the stories we tell ourselves

“Stories are ordered from the beginning in a way that we can only do by virtue of hindsight, by looking back afterwards and trying to make sense of everything that came prior. Therefore, when we recount our own lives as stories, as we so often tend to do, we’re basically fictionalizing what really was.”

This quote is from a video on the YouTube channel “Like Stories of Old,” and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The lecture series I just started about the American West starts by making a similar point: whenever we look back at history, we tend to think of what came later as somehow being inevitable. As an example, the lecturer talks about the shape of the United States on the map. We’re so familiar with that shape that when we look at a map of North America without national boundaries, we project that shape onto the map in our minds. When we think about the formation of the country and its expansion westward, we still have that national shape in mind, as if it was already there and just needed to be discovered. It’s so easy to forget that the boundaries could have been drawn up many different ways.

The one I always think about is World War II. The story I constructed as a kid, from other stories I was told, is so baked into my brain that it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people actually living through that experience, who didn’t yet know how things were going to turn out. For instance, the citizens of London during the Blitz, who lived in a city under constant assault by terrifying weapons. It’s easy for us now to look at the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster and mythologize the bravery of those people. It’s a lot harder to imagine the terror they must have felt, at a time when defeat seemed a lot more likely than victory. The European nations were falling one by one to the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union was still an ally of Germany, and the United States had not even entered the war.

I thought a lot about the Londoners of WWII when the COVID-19 situation started to heat up. I remember going into Trader Joe’s one morning and seeing empty shelves and slightly-panicked faces. It got scary for a while there. There were rumors that we’d all be ordered to stay in our homes, and that we’d need to have enough food to last several weeks. But then the governor announced that people would still be allowed to go grocery shopping, and Trader Joe’s stocked up and started letting people in a few at a time, and everything turned out alright.

That’s my story, anyway. As things have started returning to normal, I can already feel myself forgetting about the fear and uncertainty I felt during those early weeks as I put the story together in my head. Now that I know everything turned out okay for me and those close to me, I can look back and think, “yeah, I was a little worried, but I knew things would work out.”

It makes me wonder what stories other people will tell themselves about the crisis. What about my mom-in-law's boyfriend, who thought from the beginning that everyone, my wife and I included, was overreacting? I’m sure we'll be hearing his I-told-you-so’s next time we see him. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, what about my friend’s brother, who made apocalyptic predictions and brought his family and a bunch of loaded firearms to his friend’s farm to “wait it out”? He’ll probably find a different way of rationalizing his reaction and making sense of the crisis in retrospect.

If mythologizing the past is something our brains just naturally do, we have to be active in thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. We can't let ourselves believe that our version of events, the narrative we've strung together with the benefit of hindsight, is absolute truth.