Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman
Here was my dream. I would write a book that would change the world. It would be about personal narrative, the story that each of us tells about our own life. For a while there, the working title was If Your Life Was a Movie, Would You Go to See It?
“No, too trivial,” said the writing teacher. “This is an important topic.”
Second working title: What’s Your Story? How the Story You Tell about Yourself Makes All the Difference.
“No,” said the writing teacher, “Wordy and repetitive.”
Time for a new writing teacher.
Back to my dream: the book would trace the various inborn traits and early experiences that we use to invent our sense of self and the story that comes out of it. Everyone who read it would create a coherent version of their life story. They would make connections between where they came from, what experiences life threw at them and how they survived, or didn’t. It would be a selfhelp book that actually helped.
The book would be the capstone of my therapy career. For all those years I sat in a chair in a room, helping my clients wrestle meaning out of the crises of their lives. I had to have learned something and this was the way to offer it to a much wider audience than the one at a time one I was used to.
The point is not mere navel-gazing. Once you know your story you can change it, which is what therapy is all about. Researcher James Pennebaker has demonstrated that writing about trauma bolsters both physical and mental well-being. So I asked my clients to journal in between sessions. I would sometimes receive a thoughtful and cogent account of how the current stresses fit in with the flow of life.
More often I would get pages that rambled through raw emotion, blame, self-help slogans, and self-recrimination. I’d hand it back and ask for a second step: highlight the 5 most important sentences, bracket any wild and irrational statements so we could set them aside, and start to figure out what this episode means in your life. Then we would work on answering some questions: Does this remind you of anything? On your best day, how would you prefer to handle this? What stops you from doing that? Whose voice do you hear in your head giving you counsel, and is that voice to be trusted?
It was to be a simple book, a tool for the reader to use on his or her own messy life, kind of a California Closets for the mind and heart. Surely people would jump at the chance to sort through their own life stories and put them in order.
But then my own messy life intervened and I never finished writing the thing, though I do have three successive richly imagined formats filed in a drawer where they can help no one. They heckle me from there, shouting muffled accusations of “slacker!” If they were in charge, they’d give me an Incomplete on my career, and one more term to finish what I started.
Maybe I need to open that drawer. I think in the absence of my approach the world has gone a bit mad. We now have a spew of completely unprocessed minutiae spraying at us every time we turn on the computer or the smart phone or the iPad. The me, me, and more me enthusiasts inflict their me-ness on each other and all bystanders on a daily (or minutely) basis through Facebook, (which knows more about you and your buying habits than you do), Foursquare (which lets you log every single place you went today), and Farmville (that reveals that people you previously thought well of are living pretend lives as farmers instead of reading serious biographies or playing tennis like you thought they were).
Is no one interested in stopping for a moment to tease out meaning from all that? Anyone?
Apparently Facebook is. Their new Timeline approach builds a history of what you have ever posted and what can be learned from any of the 7 million sites and the apps you use. It’s certainly nice that they care, but all that data isn’t going to help you when it comes to deciding how to make the best life. Like those undigested journal pages, it just churns out an overwhelming volume of raw data, all equally important.
There is a reason why you have a prefrontal cortex and Facebook doesn’t. Your cortex allows you to prioritize, weigh in your values, perfect your unique vision, and stake out your little patch of territory that no one else can stand on. It helps you recognize you.
If I got serious and started up again today on the book, I figure I could finish in nine months or so, you know, like gestating a baby without the morning sickness.
Just think, I could advertise my new baby on Facebook, and if only a fraction of the 800 million Facebook members gave it a try, I would be in the pink, speaking to an audience far bigger than I could dream. Now that I think of it, there would be something bewitchingly subversive about using their methods to meet my goals.
Stand back. I’m going to open the drawer and see what flies out. Just send in my meals. I’ll be busy making my dream come true. It’s who I am.
CBH - 09/11
