Hi(story)

The stories that structure our lives are the inheritance of a history that does not belong to us. From the time we are very little we are engulfed in a language that is not our own, selected on our behalf, and imparted to us without our say in the matter. Days, months, and years go by and before we know it our heads contain a collection of letters, nouns, verbs, sentences, stories, and a nascent narrative, expressive as well as constitutive of our experience of the world. This is part of the power of language: not only that it describes or gives vent to the multitudinous meanderings of the mind, but also that it is structural, subtly shaping and formatively effecting every ounce of our experience. Ideas are never just ideas, as the British journalist Peter Howard once observed, and the same is true of language. Words have legs. Words do things. Beautiful, destructive, definitive things. Including framing our very perception of reality and the meanings we associate with it. The hi(story) we inherit from those rearing us is especially definitive of “our” experience, with quotation marks added here necessarily, as the experience is very much not our own, not originally, only secondarily, a hand-me-down such that all of “our” experience is inextricably filtered, translated, and transmuted through the rubric of the narratives of others, washing over us over the years, not merely instilling but also installing us. “I” am born, raised, and only ever become a thoroughly entangled entity erroneously called an individual. And still the world spins on, and all of us with it, casually assuming identities to be innocently and intimately our own.

Does it matter, that we live delusionally? That depends on who you ask. But perhaps one of the benefits of choosing to live with slightly less of this delusion is the great gift of ego dissolution. By gently holding in mind the bequeathed hi(stories) of the self, we might come to see more clearly, accept and even celebrate, how we are greater than the things we tell ourselves. We are also less than the things we tell ourselves. Indeed, more accurately, we are other; other than we know ourselves to be, and other than the “I” we assume ourselves to be, and so frequently overidentify with to our own consternation. I am not the stories I tell myself. No matter how terrific or traumatic. They are not even mine. The hi(storied) nature of the self is largely an illusion, one we have come to live with and uncritically placed our faith in, a linguistic fiction we cannot seem to escape yet fully worth exposing, jesting and jeering, and taking a lot less seriously than we tend to, thereby effacing an ego that was never really there to begin with.