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It always comes back to the frame tale...

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Maybe the question shouldn’t be “what kind of story are we in?” but rather “how many different kinds of stories are we in?”

My story includes a bookworm, a bullied nerd, an angry goth chick, a rape survivor, a trophy wife, entitlement and privilege, multiple marriages and divorces, adultery, poverty and food stamps, and an unforeseen redemption arc in the third act. They’re all very different stories, from very different parts of my life, but all of these characters make-up one whole (mostly) person that is me. And that’s only my side of this.

How many stories am I a part of where I’m not the main character? How many stories where I’m the mean girl, the villain, the slut of the piece? Probably more than a few. Those are the easier roles to admit to. No matter how self-absorbed most of us may be, we mostly always know when we’ve hurt someone, or betrayed them, or affected their life in a terrible way. We may not like to cast ourselves as the antagonist, but we know when it’s true.

Why is it so much harder to allow ourselves to see when we have been a hero? The last ten years of my life have been one of healing, for myself and the people in my life. I was given a second chance, many times, and I’ve used all of those chances to try to make life better for the people around me. What I’ll never really know though, on a grander scale, is how many people may have their lives affected, in a positive way, because I helped someone, for no other reason than that they needed help. 

So how many stories have benefited from your actions, from what you’ve done, or that kind word that you said at just that right moment when someone was on a ledge and needed to hear it? 

We are all products of our own stories, but we are also products of the stories of everyone around us. The narrative binds us all together, every single day, and the technologies that we have, like blogs, only increase that interconnectedness. Dunne tells us that there are “stories within stories” so maybe it’s simply that we are all living, breathing frame tales in the end. 

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