The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I wrote this a few years ago and shared on Intersect. Reposting here. The theme of storytelling is a big one for me, for work and for exploring inwardly.

An Episcopal priest I know once said, “we are slaves to the stories we tell ourselves.” Her context was that these stories can limit us, or constrain us. But they can be salvation, too. A friend who’s a Marine once told me that a big part of training is learning the stories of Marines who have gone before you. Under duress, you call up those stories, and they remind you that others have gone through it, too. Your job is to live up to those stories.

It was only when I became an adult that I realized how much I lived by a story I told myself about losing my parents when I was 14. A story that kept me together, for better and for worse.

Here are the facts: My parents were killed, along with my brother, in a car accident on New Year’s Day in 1973. We were returning home to Ann Arbor, Michigan after a holiday trip to Atlanta to see my grandmother and cousins. About halfway home, near Covington, Ky., the tire on our packed 1970 LTD station wagon blew, and we spun out of control—into the path of a semi-truck. My father was killed instantly; my mother and 12-year-old brother lingered for a few hours. The traffic on I-75 backed up for six miles, we were told.

That left four of us—my two sisters, 17 and 10, my 16-year-old brother, and me. One of us— my older sister—had a closed head injury which has impacted her to this day. But the rest of us had only minor injuries. I suffered a few pelvic fractures, and not even a cut or scratch; my brother had a skull fracture; my little sister broke her collarbone and displaced her pelvis. We just needed a little rest and recovery. And so the focus for us was on logistics: Who would we live with? Who would take care of us?

Because, as it turned out, my parents hadn’t had a plan—not a plan that envisioned the scenario of their both dying. And so, I remember lying in my hospital bed, weighing all the possibilities; and it was at that moment that I became conscious for the first time that I could even think of my life as a narrative. There was a giant tear in the flow of my life (think of the sound of a phonograph needle ripping across an LP) and the question was: What is the next chapter? How will the story end?

In some ways, I remember thinking: Hey, this is an opportunity. I could fall apart; I could become a completely different person; I could start liking different music; I could end up not going to college; I could even lobby to move out of Ann Arbor and get new friends. Nobody knows what people do in these situations, I thought, and everyone would understand. I realized that I had power, and that much of this was up to me.

And so, I fashioned my story. It turns out it was not about getting different friends, or separating from my community. And it wasn’t like concocting an alibi, as in, making things up. But it was still a construction—a way to get the needle back down on the record, a way to make a meaningful narrative about this shattering event—a path to keep going.

And the story I developed was: “It’s not that big a deal.”

Here’s why, my narrative went. You see, if there is an ideal age to lose your parents, I was at that age. I had been raised. My parents were not perfect, but I was lucky to have them. I had their input—I knew exactly what they expected of me. And, I hadn’t started rebelling against them in a big way. At 14, I had become a first class smart-aleck, but I hadn’t really acted out—no keeping them up at night worrying, no “I hate you” fights, no serious risk-taking behavior just to freak them out. So I also didn’t have a bunch of unfinished business with them. So really, I had everything I needed.

It’s not that big a deal.

The upside of this story was that it sustained me. It amazed and impressed people. How mature I am!! How well-adjusted! And it put them at ease: No grieving orphan to manage. No flipped-out lost child. So I just finished raising myself with no visible means of support. I decided what college I would go to. The following year, in fact, that story got me out of the 2nd-year dorm requirements. I planned my own wedding. I mean, who needs parents?

It’s just not that big a deal.

The downside of this story didn’t really come to me until later. If, as my story implied, parents ended up being not THAT important anyway, for instance, then having children was a little risky: I might realize the flaw in that thinking. So, I just didn’t get around to having kids. My story caused me to seriously underestimate my issues with loss—which didn’t end up standing me in good stead when my first marriage came to an end, and the divorce was hard—WAY harder than anything I had ever gone through before. And I was constantly intellectualizing loss. When the Challenger blew up, I argued with people that this was just not that big a tragedy. Not compared to what survivors of Pol Pot went through, for instance.

At some point in my life, I was ready to realize that what I had gone through was in fact, Quite a Big Deal. I realized that loss and love are two sides of the same coin—and if you devalue the price you paid for the loss, you risk de-valuing the love at stake as well.

An alternative narrative came to me one day when, years later, I listened to a radio interview with Gloria Estefan that referenced the terrible accident that killed some members of her band. The narrative the interviewer was intimating could have been mine: that of a survivor of a harrowing ordeal. After all, I was in a car going 70 miles per hour on a freeway that got slammed into by a semi-truck. Three people were killed, but I suffered only minor fractures, and not even a cut or scratch.

Although it has occurred to me that I might spend more time in wonder over how unscathed I was physically, I don’t quite identify with that survivor narrative. Because for me the story was not actually about surviving the impact of a truck on a freeway. It was about negotiating my identity, about holding on to myself, about managing the “before” and “after” with some sense of control.

To this day, I don’t think I’m very different from who I might have been if that accident had never happened. That’s because part of the story I told myself really was true. But I’m trying to spend more time appreciating the full measure of what I lost: Parents, who I didn’t finish knowing, and who I never really took in as people in their own right. A brother, who was a very bright light even in twelve short years.

Mostly I’ve learned to listen to stories—my own, of course, but also to those of others, and to appreciate the power of the stories we tell ourselves. One aspect of my story, then, is that a very, very big deal happened to me, and that I made up a story to get through it: a story that enslaved me just a little bit, but saved me as well.