mtl3p

That’s interesting - when I look at the two posts that have been more “personal” on this blog they are both about the same thing, one’s ability to change narrative. The first post concerned a person’s ability to change narrative in terms of adopting a new religion. I doubted (and still doubt) the ability to do because it seemed too arbitrary and self-conscious.

Then, yesterdays post reasserted ones ability to conciously “construct a story that better helps them live their lives”. To better represent myself, I’m not sure whether one has the power to choose one’s narrative - the story according to which one lives one’s life. But then I look at my encounter with feminist theory, and how I have taken that and used it to shift my version of the world. Also, the best thing about being diagnosed with ADD in my late teens was that it allowed me to re-create my own personal narrative. I re-ordered and re-valued many events of my life according to that diagnosis. Both of those things allowed me to shift, paradigmatically, my version of my life and of the world (ie. my narrative).

This is all stuff that I’m very still much in the process of figuring out. I’m very aware that I’m not well-read in the stuff that I’m talking about. If anybody wants to suggest books which could help me fill in the gaps, I’m all ears.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about narrative. I’ve realized that I want to be a storyteller. To me that means giving meaning(s) to the things that we do and the things that happen to us. I’m not so well-read in philosophy, but I do know about Kant’s idea of causality being a category of the human mind, something we assume in order to live and act in the world. I’m probably comparing oranges and apples, but I connect that to the loss of the meta-narrative (a overarching story that we use to govern our lives as a community and a society (for most Western’s used to be the Bible)).

The idea that comes out of that is that narrative is all we have. It’s an awkward phrase, but although narrative is fiction, is something “made-up”, the same way that causality is fabricated by the human mind. The difference is that we have some ability to change our narratives, as individuals and as groups. That’s what this book is about - therapists helping clients (I hate that word) examine the narrative of their lives (ie. the story they tell themselves and usually the ones that people tell about them), deconstruct them, and pick up the pieces of events, history, relationships, and construct a story that better helps them live their lives. To me the really interesting thing about that is that the search doesn’t have to be for a more accurate, or “true-er” narrative. That doesn’t matter. What matters is 1) is it believable to the client (can they invest in it?) and 2) will it help the person live their life “better”?

This is what I love about sociology. Well, one of the things. That it can be a form of storytelling. Basically taking a view of something (macro or micro) and telling a story about it. I realized that when I read “The Forethought” of W.E.Dubois’s “The Souls of Black Folks”. I was reading this colloquial story of one guy’s version of the black history in the US and I was told that it was sociology, that this guy was a respected sociologist and that he was allowed to talk like this. I was pretty stunned.

I’m reading this book right now, which is bringing up all of these thoughts (very interesting book).

On a side note, that is what I think is the key to ISF. That is the currency with which we “pay” volunteers. By giving them another bit of a story, of meaning, to add to their lives. (not that their lives aren’t full of meaning and stories already - that would be impossible. It’s just that the “meaning” we have is pretty sought after). Another disclaimer - I don’t hand out this “meaning” to other volunteers, it is something we create together and give each other.