the stories we tell (and red dress giveaway winner)
I have a bad memory. Some people can remember things like the name of the class their favorite professor taught in college. Bear can remember the course number. That’s insane. I don’t even remember the names of my sophomore or junior year dorms. In fact, I have no recollection of either sophomore of junior year. They’re gone. I mean, who needs them? It’s the beginning and the end that count. That’s why the middle of the movie is usually a bunch of montages that show slow, boring things, like falling in love and getting to know someone, happening quickly, set to inspirational music. There isn’t nearly enough inspirational music in my life.
I remember a lot of details about boys I dated, and I wish I didn’t. But in general, my memory is bad.
I told my grandma the other day on the phone, “I have to write this down somewhere, because when I’m old, I’m going to blame it on age. Also, my back already hurts. And I can’t always hear what people are saying. Especially if I’m nervous.”
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll offend her by referring to old people in non-politically correct ways (what IS the correct way? “Person of many years and much wisdom”?), but she just laughed.
Maybe I’m a writer because I can’t remember anything. I have to write it down to keep it. But then I catch myself remembering the wrong thing– I remember the thing I wrote, not the thing that happened. Or I remember the scene from a photo, not the scene from life.
“God, that was a great party!! I was wearing that red and pink checked dress, and Tommy was holding the supersoaker up over his head, and we were standing in the backyard, by the pine tree. I think…Anna was about to take a bite of cake! Yes. She definitely was. The fork was in the air.”
(ah, yes! I always loved to play the piano in a tutu! I spent years like that– it was the most important part of my childhood! and it was absolutely critical that the tights were polka dotted)
Or, “Mom was terrible when I was thirteen. She was so mean. She was always telling me I couldn’t do stuff that was totally reasonable for me to do. ALL I wanted to do was go on a camping trip with my 16 year old boyfriend! For three measly stupid weeks! That’s NOTHING. WHY IS SHE SO MEAN?”
It makes me sad. My 13-year-old memories are designed by 13-year-old Kate, and she couldn’t even spell.
But as I was lying in bed last night thinking about this, and Bear was going, “Seriously, can we talk about something else? Am I just making this up, or are you still wondering why ‘we’re all such ephemeral beings’? You look really sexy…” I had a little epiphany. I have a lot of little epiphanies, so you should be prepared for this not to be that exciting. But you should also pretend to be unsurprised if it’s really awesome, because I’d be kinda hurt if you didn’t.
Life is a set of stories you tell yourself about life. My life is made up of stories I wrote. Stories in pictures. Stories I make up based on the facts I remember, or the facts I think I can remember. There are so many story versions of me. Was I nerdy and weird as a kid? Was I confident and popular? Was I a dreamer, lost in my own world? I was probably all of these things. It depended on the day and the people I was around and what I was feeling. It depends what I’m feeling and who I’m talking to when I’m describing myself. Was my family cultured and highly educated? Or scrappy and struggling, with me the first to go to college? OK, it’s both. My brothers were best friends. They fought constantly. My childhood house was a battleground– it was a sanctuary. My mom used to read to us every morning, on the couch in the living room. For hours. There were years when every morning, I woke up to a yelling match between her and my brother. I felt beautiful and potent as a teenager. I agonized over my acne. I was a slam poet who once performed on local television and thought it was only the beginning. I don’t write poetry anymore. Not at all. Why did I write poetry? Why don’t I now?
I am goofy and bumbling. I am really interesting. I am funny and confident. Sometimes I have no idea what to say and I just stand there, looking stunned. I am weird-looking. I am pretty. I am charismatic. I sort of disappear into the background. I am a failure. I am definitely succeeding, at least a little. I am clearly unfit to take any of the personality tests that exist. “Would you describe yourself as invigorated by being around other people or drained?” “EVERYTHING.”
This much I know: I am a woman who tells stories.
I’m pretty sure we’re all people who tell stories.
Oh, and the epiphany! Wait. OK. So it went something like this: since you’re made up of stories you tell, you can always tell different stories. You own everything about yourself.
