the urge to create a narrative

on narrativizing vs. listening to the body

I used to believe I was unable to cry. In 2012, on the last night of church camp, when everyone else was falling to their knees, bawling their eyes out (iykyk), my tear ducts were as dry as a Southern California front lawn during a drought. It became my belief that I couldn’t cry because God had chosen me to be the shoulder to cry on. God wanted me to carry the pain of others, while bearing, quietly, the weight of my own. No pastor or family member or religious text had led me to believe this. It was a narrative I’d created all by myself. 

I’m really good at creating narratives. I’m good at finding a through-line, and putting two and two together. Sometimes, when Adam and I are watching a TV show, I’ll predict what’s going to happen at the end of the episode. When my prediction inevitably comes true, Adam will say, how did you know that was going to happen? And I’ll say, it was so obvious. 

Sometimes I think I’m this way because I’m a writer and other times I think it’s because I’m a girl. Most women have been creating stories for the majority of their lives. Playing house. Playing with dolls. Playing dress up. Storytelling, I think, is inherently feminine.

But even that^ was me creating a narrative. By assigning some quasi-sociological insight as the reasoning behind why I create narratives, I’m essentially making a character of myself.

In school, we’re taught to give characters backstories. Some teachers will have you write out everything you know about a character, from what she eats for breakfast to what the inside of her car smells like. Often there is a singular event (or trauma) that happened to the character in the past that affects how she moves throughout the story. It’s either the thing she’s running towards or running away from or running towards and away from at the same time. It’s advised that even if the entirety of the character’s backstory is not fully revealed, a certain amount should be incorporated into the story. This helps the reader have empathy for the character. Or at the very least, to understand her.

There are many examples of this kind of storytelling that I could point you towards. What comes to mind most readily for me is the main character in a novella called Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, recommended to me by my friend

Loré Yessuff

. Lucy is a 19-year-old girl from the West Indies who moves to the US to work as an au pair for a rich white family. Bits and pieces of Lucy’s old life in the Caribbean are interspersed throughout the book, contrasting the sharp edges of the home she’s chosen against the lush warmth of the place she came from. Eventually, Lucy’s complicated relationship with her mother is revealed. It’s their relationship, and Lucy’s inevitable replication of her mother’s nature that Lucy is running away from, but also, in so many ways, running towards.

an excerpt from Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

Some authors, however, reject this mode of characterization in storytelling. One example you’ve probably heard of is the main character in The Guest by Emma Cline. The book follows a 22-year-old Alex as she floats from rich person’s house to rich person’s house on Long Island over the course of five days. Alex makes a lot of questionable decisions (breaking into houses, seducing a teenage boy, crashing her ex’s Labor Day party) that leave you wondering, Why would a person do this? Surely, something must have gone wrong in her childhood. While Cline briefly alludes to a past and a family that Alex simply cannot return to, the details of this past life are never revealed. Cline, as the writer, knows the backstory. But we as readers are forced to focus, instead, on Alex’s circumstances. Cline talks a bit about empathizing with characters in a conversation with artist Louise Bonnet on Interview Mag:

BONNET: To be able to write about somebody, you have to empathize with them. I always thought that was funny, that you could empathize with someone and they go in such a terrible direction, and you do. But it must take a toll?

CLINE: I guess I don’t feel that it takes a toll, that’s not how I experience it. I can kind of understand, in any situation, how that could be possible. I feel like as soon as you start being like, “I’m like this” or “I’m a good person” or “I’m X” and “you’re Y” or, “I would never do that because I’m like this,” the stories you tell yourself about who are you are are actually pretty false. We are so dependent on circumstance. It’s so much easier and convenient to ascribe this morality, but I kind of accept that we all have the capacity for a lot of weird stuff.

When it comes to reading and writing, I’m admittedly much more fond of the former approach to characters and backstory. Like Lucy, I’m always asking, when thinking about people real and fictional: “How do you get to be that way?” But when it comes to real life, I agree with Cline in that often the stories we fabricate about ourselves are just that: fabricated.

In the example I shared earlier, the story I told myself about why I was unable to cry was a form of self-soothing. That story aligned with what was my worldview at the time. It took me from a place of feeling alone, and maybe even un-holy, to a place of spiritual elevation. It allowed me to tell myself, My lack of tears is not not for lack of connection to God, but rather a sign that I’m closer to God than anyone else here.

Yikes.

Even today, the narratives I create about myself and my life have a similar self-serving bent. When I’m feeling down, I make myself the hero. When I can’t make myself the hero, I make myself the victim. I make other people into characters too, casting roles in a play they never auditioned for.

Creating a narrative often feels more comfortable than allowing a negative emotion to exist in my body, untethered to some sort of storyline. Feelings are nebulous. A story gives me something seemly concrete to hold on to.

Growing up in Evangelicalism, there was always a negative connotation associated with earthly bodies. There was a huge focus on the salvation of the soul, but always at the cost of denying the “flesh.” As I’ve gone through the process of reconstructing my spiritual beliefs, I’ve become more and more focused on my body. I’ve begun to notice things like the hollowness in my throat and the pain in my chest when I’m anxious. Last year, I began pelvic floor physical therapy, which has helped me become more aware of the ways in which I hold tension in different parts of my body throughout the day. I’m learning how to tend to myself in these moments of discomfort. More often than not the medicine is taking a deep breath. Or just sitting with and noticing the sensation.

My body may have been trying to tell me something when I was 15-years-old and unable to cry at church camp. Or maybe not. Either way, creating a narrative about what was happening to me was how I pushed through the loneliness of that moment. I don’t blame myself for that. But I do wonder if God gave us bodies and sensations to help us understand ourselves.

I’ll probably be creating narratives for the rest of my life. In the storytelling way and the everyday life way. But I want to be more suspicious of the stories I tell myself about myself. I want to pay attention to when I’m creating a narrative in lieu of stretching my hips, or laying down, or hugging a soft pillow close to my chest.

End of the Red Book by Jess Allen

I cry all the time now, by the way. Not all the time, but enough to notice it. I cried yesterday watching a documentary. A few days before that, I cried waking up from a dream about my grandmother. I don’t remember when I began to be able to cry. I don’t know what flipped the switch.

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