“Your Whole Life is a Story”

This comment, “Your whole life is a story,” is capable of stopping me in my tracks. I have come across it in numerous ways: in memes, motivational speakers, writer seminars, and said to me directly. What is most interesting about it today is how this one six-word sentence can mean so many different things.

Often, it is presented as a promise of possibility. This life is mine, and, as such, I have the sole authority to author it. I can make my own choices and have the freedom to write my chapters. When viewed creatively, it gives permission to my writer-self to lean into my perspective as unique and worthy. These are the lovely times.

There are other times, however, when it feels more like (and is probably intended as) an accusation. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that I have rewritten a narrative to suit my purposes, a kind of “April washing” of history constructed to camouflage my faults, my blame, my culpability, my lessthanness as a person. I cannot deny that there is some truth to that. I am certain that there are periods of my life where I have behaved less than and created justifications for the choices in order to live with the things I can’t take back and get more than 30 minutes of sleep. The paralyzation of the statement comes not from my denial but from the idea that I am alone in this practice.

I am not.

When thinking about this today, I knew that somewhere in my writings, there had to be what I have come to call “the Memory Passage” from Pat Conroy’s Lords of Discipline. It is one of my favorite passages of literature; after I push publish here, I will start on the long putoff task of committing it to memory. I went looking for it and surprisingly only found it in one place – a blog entry from the now-abandoned See The Butterfly, written almost exactly three years ago. The post reflected on an executive summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Noble Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Today, I cannot remember the summary or why it put me in a weird headspace; I never went back and investigated the thoughts it inspired or the book as a whole. Whatever it was, it inspired the inclusion of “the Memory Passage.”

I will speak from memory — my memory — a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

But I will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me whenever I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write down his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down.

Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them, every one of them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth.

~ The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy

Three years ago, I abbreviated the quote. I am not doing that today. I am sure there is some symbology in that, some conclusion that can be drawn where the lack of editing in the passage suggests a decision to modify the editing that takes place in my own story.

But I don’t think it is that. Instead, if I had to guess (and I often do as I work out thoughts through the keyboard and am not often sure where it all will lead), it is probably closer to the decision to occupy space more than the curation of ideas. Three years ago, I questioned whether or not my love of the passage translated to other people. Perhaps it did not, so perhaps including all 411 words was indulgent and assumptive. So, I cut it. The other post contained less than half the passage. Even in my own expression of thoughts, I felt a kind of way about occupying my own space.

Maybe that’s where the convolution of memory comes from. Perhaps it is a thing I do so that I can make sense of choices that don’t make sense, a history that seems crippling if examined, and fear of what I will see in myself and others. Because there is one truth that never gets acknowledged by the accusor – I might make myself better in my stories, but I routinely do that for other people, too.

Except that isn’t what is really all about, is it? I am not (and I believe most people are not) intentionally walking around with a conscious idea of rewriting experiences to suit some type of personally created narrative. There is not a part of me that requires heroes or villains. Conflict is not my happy place. Shame seems like hell to me. Anger, hurt, betrayal – all of these fear-based emotions feel like they take years off the quality and the quantity of my life.

I have been blessed with space. I have the space to love, laugh, learn, experience, and live out loud. If I sacrifice that space, it is on me, a choice that I have made. Once I commit to being more mindful of that, the idea of life as a story becomes impotent as an accusation. My life is a story, and I love flipping the pages. Some are easier to read than others; each contains a level of fiction that both condemns and supports, and I have no idea how many blank ones are left until the end. But I hope it is a lot of space because I will take it all.