The Stories We Tell Ourselves

It told me to “tell your story”— and so I did.

It told me to “tell your story”— and so I did.

Tell, not ask; instilling [a sense of] imperative.

I must. I can’t. I will.

I’m not good enough. I’m too much. I don’t know how, or why, or where to start — but that doesn’t matter.

Just Do It.

Nike’s marketing strategists have a lot to answer for.

It began… a long time ago, as these things do. As everything does. It’s hard to pinpoint when, but that doesn’t matter. It’s hard to pinpoint why, too — hard to differentiate between factors that all implicitly contribute, flowing like a river to the sea into what makes I, you, we ME. I am I am I am: the power of three, ego screaming. That sense of wholeness; the agony.

The stories we tell ourselves are what we believe.

It’s all you know. It’s all you can feel. It’s all you can imagine.

The parameters of your experience exist within a single vision.

Lens as clear as the frame is indistinct; for wherever you go, there you are — even if you keep running.

The stories we tell ourselves matter because they are what define us.

I’m a failure.

I’m not good enough.

I’m broken.

I’m unloveable.

According to every metric I ever (previously) valued, I have failed — categorically, and unreservedly.

By rights, my obituary should read “should’ve been”.

I am young and stupid and driven.

I will make mistakes — and I will learn from them.

What feels like many moons ago, but was actually just under two years ago (how time flies!), I was writing my personal statement.

Below are some slightly-pretentious-but-eternally-poignant snippets from a bygone era:

As both a term and a discipline, not only does English encompass more than literature, but language itself — by assimilating ourselves within our own discourse, we serve in effect to “belong” to our own creation.

I love words not for what they are, but for what they can be; their power is not “found”, but actively cultivated.

It is this dichotomy that fascinates me: if freedom is merely a metaphor for a concept we have created, its significance must lie not in what it is, but what it represents.

By stating that ‘man is condemned to be free’, Sartre suggests that to be “condemned” to freedom negates its value. By implication, our understanding is rooted in contradiction: whilst even to recognise one’s freedom requires its definition, it is only in having experienced its absence that I am able to quantify — and therefore truly appreciate — its value.

As the sum of our experiences, the past procures meaning only in memory; if it has a purpose, this must lie in learning from ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’.

If, as O’Brien declares in “1984”, ‘he who controls the past, controls the future’, then I must reframe my perception of the past in order to build myself a brighter future.

We are reader, writer, critic; thinker, speaker, listener; friend, foe, lover: these labels do not constrict, but comprise.

As Offred states in “The Handmaid’s Tale”, ‘context is all’: it is only if we cannot be “all” that we are to all intents and purposes “none”.

As a published writer, this duality underpins my own identity; it is by welding language to my will that I find my own means of catharsis.

My ability to appreciate texts in a capacity that extends above and beyond the academic only bolsters my desire to deconstruct the frontiers of my own understanding. A performance, in being made for an audience, is contrived by necessity; yet that the viewer occupies as “active” a role as that of the participant/s suggests that they are more akin to classical chorus than observer. By bridging the private and personal of the written word with the theatrical, we subvert it; to fuse “reality” with craft renders any differentiation meaningless — a premise that in turn allows us to surpass our own limitations.

The only true matter of contention is, as always, wholly subjective: the question of whether or not manipulating the work attenuates its value as a piece of art.

I am not a failure, because I refuse to be.

I will never fail myself.

I am enough.

I am loved.

That is enough.

Breathe.