On the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I'm working on this book every morning, getting up at 5:30 so I have time before work, missing very few days, and feeling more momentum than I ever have as "writer."  I've written a lot of poems, and those are cool because you can finish one in a single morning.  Sometimes I've finished eight in a single evening.  And although there's revision, all of it is on a single page so it's manageable revision.

Prose is different, especially long prose, and I'm astounded by the--and there's no other word--mystery of this process.  How I show up every day, put my hands to the keyboard, and, more often than not, know exactly what comes next, even when I think I don't.  There are all of these little voices in my head saying "You shouldn't say THAT" and "My, that was an ugly sentence" and "WHAT is Soandso going to think?!"  But I find, miraculously, if I keep going they shoosh up, and I keep going and something else arrives in my brain to put on the page.  I'm not trying to say that God is telling me what to say, that I'm speaking for Him by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way, doing this every morning makes me believe in God in a way that I haven't before.  My goodness, there's something out there fueling me as I try to work stuff out on the page. 

But this is a strange thing, to rummage around in my past like I'm looking for a pair of shoes, looking for something that goes with something else, looking to make sense of my experience to someone that doesn't have immediate access to my brain.  Or really, to my own brain.  I'm probably trying to make sense of things to my own brain, since the story of how a very young girl went to Mississippi and now lives in Boston with a Sam is a story that I don't entirely understand myself. 

And so today I'm thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and the way we narrate our experiences, even inside us. In a way, this sense of story is what shapes our lives.  What I mean is this:  Once, when I suffered a painful (if mostly mutual) breakup, I realized I was obsessively trying to land on the story I would tell myself about it.  Was it: boy and girl simply not right for each other, which happens often and everything will be okay?  Was it: boy a big mean jerk who never loved me anyway?  Was it: Woe is me; if I could have just lost 20 pounds then he would have loved me?  Was it: I never liked that guy and I'm gonna get pretty and successful and then he'll see what he missed out on?  When I realized I was doing that, shuffling through stories, I worked really (really) hard to only tell myself the most useful story, the one that would help me move forward gracefully.  It wasn't that the other stories weren't true.  I could acknowledge that in one way or another they were probably all a little bit true.  But the one I wanted to dwell on, the one I wanted to package up and store on the shelves of my brain, was the kindest one, the most generous.  It took me probably a year to tell myself that story often enough that it overrided the other ones that kept presenting themselves.  But I remember that one day I cried about it and knew I was crying about for the last time, that I was ready to let the story alone. 

In a way, I feel like that's what I'm doing now.  I'm telling myself a story.  I'm trying to make it as honest as it can be, presenting as many of the scary questions as I can.  And hoping that, when I'm done, I'll have made a story I want to keep, even if no one else in the whole wide world reads it.  I'm trying to move forward gracefully.  I'm learning something new about that story every time I put it on the page.