Joan Didion famously said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We long for comprehensible chronicles, stories that pass through predictable patterns: inciting incident, rising action, climax, resolution. We desire for the disorder of our lives to tidily arrange itself in a sequence of meaningful events.
But the messiness of life doesn’t follow the neat narrative arc we learned in language arts class. Stories are fabrications: they’re crafted and compressed. Stories emphasize certain storylines while relegating others to the background. They exaggerate for dramatic effect.
Stories operate, as philosopher Alain de Botton so elegantly expressed, by a “process of simplification or selection.” When someone tells a story about a wild night out in Spain, they don’t include all the maddeningly mundane details—the way the orange summer sun set over the Mediterranean, the 35 euro cab ride, the six different outfits they tried on before settling on gold earrings and a classic off-the-shoulder dress, how their friend was 45 minutes late to the pregame, how a random guy spilled beer on their brand new outfit. They only include what’s pertinent to the narrative: the overflowing tequila shots, the sweat and strobe lights, the suave man who asked them to ride his motorcycle, the bachelor pad they found themselves in at the end of the night. The storyteller conveniently leaves out anything that digresses from the central storyline.
Stories are almost always limited to one perspective. Take The Great Gatsby. From the perspective of enduring dreamer and eternally romantic Gatsby, Daisy is his long lost love, a woman worth amassing millions of dollars and throwing countless lavish parties. But if we were to look from Daisy’s perspective, we’d hear an entirely different story. She might admit to being initially attracted to Gatsby’s extravagant wealth, but she’d ultimately decide his humble origins made him unworthy. She’d prefer to retreat to her realm of carelessness and maintain her high social standing with her husband Tom than marry an undignified farmer’s son and common bootlegger. For Gatsby, their relationship is an epic romance laden with villains and damsels-in-distress and knights-in-shining-armor; for Daisy, it’s an inconsequential footnote to her life’s larger story, a tangential subplot with a disposable side character.
In his consoling Something in the Woods Loves You, poet Jarod Anderson examines how the stories we tell impact how we see ourselves, our lives and each other. Bound in the dark of depression and detained by the limitations of his own distorted perspective, Anderson buys three bird feeders in hopes that reconnecting with nature will lift the melancholy gray clouds from his despairing mood. At the bird feeder store, he’s warned about pests like squirrels. The story is clear: squirrels are pests to be kept out.
As he watches the birds flock to his bird feeder, Anderson begins to judge the narrative of his life. Before he quit his job in university administration, his life seemed to be a series of comprehensible events that culminated in a larger meaning. He was miserable sure, but at least his life had structure and seemed to be moving toward something.
Without a job, he finds himself in an entirely different story. His life is no longer a movie with a getting-your-life-together montage of him studying for his master’s degree or climbing the corporate ladder at university— it’s an experimental student film without a coherent plot line. The protagonist? A pathetic unemployed loser who watches birds in his backyard because he has nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning.
His life is a tragic anti-climax, a pitiful story that isn’t worth telling:
“There I was in my quiet house, wounded and uncertain, watching cardinals and chickadees come and go. My new identity. An unemployed bird benefactor. A cunning opponent of starlings and squirrels. A guy who saw a heron and bought pricey bird feeders.
Beyond questions of identity, a key unknown paced like a caged bear on the periphery of my thoughts.
Was it enough?
Was I finding reasons to keep stringing days together?
Was this what I turned away from my career to do?
Was I healing?
We understand our world and ourselves through stories.
Conflict.
Character growth.
Protagonists and antagonists.
[…]
Watching the squirrels in the maple tree, in the deep winter of my pain, these realizations were taking shape. Yet, even when I clawed my way back to the present moment, shame was not toothless. With the identity-affirming structure of my job lost, one question arose again and again.
Who is it I’m trying to save?
A failure.
A lazy freeloader who is failing to appreciate even the immense privilege of having the time and space to seek healing.
A poor example of a man, overly sensitive, crying at nothing.
A misfit who was born into the wrong world.
A coward too ineffectual to cast aside a life that is clearly beyond repair.
