different-kinds-a-memoir

[different-kinds-a-memoir]

Thoughts on Truth

There’s a concept in personality psychology called narrative identity. More or less it says that we each creating a meaning out of our lives by weaving the random events that happen to us in a cohesive narrative. A narrative of redemption, a narrative that places each of us as the heroine of the story, regardless of how reliable or well-intentioned we may or may not be.

This concept of narrative identity is fascinating to me because we don’t fully understand what a narrative is, not on a psychological level. We know that the human brain is drawn to it. Memory depends on it. We can’t help but view events, time, our existence as cause and affect, a before and after. Some posit this is perhaps a function of neurobiology, maybe physics. We can’t concretely define a narrative but we know it when we hear it.

This concept of narrative is what I plan to dedicate my career to. I will soon be embarking on a Ph.D. studying how narrative, and the expression of narrative, shapes our concept of the self. But there is one problem with narrative in storytelling that I’ve never quite been able to reconcile with my scientific leanings: narrative is subjective. Narrative is dependent on the storyteller, on their experience and the lens through which they filter the world.

In this narrative, in the story I am about to tell of my life through these chapters, reality is filtered through my experience. The things that happened are the way I remember them, even though others are involved. The truth-seeker in me knows this is disingenuous. There may be words I don’t remember, actions I can’t recall. Things that may have hurt others worse than they hurt me. And I’m not giving others involved a chance to give their side.

But this is my narrative. These are the experiences and thoughts that have shaped the person I am and the person I will become. And for that reason I give myself grace.

I also wanted people to know through what specific lens I am writing from. I am a bisexual, polyamorous, white, college-educated, millennial, atheist-but-raised-Protestant, cisgender woman from California, and all the stories that follow reflect that.

Love is not a monolith, and the kinds of love we experience are not universal. But this is the story I lived. I have also altered names and identifying information altered to protect the privacy of those mentioned, but also to protect myself. There’s not a single person that knows the full details of every story I’m about to tell, except for me I suppose. And some people I’m still not able to tell the whole truth. So I’m willing to attempt to maintain my plausible deniability through my anonymity.

Thank you. And happy reading.

[different-kinds-a-memoir]

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Sensible Thing"

[different-kinds-a-memoir]

Table of Contents

Thoughts on Truth Epigraph Prologue: A Ghost Story

[different-kinds-a-memoir]

Prologue: A Ghost Story

“‘We could have had such a damned good time together.’ … ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It certainly is pretty to think so.’” - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

It's hard to know where to begin a love story. Do you start when the two of you first met? The meeting is always precipitated by something, a yearning, a searching. Maybe you start with your parents' marriage (or lack there of)—the first relationship that put on full display to you this tangled mess called love? What about their parents’ marriages? Who was it who first showed them how to love?

Ghost stories are easier to find the beginning. There’s always an awakening, a moment when the haunting begins. Love stories are murkier, filled with nuance and slow burn. They’re filled with both fireworks and subtleties that seem invisible to everyone else. And if you’re a woman in this love story, you must navigate your journey along a minefield of every societal expectation, norm, and opinion that had been taught to you when you were too young to even know what love was. 

So maybe this is a ghost story, a ghost story about the loves lost and gained along the way. And if this is really a ghost story, I know exactly where to begin, with the last thing I ever said to him: “I loved you. Goodbye.”

The feminist in me is appalled that the pseudo-memoir of my life will be filled with the relationships I’ve had, and in particular the relationships I’ve had with men. I wish this was a love story that I could write, “And then she learned to love herself and became the coolest, most confident bitch who ever walked the earth and never had another problem with any relationships for the rest of her life.” But this is a ghost story, not a fantasy. I am a messy, complicated person who has messy, complicated thoughts, and does messy, complicated things with other messy, complicated people. This story may not have a satisfying denouement. Hauntings tend to continue after the story ends and the audience leaves.

Love is not a destination I arrived at, but a battleground I have waded through, and continue to wade through. Maybe at the end of this story, you’ll find that although you might not have lived the same life as me, your story has some of the same ghosts lurking around the corners. I don’t think we should be afraid of the ghosts, of our pasts. I think talking about the joy and pain of love and loss is the only way we find our way back to ourselves after being in the trenches of life.

So let me be your guide and show you where the story, love or otherwise, began for me: with a goodbye.