The stories we tell ourselves

We think we have such a good idea of what is real. I’m not so sure that’s even true most of the time.

We basically get around telling stories to each others, and ourselves. Generally, we cast ourselves as eminently reasonable heroes, who move from situation to situation acting perfectly. But how can that be true, when the people we paint as the villains think that they’re the heroes too? We have disputes with people, and we find explanations for why we must be right, and they must be wrong.

These disputes happen in all kinds of situations. In Friends, there’s a dispute on whether two of the characters were on a break. One of the characters says that they had broken up, so he was justified in sleeping with someone else. The other says that they had simply had a fight, so the other character had cheated on her. This dispute didn’t just occur in the fictional world, it also became a point of contention for fans.

We don’t always just have different opinions. I had a dispute with someone, and we figured out that we seemed to be working off fundamentally different facts. Where do you go from there? It wasn’t even like this was something we’d only learned about through other people, we were eyewitnesses to what we were arguing about. How did we have such a different version of events? If our ideas of reality are constructed, not recorded, how can we ever figure out what the truth is?

I think with a clear mind and a willingness to face the truth, we can make our perceptions better align with reality. In disputes, if both parties have that as our primary goal, I think they could find a way to assess where their version of events was accurate. I think it can be hard for all of us to stop painting ourselves as perfect heroes, but we need to give up that defence sometimes so that we can act in accordance with who we really are.