No Matter How Much You Lose, You'll Always Have Your Story

The necessary consolation of narrative that we all carry with us

Palisades Fire (54257383638).jpg

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Hours before the fires started this week, I had lunch with a friend who told me the harrowing story of losing the love of her life to mental illness. The details belong to her, and I don’t need to reveal them here, but as we sat with her pain, I reminded her that she’s lucky to be a writer.

She’d said something to the effect of, “I just want to erase it all,” and my alarm went off. Because most efforts to erase grief and sorrow only produce different and worse kinds of pain.

“That experience belongs to you,” I told her. “It’s an important part of your story, and you can use it.”

On a superficial level, I meant that, for writers, all experience is a gift. Even the gravest tragedy is material that can be converted into work, purpose, meaning, and understanding— often in that order.

But the more important and universal core of my advice reflects something I learned long ago when writing Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders. I credit the psychologist Sheila Reindl, author of the terrific book Sensing the Self, who advised me to liken the experience of eating disorders to a domineering aunt who rules the whole house during the height of trauma but whose realm shrinks during recovery to a small closet off the kitchen. “You’d never want her to disappear completely,” Sheila said, “because then you’d lose an important part of your own life story. You’d lose a critical piece of your self.”

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Self as story

Sheila was pointing me toward the essential role that autobiographical storytelling plays in mental health. As neurobiologist Dan Siegel writes in The Mindful Brain:

Our personal identities are often revealed in our narrative themes… Remembering with the focus of deepening an understanding of past events and embracing a fuller way in which the painful sensations of the memories can be more fully tolerated and then resolved is how narrative integration can help.

Basically, our identity consists of the stories we remember and tell about ourselves. In our minds, we are who these stories say we are. We make sense of our lives by stacking and restacking, organizing and linking these stories in patterns that form something approximating a full picture.

I’m not saying this picture is accurate. Few, if any, of us are so acutely and honestly self-aware that we see the whole truth and nothing but the truth about our lives. But the more stories that we intentionally bury or deny, the more incomplete and distorted the picture will become. And that can mislead others, warping relationships and opportunities until we no longer feel we’re authentically leading our own lives. What we lose then is a sense of our own integrity.

At the same time, the autobiographical picture we paint with our narratives is never fixed or finished. And that’s liberating. Storytelling gives us the never-ending means of making new meaning of our lives, so we can understand our way into an ever more cohesive, coherent, and consoling future. The more honest, brave, and curious we are about our story, with all its pain and nasty aunts, the better.

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Now, the fires

After lunch, the Palisades and Eaton Fires exploded. Neither my friend nor I lived in evacuation zones, but we were close enough that she decided to leave town anyway. So did one of my sons across town. My other son monitored the Woodley Fire, just four blocks from his house, until it was “knocked down” the following day. We all packed go-bags and downloaded Watch Duty and Genasys —fire tracking and emergency warning apps that I’d never heard of until now.

And when we weren’t preparing to evacuate ourselves, we were tracing the stories of our friends. My husband’s ex lost her home of fifty years in the early morning hours of the Palisades fire. She knew because the fire alarm in the house rang her cell phone; half an hour later the fire department ran out of water in her neighborhood. She’d evacuated to the parents of friends. Tomorrow she’s coming to stay with us until she can find a place to rent for the next few months. But she’s lucky because she has insurance and legal and financial resources.

A couple my son knows had just moved last month from a house in a safe zone to Altadena. He’s an artist. They’re renters. They have a year-old baby. They lost everything except each other.

Between us, our family probably knows a dozen other families whose homes have burned to the ground since Wednesday, and the fires aren’t finished with us yet. What’s more, these disasters are gunning for everyone on the planet now that the climate crisis is in full swing. Those who escape unscathed are only living in the eye of the storm.

For that matter alone, every one of these stories matters. They are shaping our lives collectively. They are shaping us, even if we’re absorbing them from a safe distance. Even if we tell ourselves we’re not affected, we are. And that’s not just because of the pity or compassion we feel, or the vicarious panic, either.

Here in LA this week, these stories are literally the air that we breathe, the skies we monitor for smoke and super scooper tankers, the barricaded roads we cannot take and the emergency alerts that bark at us every few minutes from our phones. They are also the information and advice we share, the supplies we collect for emergency shelters, the reassurances we send to worried friends far afield, the people we take in because they have nowhere else to go. Our stories are what we do, what we observe, what we feel, and how we make sense of this unprecedented upheaval, for better or for worse. They are the raw material of our lives.

We all wish this catastrophe had never happened. We’d erase it if we could magically turn back time and restore the planet to its healthy, normal climate. But we can’t. This new reality of loss is part of us now. It’s a story that every one of us shares. And how we knit this story together into the future is going to determine what it says about us. What we’re capable of understanding. And who we truly are.

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