Day 349 - The Stories We Tell (Part One)

This all started because I called Mom up the other day to ask her when we got our very first Christmas tree. Mennonites celebrate the "Christ" in Christmas, but only that. So, most of them never put up a pagan Christmas tree or sing along to "Santa Baby" on the radio.

It crossed my mind that I didn't know when we first decided to put up a tree. Nor did I know whether the decision was a big deal for my parents. So I called to ask her.

Well, as my mom and I often do, we wandered to talking about other holiday memories. Thanksgiving has always been one of the worst of the painful family celebrations we have nauseatingly sweated through, if only because it lacks the momentary euphoric distraction of gifts.
(Family pictures were the worst.)
One Thanksgiving was particularly awful.
To the point that I forgot it was Thanksgiving.
That my dad was not arrested...or handcuffed.
That Mom left us with him that night and not the other way around.
Or even that I was mortified because one of the police officers who responded to the 911 call was someone that I knew from school.

Mom is telling me all of this and before I know it, she and I are deep in the story of her memories, of Delbert's forearm pinning her throat to the wall, that we had just had family pictures three weeks ago and now she was going to be dead and Delbert in jail. She told me where each of us kids were in the room and how we each reacted to the disaster unraveling before our eyes. That she didn't press charges. That she left us with him that night to sleep elsewhere, even though we cried and begged her to stay. The next day she came home and fixed a full Thanksgiving meal.

But the only thing I remember for myself is crying on the basement stairs in sheer panic when all the yelling was happening. Then nothing until all of us were sitting around the table the next day and my dad mumbled the words 'I'm sorry.'

Words that I don't remember him ever saying again. Ever or before. We were so unfamiliar with these words coming from him that we barely even let him apologize before we all rushed in with our Christian training of unconditional love and forgiveness. We preferred to just choke down our confusion and anxiety, along with creamy mashed potatoes, past the bitter bruising in all of our throats, rather than question what 'I'm sorry' should look like.

I was probably 14 years old when this happened. And I don't remember it.

What I thought I remembered was a distortion of my memories of the story as I probably heard it told and retold in the coming days and weeks and months and years. Somehow my 14 year old brain mixed up fact and fiction and my memory evolved into something else entirely.

So over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about memories and how unreliable they are. It's very tricky trying to write a memoir and then find out that you remembered the most vivid stories quite wrong. There are false memories that we believe happened but never really did, and then there are all those memories that we just overlook until someone prompts us to look a little harder. It makes me wonder...

How do memories form?

There are plenty of YouTube videos and Ted Talks to keep you endlessly entertained about the mysteries of the brain and how it creates, stores, and accesses memories. But I selected just this one short video to offer a visual explanation. 

Many scientists believe that memories are built through a three-step process of encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. 

• Encoding is how we create the memory. We associate pieces of information with one another and form a bond, even if it is a completely arbitrary relationship.

• Next, we consolidate and organize our memories. Childhood, graduation, college, dating, having babies, buying a new house, retirement, whatever.

• And third, a memory can only exist when we actually remember it.  We have to recall it for the memory to be born into existence. Not only that, but the more frequently we work to recall a memory, the more certain the memory becomes! This is the most important step of a memory and it seems incredibly significant to me with regard to the presumptuous act of writing a memoir.

If a tree falls in the forest, 

but no one is around to hear it, 

did it make a sound?

This philosophical question is meant to debate the concept of perception versus reality and if you think about it, isn't that similar to how we determine the validity of memories? However, I've been wondering about a different response to this question that may seem completely unrelated to the actual event of a tree falling anywhere.

Depends on whether or not

someone told and retold the story

of a tree falling in the forest...

What I am getting at is this: The stories we tell over and over become the stories that we remember. What we actively remember is what becomes our memories. And what becomes our memories is what defines our sense of the past and who we are.

We do all of this merely with the stories we choose to tell.

We can create a memory simply by visiting a story again and again, even if the story is completely imaginary. Any book or film lover would be forced to agree. The brain does not know and doesn't care about whether the story is real or imaginary. The brain simply looks for patterns and associations and meaning in the stories. And when the brain finds it, the brain believes it.

Think about the stories of your life.

This is how we are convinced of evolution.

Or Moses parting the Red Sea.

Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the Catholic Saints.

This is how we remember our weddings. 

Or the day our children were born.

9/11, national holidays, the death of a friend.

This is how we define our lives.

Our sense of self and our relationships.

What is love, fear, anger, doubt, and shame.

Every story that you listened to and talked about and told to others....

...you chose these stories... 

...from which your memories would grow like vines up over the walls of your house of self. 

Unfortunately, our western culture does not really emphasize the responsibility of storytelling from one generation to the next. Sure, we tell stories, sing songs, write books, and make movies, but we usually do this only to preserve history, entertain imagination, or enforce philosophies. We rarely seem to teach the power of storytelling, the art of storytelling, and the significance of storytelling. So much of humanity seems so driven by absolutes that I don't think we fully realize the fluidity of truth and also that these truths are usually only formed through stories.

What?
80% of our beliefs are developed through stories??
Ok, yes, I admit that I completely made up the number of 80%, but...
Think about it...
The average lifespan today is maybe 75 years.

In 75 years, 

how much of what you learn as fact 

is something that you 

actually experienced for yourself?? 

We don't travel to see all nine planets and then decide based on our experience that one is not really a planet. We don't sail the ocean blue to follow Columbus' route to America and know for ourselves that the earth is round. We didn't know our parents when they were children and we barely knew them when we were children. Even the things that we are there for, we don't always have an awareness to know what is happening without our mother recounting the day of our birth or our first lost tooth or that awful Thanksgiving when you were 14. This is the power of the stories we tell...

But what would happen if we decided to tell different stories?

Is it possible to rewrite the past?

I think, in part, it could be.

History is not so set in stone
as we think it is.

All it takes is one story to change
what we remember and why.

We can choose to trim the vines
creeping over our house of self.

Or we can let our memories run wild
and ravage who we are.

Either way, we choose the stories we tell.

We choose what we remember.