constructing a narrative to explain that something. Losing your job doesn’t
just suck; you’ve constructed an entire narrative around it: Your asshole boss
wronged you after years of loyalty! You gave yourself to that company! And
what did you get in return?
Our narratives are sticky, clinging to our minds and hanging onto our
identities like tight, wet clothes. We carry them around with us and define
ourselves by them. We trade narratives with others, looking for people whose
narratives match our own. We call these people friends, allies, good people.
And those who carry narratives that contradict our own? We call them evil.
Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a)
something or someone’s value and (b) whether that something/someone
deserves that value. All narratives are constructed in this way:
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Every book, myth, fable, history—all human meaning that’s
communicated and remembered is merely the daisy-chaining of these little
value-laden narratives, one after the other, from now until eternity.^31
These narratives we invent for ourselves around what’s important and
what’s not, what is deserving and what is not—these stories stick with us and
define us, they determine how we fit ourselves into the world and with each
other. They determine how we feel about ourselves—whether we deserve a
good life or not, whether we deserve to be loved or not, whether we deserve
success or not—and they define what we know and understand about
ourselves.
This network of value-based narratives is our identity. When you think to
yourself, I’m a pretty bad-ass boat captain, har-de-har, that is a narrative
you’ve constructed to define yourself and to know yourself. It’s a component
of your walking, talking self that you introduce to others and plaster all over
your Facebook page. You captain boats, and you do it damn well, and
therefore you deserve good things.
But here’s the funny thing: when you adopt these little narratives as your
identity, you protect them and react emotionally to them as though they were
an inherent part of you. The same way that getting punched will cause a
violent emotional reaction, someone coming up and saying you’re a shitty
boat captain will produce a similarly negative emotional reaction, because we
react to protect the metaphysical body just as we protect the physical.