The only story
Exploring the dance we take while shaping our memories
How do we tell our own story? How do we edit our lives? What do we decide to share?
Every one has their story. It often, in truth, can become the only story that gets told.
But how do you judge which story to tell? By the rise and fall, the dramatic beats? By longevity? Or the one that cuts the deepest? The story most powerful to share?
Take love. To choose between a romance where flames first burn bright, but ultimately becomes a heavy smoke, inhaled and exhaled in a confusing cycle, an ouroboros suffocating slowly over time, until nothing is left but charred ashes.
Or to be the fading photograph sat on the mantle. The one of you when you took that weekend away together in Brighton, when you just got engaged. You shared a cone on the promenade. It was strawberry. A seagull swooped down and surprised her. She was left clutching an empty cone — the scoop, which could have been vanilla, fallen overboard, plopped into the sea.
This particular story speaks of missing breakfasts. Staying together entangled beneath sheets. The echo of her heartbeat in your ears. A pair of steam trains racing up and down a coastal track. Only pausing, briefly, after ascending steep inclines, to catch a breath. Before charging away again, engines stoked with fresh coal, eyes watering with morning dew.
Maybe it was actually Bournemouth? Your story fades like the photograph through the years, the more you think about it.
Our mind is so often the pivot point between conflicting memories. A juggling act of bias, ego, and anxieties. The more we remember, the less real the memory becomes. Truth waves hello and goodbye. Hello and goodbye. A series of waves crashing up and down against the shoreline.
It’s really a terrific dance between history and our story. On one hand, there is the German waltz. On the other, the Spanish-Cuban habanera. Throw in the Czech polka, Polish mazurka, Bohemian schottische, and mix with the African candombe and Argentinian milonga, and what do you get? Well, in fact you get the tango; at one point deemed by the church, the dance of the immoral. But the point here is, it’s just another type of dance. Still one based around a reaction to a certain type of music, a rhythm, melody, time, and measure. One that is integral to share steps with a partner.
A dance is still a dance, except for when it’s not. What throws it all a wobbly, is history, and the reinterpretation of this history through culture, society, geography. How moves are passed down between generations, and reinterpreted to reflect their story, sometimes affects the entire spirit of a dance. And of course, memory is the oldest and most fragile dance of them all.
With anyone aspiring to dance, and to dance well, ego of course, comes into play. It’s instrumental in defining our routines, re-framing our memories. When we tell our own story, we shape it accordingly to how we want to present ourselves to the world. It becomes a skill of the edit, which is all the more par for the course when dancing with words.
Writing about yourself can be an admirable pursuit. A gathering together of moments to leave as a legacy. An avenue to uncover, with a hope to heal, and push forward against collated traumas.
Alternatively, there are of course plenty who choose, or are encouraged, to take an interest in life writing for less than spiritually pure gains. Think about the stacks of celebrity autobiographies lined up at supermarkets in the lead up to Christmas. Hundreds of vague face shape blobs, whose teeth have been brightened and skin has been smudged smooth, to present a manipulated cover to a personal story, so often ghost written.
The interest regularly lies in what isn’t said, rather than the words printed on the page. These types of books get churned out and are so formulaic that one becomes the other. Peoples lives become the same. Chapter one begins in the present with some gentle reflection on an ‘important incident’, before jumping back to birthday, school days, teen daze, skipping back and forth before the then and now, up to the current point in time, which becomes the end simply by necessity. Repeat for book two etc.
Don’t get me wrong, some autobiographies are wonderful. But what piques my interest is the original stack of post-it notes, the first draft. What got cut, not for brevity or quality, but because of a lack of bravery. I want to dig through the ashes of the lost moments thrown on the fire. To reveal the story I want to read.
This mythical first draft existed once. It exists for us all, hidden somewhere between heart and head. In some cases, it may one day rise like the phoenix from the ashes. But through iteration and the relationship between interviewee, ghost writer, editor, publishing house, and many others, a dilution takes place which shifts not only the tone, but the content, of a story. Often, for those near the beginning of the process, their power of the edit diminishes with every stage.
Take for example, a fledgling journalist interviewing a person of some note for a feature article. They may go into the process with an agenda, an idea of where they would like the finish line to be. A pure hope of revealing hidden meaning in someone else’s lives, for the better. To find the interview leads in very different directions, or never gets going. Leading to a retelling of a story that is different, either better or worse, than initially hoped.
Let’s be an optimistic journalist and be delighted with our story. So proud of the thematic thread, the attention to rhythm, flow, cadence, skilled use of assonance and metaphor, all working harmoniously to drive a story with an enticing hook, moments of uncertainty, then relief, a story that reveals skeletons and fleshes out emotions and moments of revelation for the self and the reader – but, the interviewee doesn’t like the angle you’re gone with. They have final say, your enlightened treatment of their life gets hacked to pieces.
So you sob, silently, gather together your editing chops and make good an already great story. Poor little ego squished by a mightier, or at least more powerful, one.
Perhaps given time and critical acclaim, our fledgling, still optimistic journalist has collected enough credit in the bank for interesting people to flock to them to write their interesting, and real, stories, and they make their way into print in a manner which both writer and subject are proud of.
I imagine the hit rate of this is rare. Compromise is the common denominator. That’s why there are so few stories, with only seven plots to wrap a life around.
As much as we would like to think otherwise, our story fits somewhere in a neat genre. We all hope to be original – this is often where memory really kicks in and twists and tweaks – when telling our own story. We become our own writer, interviewee, editor, publisher. Through this process we dance with several versions of ourselves. The id does battle with the ego. We’re brave, we’re scared. We slash and burn, remodel and skim over.
So, where does this leave us and our story? It’s still for us to tell, and to tell as we please. We continue to dance with ourselves. But this dance can change, morph, be clipped. It manipulates time, events, emotions. Stain-glassing our memories into a compressed story that privately in our hearts, and publically, we’re happy to share. Ultimately, it’s about how comfortable we are with negotiating the truth.
What’s your story?
Once upon a time, I fell in love…
When it fell apart, I always knew it would ever since…
I knew back then I would never love as hard again…
If we stayed together, we would have teared ourselves apart…
I had to take the chance, or lose the opportunity forever…
For fifty years, day-in, day-out, we held each other hands…
When he passed, half of me passed on, too…
This is how I knew it would always end up…
The end. Or is it? That’s up to you to decide.