Someone slap that on a poster, please! Or a bumper sticker, maybe. I can see that really working on a bumper sticker…
So the story about the girl I hung out with in choir who was really bossy and who treated me like her flunky and then left me to sit with the more popular girls? Yeah, that’s a story about me being unpopular and dorky. And also a story about me learning how people treat each other in big groups. It’s also a story about class dynamics– the girl bragged about her king-sized bed (we were eleven) and the enormous house she lived in. The other girls she decided to spend time with lived in her neighborhood. It’s a story about how my hair was really frizzy and how I didn’t care because I was very much a little kid who wasn’t trying at all to be anything else. And a story about how quickly I got over her, because I was never sure how to talk around her– if I should make my voice quick and breathy and excited or quiet and low, to contrast hers. Finally, it’s a story about how awful choir was, and how dumb it feels to be a second soprano in a group of a hundred 11 and 12 year olds who can barely sing. I have never been a first soprano. And I’ve been in a lot of choirs. Let me tell you, it doesn’t feel good.
I’m sitting here, staring at the screen, with no idea how to finish this post. I think I was up too late last night, musing existentially. Because I’m the kind of person who does that. And also the kind of person who is made really, really happy by a good cheeseburger.
It all depends how you spin it.
I feel like that’s a lame conclusion. I have something better in me. I just can’t get to it. Did I jinx myself, by talking about how I’m a storyteller and stuff? I’m hungry. I’m gonna give it a rest.
And now…GIVEAWAY RESULTS!
I entered the number of comments into a random number generator (there are a lot of these on the internet, I discovered).
The winner is….Laura! And since the comments aren’t actually numbered, she’s the one who talked about interviewing as a school teacher and liking the A+ dress. Laura, write to me at kate@eatthedamncake.com with your shipping address, measurements, and one other thing I’m forgetting but will figure out and tell you about over email. And Shabby Apple will send you the dress! Hooray!! And then you probably have to send us all a picture of yourself in it. Because that would be so cool.
Thanks again, everyone!
Also, because this was so fun and I like giving you guys free stuff in return for reading my blog, I’m doing another giveaway soon, with eShakti. Thank you to reader Melanie, who pointed me to them. This is a site with plus-sized options, so I won’t feel like quite as terrible a person. We’ll get into it more later. For now, congratulations, Laura! I hope you have a holiday party to wear the fabulous dress to!
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Unroast: Today I love my wrist bones. Isn’t it weird that there’s a bump there? Aren’t so many of the things we find normal weird? Why am I still all existentially?
Kate on December 13th 2011 in Uncategorized
Sarah responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 2:05 pm #
If you feel like reading some complicated-ish, but incredibly beautiful Kantian-inspired philosophy about agency and personhood, I can send you this incredible paper I read this semester called “Self as the Narrator”. It’s by J.D. Velleman, who is an incredible philosophy at NYU actually. Essentially he argues for something like what you are saying, that we exercise agency by spinning tales about ourselves, however we choose to do so, and then living out those tales we’ve just spun. It’s poignant and wonderful, just like this entry.
<3.
Sarah responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 2:06 pm #
Also, when do those random acne mishaps go away? I mean srsly; I am 22. Come on, face.
Kate responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 2:33 pm #
Sure, send it! No guarantee I’ll be able to get through it, but I’d love to try.
And acne: for me most of it went away sometime in college, but I still get pimples, usually just not a bunch at once. Definitely far from the smooth skin over here, though…
Laura responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 3:28 pm #
I totally understand the part about writing things down so you don’t forget them.
For whatever reason, I have the worst memory EVER. I mean, there are entire swaths of my childhood that I have no recollection of (to the endless amusement of my brother and sister). No reason to block things out, no trauma, no big bad event, just… can’t remember.
So, about a half dozen years ago, I started journaling. Partially to give me a safe place to work out feelings, but mostly as a vehicle to create memories that I knew would last. Of course, I wonder about the veracity of all these stories, but hey – it’s MY story. I can make it up, right?
I wonder sometimes how bad I’m going to be when I’m actually a “person of many years and much wisdom”.
Kate responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 3:31 pm #
@Laura
Sometimes I can tell where I’m lying in my journal, even though I wrote that entry years and years ago. I can’t remember the truth, but I can detect the lie 🙂
tirzahrene responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 4:08 pm #
I’m convinced that pimples being the province of teenagers is a lie they tell you to keep all teenagers from killing themselves or something. Because I’m 30 and still breaking out randomly.
Re: stories we tell ourselves. Yes. And reviewing the good memories makes them stronger. And sometimes you can even spin the bad ones to prove how awesome you are because oh, it was terrible, and I made it through!
