What Are Storylines?
The beginning point for becoming more present in our lives can be an intention to investigate our ‘storylines’.
What is a storyline? It’s what we tell ourselves about what is happening, or has happened, or might happen.
Though that sounds very simple, it can be hard to recognize or disentangle in our own minds.
Here is an example:
You and I are shopping in a store and a car crashes through the window of the store. No one is hurt.
Here is the mental ‘story’ of the clerk working in the store:
“Oh, no, bad things always happen to me. Now the store will probably be shut for days and I won’t get paid. How will I pay my rent? I’ll have to borrow money from my sister again. Then she’ll give me a big lecture about lack of responsibility again – what a drag! Why do these things always happen to me??”
Another customer in the store is thinking:
“Wow, this is amazing. My second day working for the newspaper as a reporter and this happens right in front of me. What a scoop!”
A passerby outside is thinking:
“That car just barely missed my daughter as it came up on the sidewalk. I am such a lucky person, bad things usually bypass me. I’m so grateful for my life and grateful that my daughter is okay.”
Another customer, who is clinically schizophrenic, is thinking:
“I knew they would finally get me. Now they don’t care who they hurt, they are driving into a store with a car to get me. Or maybe it’s just a warning this time, but next time they’ll kill me. I better figure out what to do to keep myself safe.”
In some ways this is obvious – something happens, and we talk to ourselves about it. We tell a story to ourselves that is more than the bare facts -- which are simply: a car drove through a store window. Everything else is an inner account from someone’s point of view. We filter ‘what happens’ through what we want, what we don’t want, what we assume about the world and about our lives, and we filter it through how we perceive ourselves and wish to be seen.
The interesting thing is that this is much more obvious to us about other people than it is about ourselves. In our minds, humourously enough, we imagine our ‘story’ as reality, and other peoples’ descriptions as ‘their story’. We often know the tenuousness of other peoples’ interpretations and how distorted they are. But, with a leap that defies logic, we somehow assume (without really thinking it through, we just have this as a starting point) that we comprehend things clearly – we are seeing reality.
It was a major shift for me to open myself to the possibility that I, too, am living in and through my ‘stories’ as much as anyone else – that everyone is. That what I experience as ‘reality’ is actually created by my narrative.
Some of our stories are pleasant or happy interpretations of events. Others are not – they can be tales of lack, victimhood, disaster, or grief. Some of the time we might feel like we need to have a positive interpretation of events, just to get through a situation – and that’s understandable. Though of course our experience of life might be more pleasant if we have happy interpretations, for the purposes of what I’m writing here, there is no differentiation between the emotional tones of our descriptions. The point is to discern that all of the ways we think about events are our stories, whether it’s a happy or a sad or a fearful interpretation. Though you might feel it’s better to have an empowering story rather than a negative story, it’s clarifying to know that our version is a story – even if it’s empowering -- than to mistake our interpretation for absolute reality. In the end, true aliveness and wisdom is being with what is actually happening, not our story about it.
This is not to say that bad things don't happen, or that we imagine them. War, rape, hunger, violence -- it all happens. But even in those extreme circumstances, peoples' stories vary widely about what happened, why it happened, and what it means to them personally -- and it can be hard to separate out what is story from what is the bare event.
Most of our thoughts are in fact stories rather than the factual representations of reality that we imagine them to be – stories about what we want, what we need, what happened, what we expect to happen, what is happening now, what we should do now, what we should have done or should not have done then, what they should have done or should not have done, and on and on.
To comprehend the ‘storyline’ quality of our lives is to loosen something for the first time. It allows some space, some uncertainty, some vulnerability into our sense of who we are…and that creates an opportunity for more to be seen.
In the section Frameworks and Patterns we’ll look at the pervasiveness of networks of stories and how they form our identity. But in the rest of this section, Storylines, we’ll try to separate out and notice our individual stories, as a beginning.