It is deeply human to tell stories. Whether through art, song, or the tradition of oral history. We tell stories to organize our thoughts, to express our feelings, and to impose order onto a chaotic universe.
I am by nature a storyteller. I craft narrative like it is second nature. I have a profound and persistent need to make myself understood and to create sense of my own lived experience. It feels most resonant to apply internal logic to cement my understanding.
I had always considered this a strength. A tidy way to interpret and communicate around an organizing principle; something that provides a common lens to consider my feelings and circumstances.
It was recently suggested that while having stories is both natural and helpful in its way, they can also become the focus of so much attention that the core of what has prompted the process can be lost.
I was struggling to understand my relationship to anger. For many years I have essentially refused to acknowledge any anger I may be feeling. It has felt too… dangerous; too risky. When I was confronted with an anger I could not deny, I felt overwhelmed and frightened by the feeling.
When I brought this up my therapist and I discussed the feeling of anger – which was in both my body and my mind – versus the experience of it. She mentioned that for some people, they not only experience their emotions in the moment they are in, but can also get caught in the story about the anger, causing them to relive the moments that triggered the feeling initially, not allowing it to run its natural course and exhaust itself.
It caused me to realize how often I do that. I dwell in the stories I have told myself, both good and bad, almost to the exclusion of presence in the current moment. Realizing I can experience a feeling in the moment it occurs, without deferring it for a moment after I can create a story about that feeling, makes me realize just how often I was avoiding the experience of life in the present.
I have spent the time since then actively cultivating my ability to stay present through intense emotion. To experience it in real time and know that even if I am not done processing it, that I have engaged with the truest encounter with my response. In this way I no longer have the feeling of my life unfolding only in retrospect.
It still happens that as I am blundering around, a narrative will arise, but I am better at recognizing and understanding the purpose this has served in the past, and allows me to pause and wonder if that is what will serve me best. Better, it creates space for me to create a different ending.
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