Marilyn and I just returned from spending a week with her brother, Danny, and his family in Nevada. I love Danny. He has a heart of gold. He loves his family, Giants baseball, F1 racing, fishing, and working on his Mustang. And maybe one of the things I love most about Danny is how much he loves his sister. It is unmistakable, even to a casual observer. It reminds me of the relationship I once had with my own brother.
Then, on the drive back to Colorado, we spent a day in Yosemite and the night in Groveland, California. By coincidence, maybe five miles away lived my former brother-in-law.
I didn’t stop by to see him.
Our relationship ended when my marriage to his sister did.
For many years, before my divorce, I would have said we were close. I remember thinking I was probably closer to him than I was to my own brother.
And yet, when I think about him now, it is hard for me to believe I would have ever considered my relationship with him even close to what I had with my brother. Not that we weren’t close. We unquestionably were. Certainly my divorce put distance between us in the years since. That makes sense to me. But why has my memory of that relationship changed so dramatically?
I look at the love between Danny and my wife and recognize something familiar. It reminds me of the love I had for my brother. But when I look back at a relationship I once described as being even closer, I don’t feel anything approaching the same thing.
At least not anymore.
What changed in the years since I last saw my former brother-in-law?
Me.
Could it be a story I am telling myself about my former brother-in-law and what our relationship once was, seen through the lens of all that changed with my divorce? Or was there some other story I was telling myself back then, about him or about my brother?
Perhaps more interestingly, how would I even know?
The person remembering all of this today isn’t the same person who lived it. I’ve changed. So has the way I understand my previous marriage, my divorce, my brother-in-law, and my brother.
The experiences happened. But what I have today are memories of those experiences, unknowingly shaped by everything that has happened since and by the stories I’ve told myself about them along the way.
Our ability to create stories is one of the remarkable things about our species. We humans are not only extraordinarily good at creating them, we use them to shape the world around us. To assign meaning to things. To convince others of things we believe.
But where do our personal stories come from?
From the only place they could come from: our experiences.
Everything we experience gives us something to interpret. And each of those interpretations helps build stories in our minds.
Imagine you tell your partner about something that bothers you and she responds in anger.
What happens the next time?
If I tell her how I really feel, she’ll get angry.
An experience has become a story.
But it doesn’t stop there. The story you tell yourself begins shaping your future experiences. Maybe the next time something bothers you, you don’t say anything. Maybe she senses you pulling away and gets angry anyway.
Now you have another experience.
See. I knew she’d get angry.
And the story gets a little stronger.
We do this all the time.
Think of something you believe so deeply that it feels less like a belief and more like a fact.
I’m good at this.
I can’t do that.
I can’t trust him.
She would never lie to me.
Now ask yourself why you believe it.
Or consider something far more mundane. Someone cuts you off in traffic.
What an asshole.
You don’t know anything about the person in that car. Maybe he’s a careless driver. Maybe he’s racing his critically ill child to the hospital. Maybe he simply didn’t see you.
But you experienced something, and almost instantly, your mind gave it a story.
That’s what we do.
Our lives are full of these stories. Some may be accurate. Some may be useful. Some may be completely wrong. Most are probably more complicated than we realize.
They may begin with facts, but they don’t end there. We select details. We assign causes. We attach meaning. We decide what something says about another person, the world, or ourselves.
And eventually, we forget which parts happened and which parts we wrote.
How many of us would knowingly choose to live a lie?
Most wouldn’t, or at least that’s the story I tell myself.
But once we’ve created a story that makes sense of our experience, we don’t have to knowingly live a lie. We can simply believe the story.
I’ve spent the last two years writing a novel about two men whose lives were shaped by the stories they carried from a single night in their childhood. They experienced the same event, but each walked away with a different understanding of what happened and why.
The interesting thing is that this work of fiction has taught me more about truth than I could have imagined.
As I’ve dug deeper into the lives of these two characters, I’ve begun to see how easily an experience becomes an interpretation, an interpretation becomes a story, and a story, repeated often enough, becomes something we no longer think to question.
It begins to feel like truth.
As readers, it can be easy to see when a character has mistaken a story for the truth. But how often are we willing to question our own?
I remember telling a friend several years ago about a research project that began immediately after 9/11 and followed people’s memories of that day for years. The researchers found that those memories changed considerably over time.
I still remember my friend’s response.
“Yes. It’s amazing how our memories can change over the years.”
Then she added, “But I remember exactly what I did that day.”
Don’t you love a good story?