“So your newsletter is a lie.”
My partner looks disappointed, which breaks my heart. I grasp for something, anything to say. I come up empty.
“I find that rather sad,” he continues.
“It’s just the way it is.” Not a defence, a statement of facts. “These stories are all I have. And there’s no way for me to tell if they’re true.”
My partner perks up. “What do you mean?”
It’s all a lie
I’d just published a newsletter about my 12-year journey from being solely driven by vanity to choosing value as my social media strategy, a post I’d spent weeks tweaking. My partner had asked what I’d learnt about myself in the process. My answer: nothing.
What do you mean, nothing?
As I relate each turning point in my journey, I’m sifting through all the stories about me that I’ve told myself over the years to find something—a trait, a desire, a goal—that might explain the shift. Whatever makes sense, I write down. Then as I’m rewriting, more stories bubble up and I include the ones that fit the narrative I’ve arbitrarily chosen. I was making it up as I went.
So it’s all a lie.
My partner’s not wrong. Writing that introspective newsletter had me asking questions that were impossible to answer with any measure of certainty—What drove the vanity of my 20s? How did I grow out of it? Why did I choose value as my motivator? All questions I had to “make up” explanations for.
Armed with nothing but imperfect hindsight, I pinned my vanity on a soul-sucking need for validation, justified the end of that phase with my institutionalisation for bipolar disorder, attributed the new focus on value to my job working for my favourite author. And that was that.
These answers that together formed the outline of my problematic newsletter are all things I think I know about myself. They are true to me. But I haven’t the faintest if they actually are.
For all I know, I could have been lying to myself all my life.
The stories we tell
A highlight reel of the stories I’ve been telling myself for three and a half decades:
If I’d never won the Thai government scholarship that funded my seven-year studies in the UK, I would never have developed the ability to think. I would still perceive whatever’s in books to be objective facts. I would trust whatever figures of authority say to be true. I’d never have become a writer, no less one with a publication titled Val Thinks.
My fierce guarding of personal freedom—living where I fancy; working when I choose; not wanting children, pets, even house plants—and valuing agency above all—believing I always have a choice—is me over-correcting for having had an overly restrictive upbringing.
I believed growing up that all there was to life was getting perfect grades (GPA 4.00 through 13 years of schooling in Thailand), attending a top university (my alma mater was 4th in the world), graduating with a first (barely made it), and working for BCG (never heard back). These misguided values were the reason for my crippling depressions in the 2010s and my severe manic episode in 2014.
Prioritising relationships—especially friendships—over work from my late 20s onwards has served me better than the never-ending chase for success of the first two and a half decades of my life. I do waste days worrying whether a friend I care about will end relations over that thing I said a week ago that might be taken the wrong way, but ultimately this choice has enriched my life and made me a happier, more balanced individual.
These stories are how I see and understand myself. They’re how I account for my evolution from an oblivious, self-obsessed child to a more self-aware, but still self-obsessed adult. They’re what I tell others on the rare occasion someone asks.
But here’s the thing. These are just stories—“a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events.” They are words I made up to make sense of a past I barely remember. And there is no validator I can run them by to prove their veracity.
The entire construct of our “self” could be based on a lie, and you’ll never know it.
I find the fragility of it all frightening. How everything we think we know about ourselves could crumble with a single revelation.
What if I already possessed critical faculties before my move to the UK? Would I be as obsessed with “thinking” as I am? Would I have adopted “making people stop and think” as my writer’s mission? Would I have become a writer at all?
What if I, in fact, had far more freedom as a child than I think I did? Would “freedom” and “agency” still be my guiding principles? Would I choose to live closer to home, be more involved with family?
What if my depressions and manic episode had nothing to do with my childhood values? What if I was simply disoriented by university, then work life? If I hadn’t believed those values misguided, would I have continued to prioritise work over relationships into my 30s? Would I be living a completely different life? Would I be more successful? Would I have any friends?
A lot of what if’s to destroy my world as I know it.
Before this existential vortex swallows you whole and dooms you to a life of perpetual doubt, let me bring your attention to a huge upside to this arbitrary story-telling we’ve partaken in our whole lives.
The absence of the one true narrative frees us to tell ourselves whatever stories we want.
Because I don’t know any better, I tell myself every morning that I’m changing people’s lives, that my choices are mine to make, that my priorities will see me loved by my partner, my family, my friends until the end of my days.
And this gets me out of bed. This story keeps me going, empowers me to do the things I believe are right, comforts me when a decision I make turns out to be wrong.
It’s the story I choose to tell to explain the choices I make that, in turn, make me.
What’s your story?
Hand on heart:
What stories have you told yourself your whole life?
Why do you choose these stories over countless others? How do you know if they’re true? Does it even matter? Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. If you want, share this post with a friend who tells incredible stories.
Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,
Val
Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Voicing the reasons why we made certain choices are, of course, stories. And maybe there is a reason why we need that story VS another. Maybe it's not fragile, but it's what saves us from fragility, the constant uncertainty of whether we are doing the right thing. But if the "what ifs" are stories that actually did not happen, why do we need them disturbing the peace of mind we get from our choices (if they are truly our own and deliberate)?
So you're saying we're not the sum total of our experiences, but instead, we're the sum total of what we think our experiences were?
Or rather, we're the sum total of our interpretation of our experiences?!