on stories we tell ourselves
what is the moral of the story?
October has always felt like the end of the year for me. November and December always seem to exist as liminal, almost in-between months before the new year starts. It’s funny I say this, because my life’s canon events have been spread across November and December. It’s funny, really, and almost ironic, to realize that the most jarring, life-shattering moments often arrive during these transitional stretches, right at the cusp of something new. It’s as if the moment you prepare to step forward is when the ground shifts beneath your feet.
There is also something about the year-end that asks you to take all the experiences and memories and package them into neat little boxes with a bow on top. These experiences ask you to reminisce. They ask you to make sense of them. We are told it’s also important to express, interpret, and make sense of it all, as if there isn’t any joy in just experiencing things for what they are.
So before I wallow in the year-end blues, I wanted to revel in the month that was October. I also wanted to revel in the months that came before and understand and dissect the year that has been. It only makes sense, right? You take a walk down memory lane, reflect upon the year that was, and once you look enough, you find a list of learnings in the things you want to do more of and things you don’t want to do. A neat little blog that contains the year of memories, finishing off with a storybook ending. I did it last year, and I wanted to do it this year too.
Does every story come wrapped with a neat bow on top?
Because, I have always loved stories—telling them and listening to them. I find stories everywhere, in places, in people, in things, in the lacklustre and in the extraordinary. They live in the quiet spaces and in the riotous ones. But there’s this thing. This one thing that I can’t seem to wrap up, no matter how hard I try. The story I can’t seem to finish, because every time I reach for it, it slips from my grasp. Unraveling.
I wanted to take all the joy, the sadness, the anger, the confusion, the multitude of feelings and give them a name. I wanted to pin them down with a meaning. But maybe, in giving something a heading, body, and conclusion, I shrink it, box it in, reduce it. Memory is an unreliable narrator. It picks and chooses. It leaves things out, fills gaps with half-truths. It doesn’t care about neatness. It doesn’t care about wrapping things up.
And then I wonder—by forcing a narrative onto something, am I really understanding it, or am I just trying to control it? Stories, I think, can be a kind of safety net. They promise an end. A sense of closure. I always thought that every story came with a moral at the end. But sometimes, there’s no neatly packaged tale with a moral to offer by the end. Sometimes the things we experience don’t come with punchlines.
Rayne Fisher-Quann, in her essay, nailed it when she said: “This is the paradox of narrative: it is both existentially necessary and necessarily insufficient. We can’t escape the story (to think that we can is, in the end, another kind of story), but the story is also never enough.”
The unsettling truth
When I asked ChatGPT to roast me, I thought I was setting myself up for a silly response. Something light. A joke, a jibe. But then, this came:
Also, let's talk about that 5K you tried convincing your friends to run. A “healing journey”? Shriya, who hurt you? But honestly, even if you don’t end up running it, you’ll probably write a poignant essay about the emotional attempt, capturing the angst of ambition and the gentle art of not following through. Because let’s face it, sometimes the story is better than the sprint.
And there it was, the moment that stopped me in my tracks. (Haha, sorry). Is the story better than the sprint? Then it dawned upon me.
Sometimes the sprint is better than the story. Because if you chase the story, you might just miss the sprint.
I will not stop telling stories. But I will heed to Miss. Sontag and I will see more, hear more, and feel more and briefly forget the causation, correlation, and subtext. A poignant essay about the emotional attempt, capturing the angst of ambition and the gentle art of not following through can wait!
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