Everybody has a story: the thoughts running through your mind as you go about your day; the way that you relive your memories; for many, the colours, images, or music you feel as you experience or remember your world. We are all constantly telling ourselves our own story, whether we imagine ourselves to be our protagonist or not, and whether our lives are a comedy or a tragedy. Many of us do not realize this truth on our own, and another common misconception is that experiences we share with others can be experienced in the same way. What is the story you tell yourself?
The truth is that, no matter how much any number of us may have in common, no two of us has the exact same story. It is a simple matter of perspective. Imagine that two people are sitting across from one another at a table, and on that table is a blank piece of paper and a pen. Person A takes the pen, and draws a large “M” on the piece of paper. Person A can sit back and admire their “M;” meanwhile, Person B sees a “W” from their perspective.
While a simple teaching tool, this imaginary activity demonstrates the larger truth that every single shared experience will be experienced from each involved person’s individual perspective. Our opinions, how observant we are, our values, our past experiences, and probably many thousands of other factors all influence our metaphorical “angle” or perspective. No two people are exactly the same, so no two perspectives can be exactly the same, even if they seem to be extremely similar.
The more that we learn about perspective-taking, the more complex it becomes. After all, where do our opinions come from? How do we develop habits of observation, and how do we decide what to focus on? Where do our values come from?
Our perspectives can be heavily influenced, with or without our knowledge, by every aspect of our identities and every experience we have. Societal expectations and unwritten rules that trickle into our consciousness through media and advertising, for example, can have an enormous impact on how we form our perspectives. Imagine a newly engaged couple’s differing perspectives on the same diamond engagement ring: the giver may believe it to be beautiful and appropriately valuable, having grown up with a certain socioeconomic status and having developed their own particular taste; the receiver is disappointed that the ring was not more expensive and is feeling, on some level, that this is a reflection of their worth to their partner. Neither partner realizes that the social rules around this particular gift have been directly and indirectly prescribed by effective marketing campaigns, and that these same advertisers benefit greatly by tying the price tag of a ring to a person’s worth. Decades of marketing have normalized the importance of expensive diamond engagement rings to the point that few consumers are aware that diamonds are intrinsically worthless, that these companies have an overabundance of them and artificially inflate costs, and that diamonds are ultimately worth exactly how much we emotionally invest in them.
Another helpful imaginary activity is to picture a classroom full of students who are asked to throw rolled up pieces of paper into a garbage bin at the front of the room. Students in the front row will likely accomplish this easily, while students in the back row may have a much more difficult time. This activity demonstrates social privilege in that the students in the front row may not have any idea that they have a significant advantage if they do not look behind them; all they see in front of them is their goal, unimpeded by obstacles or any great distance. They will have to actively work to try to broaden their perspective by looking around them and listening to the stories of the experiences of others if they are to begin to understand their own privilege.
This metaphor can be applied to most aspects of a person’s identity, and privilege/advantages compound to narrow a person’s perspective when they carry several aspects of social privilege, making it that much more of a challenge for them to broaden their perspectives. If we imagine our classroom stretching to the length of a football field, and the rows of students becoming staggered instead of uniform based on each student’s individual privilege, then the student who is closest to their goal will have a very difficult time seeing the farthest student with any clarity. To make our example practical: the “goal” is a position of stable employment; a student near the back of the field is a black transwoman who grew up dealing with chronic illness, in poverty, and unable to access post-secondary education; a student near the front is a healthy, white, heterosexual and cisgender (meaning that he identifies with the gender he was assigned at birth) man, who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood and was expected by his family to pursue post-secondary education. The woman near the back deals with compounded racism, transphobia, sexism, ableism (or society favouring able-bodied and neurotypical people), and classism, along with specific discrimination that comes in North American society with the interactions of each; for example, a transwoman will face transphobia, sexism, and the unique discrimination toward the two aspects of her identity combined that neither transmen nor cisgender women will ever face.
The man may have hardships and face obstacles in achieving his goal, but none of these obstacles will ever be because of his race, gender, or socioeconomic background. To fit with our metaphor, we can imagine that the seats of the football stadium are full of people hurling objects at the participants trying to reach their goal. Any of them are equally as likely as the others to have their ability to reach their goal impeded by being hit by these objects, which are completely unrelated to their privilege, like relationship difficulties, loss, grief, etc.; but the woman near the back and the man near the front will face these obstacles from their completely different positions, and will still be impacted by their positions and the discrimination (or lack thereof) that comes along with their positions in this society.
This all can be very difficult to learn. We humans tend to grow up looking in front of us until someone shows us that we need to look behind us. Someone between the man and woman on the field, say a white, gay, cisgender woman, will usually be able to clearly see the advantage of the man ahead of her without thinking to consider how far ahead she may be of the people even further back. Learning to accept how privileged we are as individuals, no matter how tragic our stories have been and no matter how much we have had to overcome, is key in understanding perspective. Knowing that we are privileged compared to others does not need to cheapen what we have achieved; we can learn to acknowledge how our society hands out more privilege to some of us than others, broaden our perspectives, listen to the voices that are so often silenced, and use our privilege for good by supporting people who need it, all while finding meaning in our own growth and achievements.
