Stories Invite You To Die
Why is it so difficult to let go of old habits, addictions, and self-pity? Why do we prefer a familiar pain over an unfamiliar future?
The reason is the same reason we love stories so much. We are creatures who love to establish the known. Well, of course we do, the known is where we are safe and in control.
That’s where every story begins. A character is in a familiar place, a comfortable place. But something needs to change. Why? Because something always needs to change. Life is always changing, despite our very frantic efforts. The tornado is coming to Kansas, whether Dorothy likes it or not.
To change is a little death. A hero faces this death and comes out the other side stronger, and with something that can help others. To be tragic is to hang on too tightly, refuse the call to adventure, and to fail to learn and grow. The utility of tragedy is a cautionary tale to others.
Who do you know in life who is currently a tragic figure? The truth is, it’s practically everyone. On the extreme end, epidemics of depression and suicide plague modern cultures. The darkness of our lives is going more and more unaddressed. This isn’t just about individuals, either. As we become more and more separated, we lose the support we once had. Each of us faces a tidal wave of societal darkness. If it sounds bad, it’s because it is. Feeling overwhelmed by darkness is really common, and you’re not alone. A symptom of our separateness is the pressure to display false positivity, which is a vicious cycle that makes us feel more and more alone. The wonderful thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. The encouraging signs are that this pattern is slowly breaking. Everyone can take the story they are currently telling themselves to its heroic end. It may be incredibility challenging, but there is truly a hero in all of us.
The first thing to admit is that we all are constantly under the influence of the stories that permeate our culture. Stories are so baked into our brains that it would be inconceivable to think of a human being without them. “I am the sort of person who doesn’t really care about stories.” That’s a story. We consume stories on our social media feeds, on our TV, and in the news all day. We sort and tell ourselves more and more satisfying stories about ourselves. That’s usually what we’re doing at night when we can’t sleep. “How do I take all this information and form it into a story that is related to the truth, and gives me the status, safety, and love I seek?” Depressed people’s stories are hopeless, helpless, and painful. Optimistic people’s stories may be less factually true, but also maybe more helpful. Stories fill our unconscious and mostly can’t be willed to change very easily. That’s what makes being a hero difficult; changing our stories requires us to confront the dragons of chaos.
You see people on Instagram whose story seems to be “I am an adventurous person who lives life to the fullest,” or something like that. Maybe a more cynical person would look at them and imagine their story is more like, “I want people to see me as an adventurous person who lives life to the fullest.” There is an important distance there, because when we project stories onto others, if often reads as phony. Actually think about why that would bother us. It seems like, on an unconscious level at least, we understand that phoniness, is a faking of being a hero. We are sensitive to who gets to be seen as a hero, and we can usually tell within moments of meeting a person. That should tell you how deep stories go in our psychology. We intuitively know what it takes to be a hero. We can tell when a person hasn’t faced their dragon.
What if we have unfaced dragons? It can lead to self-hatred, stagnation, and an ever-increasing avoidance of fear. The dragon of our imagination grows and grows. It becomes too terrible to face. We are always seeking distraction. It comes out in ways we don’t fully understand. Rage. Depression. Addiction.
The only way to change our lives is to change our stories. To me, saying positive affirmations in the mirror may be a start, but it doesn’t nearly go deep enough. These stories are in our bones. A lot of times, they are the stories your parents told you, or ones you picked up from school, or TV. They are cultural, generational, subconscious, and they guide our every move.
Your brain can’t let them go because without them, you would fall into unstructured madness. We need a story. Our minds don’t care if it’s a good story. Have you ever taken a psychedelic drug? That’s your brain without a story. Which actually is why those drugs can be so wonderful at allowing us to let go of old stories. A bad trip, then, (and I mean a trip that leaves you worse off than before, not just a challenging one) is one that reveals all of your unconscious stories to you, and only convinces you further that you’re trapped with them forever. I’ve had those, and that is the realest version of hell I can imagine.
We don’t have to carpet bomb old stories with psychedelics if that scares us. We can take slow steps, each day, to face our fears. Either way, though, we have to eventually look all our fears in the eye. For those of us in a lot of pain, I suggest getting all the help that can be found. A therapist, a loved one, a daily practice. People write thousands of articles a day about how to do these things. Most of us know what needs to be done, but perhaps we aren’t seeing the direness of the situation: If we don’t face this stuff, it will make us toxic; we will fill the lives of everyone we know with negativity, and it will eventually kill us.
In some people’s mind, a story pops up, “I need to kill myself.” Horrific, and much more common than we like to think. Where does this story come from, though? We are the only animals on the planet that get this sort of idea in our heads. Why? It is a recognition of a real truth. Something needs to die. The suicidal person makes only one mistake: they think that the something that needs to die is their physical body.
What actually needs to die is a story that is no longer serving that person. I don’t mean to trivialize suicide; I have lost people this way, and I have had periods of my life where it seemed like the only option, too. The stories in my head were so painful that I couldn’t see a way out.
I am thankful every day that I did, and looking back, the first step, for me at least, was to recognize what my stories actually were and begin to really question them. I began to see them when I made mindfulness a regular practice. When I had a dark thought, I actually started to clock it and get an idea of where it came from. Most problems unwind in the light of awareness. Awareness can’t happen if we are ignoring parts of ourselves, though. Awareness requires that we accept and see all of us. This is the project of a lifetime.
Most of us are probably working on this project, or need to start it again. Time never stops, there is no permanence, and life asks us to be show up a hero every single day. It is never too late to start again.
Originally published at https://www.taylorforeman.com on June 20, 2020.