Existentiality: I spend most of my free brainpower on food and people, seriously. The first time I gave my boyfriend a run-through on my people-thoughts, his response was, “Um, are you feeling okay?” LOL. Yes. This is what my brain does.
San D responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 5:46 pm #
Because I moved so often as a kid, my memories are a bunch of embellished stories that no one can prove, including myself. I have few photos of myself (and probably that is why I photograph myself constantly in the mirror now), so I can’t even connect these memories with a visual. Every once in awhile, something appears in my memory, like a dim light, and I try to conjur up a story to go with it. When my sister and I get together, we find that our stories don’t even overlap, much less connect and that makes us raise our eyebrows and giggle at the same time. I would venture to say once you have children you will have a stock set of stories/memories that you will keep to share with your children, like a legacy of sorts. Without kids, when we pass, our footprints and stories will be washed clean by the tide of life.
Reckless Housewife responded on 13 Dec 2011 at 6:52 pm #
@Sarah… I wanna read that article, too! And the acne… I swear it’s worse at 40 than it ever was before but totally different at the same time. bad different. and more random than ever.
Kate,
Yes! Life, it’s all about the spin.
Anna responded on 14 Dec 2011 at 12:03 am #
This was an amazing post! We’ve been reading about Buddhism and Taoism in school and so I’ve actually been thinking a lot about how we, and pretty much everything, are just a collection of stories and recollections. Also, I’m a second soprano too!
Jeanine responded on 14 Dec 2011 at 8:41 am #
You should read Terry Pratchett. Start with Wyrd Sisters and read all the books including the Tiffany Aching ones.
Absolutely awesome insights on telling our stories and how we live in the story we create. I <3 Terry Pratchett.
Katie responded on 14 Dec 2011 at 10:54 am #
Great post. Second soprano here.
Kate responded on 14 Dec 2011 at 4:25 pm #
LOL! I love getting comments from the other second sopranos 🙂
Kate responded on 14 Dec 2011 at 4:25 pm #
@Jeanine
You’re right, I really should! Thanks for the reminder.
Lynelle responded on 14 Dec 2011 at 5:39 pm #
Another second soprano here – and also of the opinion that we are essentially story-oriented. Sometimes I imagine something happening, and I imagine it so clearly that later on I remember that as the actual event. My earliest memory is so shady and distant that I’m not sure whether it was a dream or a memory, but I remember telling it to my mother when I was about 5 and her telling me yes, she knew the woman I was remembering… but sometimes now I wonder whether that memory is also fantasy, and I just remember it because I’ve told myself the story so often.
Jiminy responded on 15 Dec 2011 at 8:10 am #
Damn, I would so like them (http://www.eshakti.com/clothpdpage.asp?catalog=Clothes&cate=solid dresses&productid=CL0020915) to ship overseas as well… so unfair!
As for the topic of your post, – yay! deep as usual – while I agree that we are a sum of stories we tell and while I can sometimes see people around me spinning their stories away from my story of the same moments lived together, even to the extent of „I have never said this to you!” „Yes you absolutely did!”, I’m not sure about the ability to tell the stories differently (to oneself). I believe indeed that you are all those persons at the same time, but what makes you YOU is the fact that you tell those stories in exactly the way you do. I guess I mean that you can make subtle changes in the way things affect you by fine-tuning an undertone of your story (looking at something more positively, for instance, or emphasising the ways in which a certain context makes you feel empowered, etc.); but as you say yourself, in hindsight, reading the diary, you will know where you were lying 🙂 . I just mean that I’m afraid our agency, as Sarah puts it, is in a two-way relationship with who we already are – when one changes, the other changes with it, and then the first needs to change again to keep up… (I wonder if I make any sense whatsoever!?!)
Tasha responded on 15 Dec 2011 at 1:32 pm #
The idea of how we tell stories is who you are as a person totally makes sense because how we view our past usually is indicative of how we view our present selves. Does that make sense? (Probably not.)
“I have to write this down somewhere, because when I’m old, I’m going to blame it on age. Also, my back already hurts. And I can’t always hear what people are saying. Especially if I’m nervous.”
I love this because I feel the same way! My friend will call me deaf because I can’t hear what he is saying and then I reply with “well quit mumbling and I could understand you” which makes me feel old to say… 🙂
JJgal responded on 16 Dec 2011 at 11:34 am #
Second soprano here as well. Though now my choir story looks different to me because I never though there was anything undesirable about being second soprano until now. (joking)
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