While we can track a great deal of how our perspectives are formed, there are still aspects that cannot be accounted for by our position in society or our life experiences. Identical twins, having the exact same genetic potential (influencing such factors as IQ, weight, or likelihood of developing substance addictions), raised in the exact same environment, with the exact same values, and with a life full of shared past experiences will still be two entirely different people with different opinions and perspectives. No matter how many factors in how we form our perspectives are unknown to us or even beyond our control, we ultimately have agency in creating our own stories for ourselves. This incredible truth brings so much hope to people when they understand it; rather than focusing on aspects of their life that they cannot change, or waiting for slow changes to come that will improve their quality of life, they can take action immediately to change everything about how they interact with the world around them by changing the way they tell their stories.
Some of these changes are simple, and just take some practice to implement, like a slight change of language in our ongoing story-telling. For example, many people will talk to themselves about the choices they make in their day by deciding if they “should” or “shouldn’t” have made each choice. “I should’ve said something like…” or, “I shouldn’t have done that,” or, “I should do better.” While many of these thoughts are right for a lot of people, they carry with them inherent judgement and divide every little action a person does into one of two categories: good/bad, good enough/not good enough, approved/not, etc. Changing your “shoulds” into “helpful/unhelpful” or “healthy/unhealthy” suddenly changes these little judgements by putting them on a spectrum instead of into categories, and takes any moral judgments out of it entirely.
For example, a person has eaten a bowl of ice cream. Logically, there is not any moral value to eating a bowl of ice cream; why do they need to decide if they should have or should not have eaten it? They can instead acknowledge that ice cream is not particularly “healthy” in terms of nutritional value, and perhaps eating it (depending on the situation) was “unhelpful” because the action did not fit for them with something they are working on changing, like having a healthier diet or improving their impulse control. The important next step is to also look at the other side: perhaps it was “helpful” for their mood, or socially if they were with others eating ice cream, or to their ongoing journey with their diet because they allowed themselves to have a treat and can now continue with less of an “all or nothing” (and therefore not very realistic or long-term) approach. Perhaps it was “healthy” psychologically or emotionally because they did not follow up their action with a self-judgement, and are practicing accepting themselves as they are. Healthy/unhealthy and helpful/unhelpful are beautiful spectrums that acknowledge how our actions are rarely easy to categorize, and replacing your “shoulds” will get you started on telling yourself a gentler and kinder story about yourself.
Some changes are harder. When we have been telling ourselves a tragedy for many years, it takes some re-writing to change the genre. This can mean reliving painful memories in order to broaden our perspectives on those experiences and find meaning in them. This is something that all of us can do on our own, but it can be extremely helpful to see a professional for help; the tricky part of changing the parts of our story that contain trauma is that traumatic memories do not act the same as other memories.
When a person is traumatized by a single event, their brain in that moment will function differently than it normally does. Fight/flight/or freeze may be engaged, depending on how frightening or shocking the experience is, and that means that the brain ceases normal functioning in order to put all of its resources into keeping you alive. When a person is traumatized by an ongoing series of events over time, it is not quite as simple as the brain’s efficient process when facing a single event; instead, the brain deals with longer periods of high stress than it is designed to, and this impacts the person’s physical health and the way that they respond emotionally. In both cases, there will often later be gaps in clear memory, because the brain was not “recording” (for lack of a better word), it was busy fighting to take care of you. This is a very simplistic explanation of very complex processes, but it can be helpful in understanding ourselves after trauma.
Just because the brain is not “recording” in the way we are used to, it does not mean that we do not remember. Unlike most of our stories that we tell ourselves, which can easily be put into words and will usually be chronological, our trauma stories are more likely to be stored in our bodies and our senses. It can be difficult to order the events of these stories. They may be pieced together in our minds with flashes of pictures, scents, and sounds. We might clearly remember what we had for lunch that day and how it tasted, but not important details like names, times, or places that make up the setting of our stories. We might have the same lunch again at some point in or lives and suddenly find ourselves transported back in time to relive our trauma against our will; this is the sense memory awakening the experience stored in our bodies. It is not an uncommon phenomenon for people getting a massage to find themselves crying and not knowing why; our muscles remember, and can carry tension from trauma for years.
It is because of this almost foreign language of trauma memories stored in our bodies and in our senses that we are not always able to re-write these parts of our stories on our own without hurting ourselves. When we try, we have to be aware that we are navigating unknown—and, to some extent, unknowable—systems, and we may be surprised by what we find. However, with or without professional support and no matter how painful some parts may be, it is possible to re-write these parts of our stories from new perspectives.
How you need to shift your story-telling perspective may depend on your current story. If your story is about someone who makes mistakes, you need to tell a story about someone who makes choices for a reason at the time they make them, whether or not the choices they make have the outcomes that they expect, and who learns from each choice. If your story is about someone who suffers, and includes tragedy after tragedy, you need to tell a story about someone with endurance who is strong, grows in adversity, and has a meaningful future.
If this resonates with you, I encourage you to ask yourself these two questions:
- What is my story about?
- What do I want my story to be about?
As you are getting started, question #2 can be difficult to answer if you do not feel like you are capable of being the protagonist in a story that you like. It can help, at first, to separate yourself from all of this a little bit by pretending that you are writing a story about someone else with your experiences, or that someone else who loves/admires you is writing your story. If you are open to it, you will eventually learn the truth that we are each capable of authentically being who we want to be.
The purpose of all of this is not just to broaden our perspectives and learn more about ourselves. Because we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves, and because we all have the immediate power to begin to change how we tell ourselves our stories, we all have the power to begin to see meaning in our stories where we have not before. You may have heard people say, “everything happens for a reason.” This is never inherently true. The truth is that everything that happens can have meaning, and we decide whether or not it does and what that meaning is for us.
Everybody has a story: it is up to each one of us how we decide to tell our stories, and how much meaning we give them.