Telling My own Story

Happy New Year!

 Five years ago I made the only resolution I ever kept - not to make any more resolutions, because I never kept any. I did, however makes one mid -year resolution last year. In March, at the onset of the nation-wide lockdown, I resolved to blog every day, to record for posterity the trials and tribulations of survival in a plague season. 

I envisioned myself a modern Samuel Pepys, diligently scribing a diary that would be poured over by sociologists and historians hundreds of years later, as source material for an inter-galactic docudrama on The Great Pandemic of 2020. Ālmost immediately, I hit a snag. Unlike the estimable Mr Pepys, I wasn’t going into the Naval Office daily, or giving a doxy one in the alleyway. I have insufficient Parmesan to bury, and no servant to chide. I believed I had no story to tell. 

 That’s never true of course. I took up knitting, I made a banner for Church, I recorded stories for my grandchildren and uploaded them to You-Tube I shopped weekly in a face mask and I binge-watched Doc Martin on the telly. I failed to make sourdough bread. These things may indeed be of interest to my notional intergalactic screenwriter, but I have my doubts. 

So, I am listening to an uplifting Ted Talk yesterday, a dialogue between two men about the human tendency to make things up as they go along. I am a little miffed, as I believe this theory originated with me, and I’m getting no credit here. I really must listen again, because I missed much of it, having been suddenly overtaken by the principle thesis: there is no objective reality, we get by through the invention of a story that enables us to make sense in an otherwise chaotic and meaningless cosmos. 

 I am very taken with this. I can look at the tv and watch the absurdities of others and frame it as ‘their story’. Take, for example, the historic unfolding of events in Washington DC this week: the President of the USA is inciting a mob to invade the seat of his own government in what many will rightly call an insurrection. 

 My attention is caught by footage of a young man, distraught at an airport, being refused a seat on a plane as he is now on a no-fly list, branded as a terrorist, and about to confront unlooked-for and very unpleasant consequences. Already the recipient of mocking derision, this man weeps as his heroic myth of a patriot opposing a corrupt system, unravels before his eyes, in front of the world, and he, in this new story, is an extra on the set of the drama of a malignant narcissist desperately trying to cling to power. 

 Will the “hero” ever see it this way? I do not know: only he can write his own ending, and I suspect it will not be a happy one. 

 Pause to reflect on the story I am writing for myself. Unlike the anti-hero above, I am not caught up in the delusions of a despot, and I am self-aware enough to be skeptical of my hopes and dreams. 

 Stuff happens. Much of it beyond my control, it’s the raw material of a narrative I concoct for myself. Maybe I will make a resolution this year, and maybe this will frame that narrative. Or not.

 I think the reality is more like watching Doc Martin. The drama unfolds, I laugh out loud and nod to the Story-maker: This is my cup. I will drink it with gratitude, and when we write the last paragraph together, let us be satisfied.