Your Stories Are Not Who You Are

You carry big stories and small ones, and together they feel like your life. But a story is a wave on the surface of the ocean, and you are the ocean.

Someone did something you think they should not have done. Someone said a thing that hurt so quietly you never mentioned it. Someone forgot what should have been remembered. These are small stories. They last a few seconds, or a day, before they sink into the past, and you tell yourself a dozen of them before lunch without noticing.

Underneath the small stories run the big ones. We are the ones who were never given a fair chance. We are the educated ones. We are the ones doing good in a world full of harm. We are the ones who eat this and not that, and disapprove of those who do the opposite. Big stories can last for years, or for a lifetime, and some pass down through generations without anyone ever reading them aloud. They are the habits we live by, and we rarely see them, because we are standing inside them.

The small stories draw their strength from the big ones. A remark stings because it touches a story about being overlooked. A forgotten favour hurts because it confirms a story about being alone. The ripples and the waves feed each other, and together they make the whole visible surface of a life. When you identify with your stories, you cannot see them rise and fall, because you are the rising and the falling. You have become the story and everything it means.

Now look at the surface of the sea. It is an impossibly thin layer between the water and the air. In a sense it does not exist at all: there is water, and there is air, and the surface is only the name for where they meet. Your stories are like that. Real enough to see, real enough to break on the shore, and yet only the shape the water takes for a moment before it takes another. The wave is not wrong. It is just not the ocean.

I do not say this to make your stories small. Some of them carry real wounds, and the wave that broke over you was heavy. But a wave, however heavy, is made of the same water as everything around it, and it does not stay. What you essentially are is not in the wave. It is what the wave is made of. When you look only at the surface, you forget that you are the ocean, and you spend your days defending a shape.

You can test this the next time a small story starts. Notice the sting, and then ask which bigger story it belongs to. You will usually find one within a breath. Then let both of them be waves. Do not argue with them and do not push them under. Watch them rise, watch them fall, and notice what is watching. That is the ocean. It was never in any danger from its own weather.

Questions that arise

What do you mean by big and small stories?

Small stories are the passing accounts of everyday slights and events. Big stories are the long narratives about who we are, often shared with a group, that we live inside for years. The small ones take their force from the big ones.

Aren't my stories true?

Some of what they describe did happen. But a story is an interpretation, and interpretations rise and fall. What you essentially are does not depend on any of them being true or false.

How do I stop identifying with my stories?

Not by fighting them. Notice a small story when it starts, find the bigger one under it, and watch both as waves. What notices them is not a story.

Isn't this a way of avoiding real problems?

No. Problems still get handled. What changes is that you handle them without being the wave that broke, and a mind that is not defending a story sees the problem more clearly.

Where this came from

The ocean and its waves are from my book We Were Once Human, in a chapter called A Life of Waves and Ripples. The list of big stories there is longer than mine, and each one is a sentence that begins with we are. It is a book about the false sense of identity, written for anyone who suspects they are more than the story they keep telling, and many of its chapters open with an image from nature that makes the point before the words do.

We Were Once Human runs about 140 pages and costs €9. The rest of my books are at jussiniittyviita.com.