We are all storytellers. We all tend to relate our days and difficulties in presentations that are more narrations than expositions. But beyond the particular events that we tell other people, the macro-level story of our life itself is especially important to consider. We should examine the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves.
If I were to tell you that I was an English major, what expectations would you have about my character, looks, and interests? What about a math major? Theatre? AES? Music? Economics? The expectations that other people have for us are always an interesting dynamic in the declaration of our majors.
Shall we fulfill what people expect our major to be? We can subvert those tendencies and “own” them or refuse to comply at all. Either way, we are responding to the perceptions caused by the academic story we choose to identify as our own.
This principle extends further in two ways. First, it is interesting to see how we set up expectations of ourselves in the story we identify as our own. Just as I can respond to someone’s perception of a rhetoric major by fulfilling or breaking it, I can choose to conform or contradict my own expectations that stem from the story I am telling.
Second, the power of our story extends much deeper than our academic majors. Who you tell yourself to be and who you tell others you are can influence every area of your life and identity. Who you believe you are religiously, culturally, ethnically, sexually, and every other aspect of your composite identification can influence your actions, responses, and expectations. What does it mean to call yourself a party-animal? A politico? A poser or a prodigy? There is no part of ourselves that is not also a part of this greater story.
But this story-building is not so freeform as our ideas of narrative fiction may initially suggest. Some stories are better than others. That is the whole point of examining the narrative of your life. Much like how papers are invariably better when you proof-read them, our story is better when we do everything we can to verify it. The saddest stories, in contrast, are the unverified ones. The phrase “living a lie” is particularly apt. Somehow, however intuitively, we know that some of these personal tales are true, some are adopted, and some ought not be ours.
There are adopted stories that don’t truly jive with us. Being associated with or identified with a particular idea need not be the only or fullest definition of who we are. In order to fit into the expectations of our identities, we need not become caricatures of ourselves. The depth of who we are is not found in what we conform to, or even what we refuse to conform to.
Rather, our story is found in the unique pieces. Our habits, beliefs, thoughts and actions must be examined in context of that utterly unique narrative of our lives. We should know the complete impact of the story we are telling ourselves.
Originally Published in the Willamette Collegian.