WE ARE THE STORIES WE TELL

Who is the “we” telling the story?

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion

But who is the we telling the story?

And what if the story I call “my life” is, at least partly, a fiction?

Perhaps life itself does not tell a story.

Birth happens.
Death happens.
Someone leaves.
Someone arrives.
We fall in love.
A disease appears.
A war begins.
A stranger changes our life.

There is no narrator standing above it all explaining why.

Life does not arrive with a beginning, middle and end. It does not necessarily offer fairness, logic or resolution.

It simply happens.

And then we become the narrator.

We select the moments we care to remember.

We forget others.

We connect one event to another.

We decide what mattered, what caused what, what it meant.

We gather the fragments and give them a sequence until, somehow, they begin to resemble a coherent story.

Eventually, we call that construction:

My life.
My story.
Her story.
Their story.

We become the narrator.

Or perhaps we accept a story that someone else has written for us.

“Each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ … this narrative is us, our identities.”
— Oliver Sacks

Perhaps storytelling is one of the ways we make the unbearable randomness of being alive feel understandable.

We need the story.

Without it, perhaps there is simply too much chaos.

But here comes the paradox that fascinates me:

We need stories to make sense of life.
And then we can mistake the story for life itself.

The story that helped us understand ourselves can quietly become the very thing that limits us.

This is who I am.

This always happens to me.

I am successful.

I am a failure.

I am the abandoned one.

I am the strong one.

These are my people.

Those are not.

We tell the story often enough and eventually it stops feeling like a story.

It becomes “truth.”

But is it?

Or is it simply one interpretation of thousands of moments that could have been remembered, connected and arranged differently?

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.”
— Terry Pratchett

There is the strange loop.

We create our stories.
And our stories create us.

Muriel Rukeyser wrote:

“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
— The Speed of Darkness

Perhaps not the universe itself.

But perhaps the human universe is.

We live inside stories about ourselves, our families, our nations, our gods, our successes, our failures, our enemies, our futures.

Some we create.

Some we inherit.

Some are given to us so early that we never even realise they are stories.

And so A HUMAN STORY begins to ask:

What stories are we living inside?

Who wrote them?

Are they true?

Do they unite us or divide us?

Do they wake us up or keep us asleep?

And can art disturb the story long enough for us to see differently?

Because perhaps that is something art can do.

Art does not always explain.

Sometimes it interrupts.

A painting can make us stop.

Music can reach somewhere before thought gets there.

An image can unsettle something we were certain we knew.

For a moment, the narrator goes quiet.

And perhaps something else becomes possible.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
— Hannah Arendt

Maybe art does not need to give us another story to believe.

Maybe it opens a crack in the one we already believe.

It tickles some suppressed innocence in us.

It asks us to look again.

To wonder again.

To remember.

To remember that perhaps we are larger than the stories we have been telling ourselves.

Larger than my story and your story.
Larger than the stories that separate us.

And perhaps, underneath all those stories, there is still something expansive, curious, connected—

waiting to wake up.