noticed improvements. The truth is that I don’t appreciate the narrative that we control how we communicate with others. We have a little control. We can’t possibly know the experiences of our listeners, the facial expressions that they have equated with kindness or with patronization (and studies have shown that we read faces differently from one another). I can control whether I use jargon, and choose to use more familiar language instead, but I can’t control if a person has the mental flexibility to understand something familiar as something completely new. To contextualize all of this is to say, I can tell my story and listeners may hear a completely different story. We all do this. I certainly do! We may hear our own story. We may hear a story that sounds more familiar than the story actually is. We may hear a story that fits cleanly into a plot predesigned and already told over and over. These are the most common stories. They are useful archetypal stories, but they are a little bit fiction.

One of the reasons why I still love Shakespeare is that he made clear that people don’t fit. They just don’t fit. Iago, arguably the most famous villain ever, hates Othello. The age-old question is, “Why?” Is it because Othello is a Moor? Is it because he is a Moor with power or because Iago was overlooked for a promotion, or because he is secretly in love with Othello and hates his own homosexuality and therefore his desired object? There is no clear answer. Iago offers all sorts of reasons, but perhaps even he doesn’t know. When he is finally asked why, he states, “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.” As evil as his actions reveal, Iago’s unknowing is so human. We don’t know why we do something. We don’t always know why we love someone or why we feel threatened. We can probably see a few reasons “why” to every question we ask about ourselves or others. We can often answer that question in hindsight, because we create a narrative around it, and everyone in our lives plays a part. The moment that we pick one answer, we have whittled ourselves and everyone in our story into a fictional character. The truth is people are so complex that we perform a disservice when we accept one story over others.

This is not to say we shouldn’t tell stories. I believe stories have the potential to cultivate compassion in the human heart. In fact, studies show that readers of poetry and fiction are more accepting of others and show more compassion than those who do not read. So I think we should tell stories, and yes, we should tell our stories. But which one? And how? This is something I’m not quite ready to do. Right now, I need to not tell my story. This bit of writing has a story about me, but it’s not my only story.

I think of samskara as etchings of thought habits, like whittled grooves in a piece of wood made from a carving knife. Sometimes, until we have them under control, stories can make these grooves deeper and make them more difficult to climb out of. I’m trying to whittle new, healthier grooves. I need practice reminding myself that while stories are often true, and certainly hold truth in them, their fictional aspects can reestablish plot lines that are stifling and oppressive. So, in telling bits of stories here, I’m not going to tell a monolithic narrative. Not yet, because I’m still revising.

#samskara #writing #shakespeare #stories #narrative #fiction