None of these identities felt worth the effort of breaking free of pain and risking the disappointment of another failed reach for healing.
I saw a reflection of myself in the window. A pale, bearded wraith in worn-out sweatpants. Sunken eyes and a haunted expression. A person who looked like he had every reason to be sad and ashamed. The villain of the story.”
Depression warps and narrows our perspective. Bound hand and foot and the bottom of depression’s well, we cast ourselves as antagonists unworthy of redemption. We’re not valiant knights but monstrous dragons who must be slayed so the hero and princess can live happily ever after and prance into the sunset.
From this merciless viewpoint, our lives are pathetic, pointless, insignificant. But—Anderson whimsically suggests—it’s possible to look at things from a different perspective:
“Perhaps it’s worth imagining ourselves from the perspective of squirrels.
How brave we are to walk boldly across the ground in full view of hawks and foxes. How impossibly giant. How remarkably long-lived. How magnificent it must feel to be too heavy to be carried off by grasping talons and beating wings.
We can all imagine the biting words of make-believe critics. So, we can also imagine the accolades of admiring squirrels. We are, after all, storytellers. Make sure that some of the stories you tell yourself are kind.”
The prevailing story is squirrels are “purposeless pests.” They invade your chimney, chew electric wires, ignite house fires, dig up bulbs in your garden. They’re menacing intruders, pestilent transmitters of disease, noisy nuisances.
But they’re also silly entertainers who charm with their bushy tales and mischievous antics. Squirrels spread seeds and plant nuts that grow into mighty oak trees. They’re originators of entire forests.
Ultimately, there is no “truth”—only perception. There is never only one “correct” story—there are as many stories as there are mushrooms in a redwood forest. So—Anderson asks—why not tell ourselves kinder stories and challenge dominant narratives?
As he writes:
“Perhaps gray squirrels are pests if you spent $30 on birdseed in the hopes of an interrupted month of song bird visits, but in the broader ecological sense they are absolutely vital.
Stories. One story of squirrels casts them as birdseed thieves, as powerline chewers, as interrupters of dog walks and invaders of attics.
There are others to tell.”
For Anderson, squirrels are a comforting reminder of his own intrinsic worthiness:
“I understood how squirrels could be worthy representatives of nature. Their service to forests. Their hidden pathways through treetop halls of dappled sunlight and fluttering green. Their winter shelters clasped in a hundred maple palms.
I saw the vital, intrinsic worth of a squirrel as indistinguishable from the creature itself. A squirrel, any squirrel, felt like part of the overarching mystery and dignity of nature without distinguishing itself as an individual of particular merit.
I, on the other hand, had long felt that I had somehow started in a deficit and only immense work and achievement would bring my worth up to neutral, let alone the positive. A squirrel could just be a squirrel. I needed to be the hero of not just my story, but the collective story of the cultural values I was raised.
When I looked into my backyard, seeing a squirrel take an offered seed, my bruised mind trying to grasp any firm point in the weightless haze of my pain and uncertainty, I felt the tug of a wordless lesson in those creatures’ surety of place and purpose. I couldn’t conceive of a world where they were questioning if they deserved their food or their spot on the bough. I couldn’t imagine that the questioned whether their lives were adding up to something worth living, that they were doubting past leaps or the quality of their dreys.”
We can tell ourselves new stories, but we can also stop telling ourselves stories entirely. Gray squirrels don’t tell themselves stories about their own lives. Sugar maple trees don’t try to force the autumn sunlight that filters through their dappled leaves and the finch nest on their branches into a comprehensible plot with protagonists and antagonists. Herons don’t understand their existence in terms of central conflict and character development.
Rather than demand his life resemble a novel, Anderson realizes he can view each experience as a poem: beautiful, if fragmented. Life doesn’t have to be a movie with a continuous narrative; it can be a collage of singular moments:
“Shame often arises from a judgment of life’s project as a whole, unified work. I was well acquainted with shame and sadness as a child, but I also had a friend in nature, a friend that constantly reminded me that our lives do not require formal interrogation. That we don’t live as mathematical sums of events, successes and failures. Our lives exist in their realest form here, in this exact moment.”
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