The Story We Tell Ourselves

For a long time I disliked the writing of other users of mental health services. Now I’ve concluded I just didn’t have the tools with which to begin an understanding. They seemed to write solely in order to make sense of their lives for themselves, more evidence of a preoccupation with ‘self’. As an avid reader however, of fiction, biography, reportage; and as a critical viewer of film and television - I knew that writing for oneself, was quite different from writing for others. You have to be aware of, and build a bridge towards an audience.

And of course the meaning of any communication is what the ‘receiver’ perceives it to be!

We all share that inability to explain ourselves to others, to make coherent those experiences that derailed our lives, that were brought to a head in the first encounter with the hospital consultant and their accomplices, describing the intimate details of our lives to a group of strangers. To begin with, there is no beginning. Although what follows is of course fact, we all turn our past experiences into a narrative. In retrospect and with hindsight, we take the ‘here and how’ as our ending, selecting those elements of the past which can be logically fitted together to explain the present. Equally, each act of remembering involves to some extent a reinterpretation of what actually happened - a game of Chinese Whispers played out with our own internal dialogue. We tell ourselves, ‘I know, because I was there‘! When in fact it is our selective memory which provides those ‘facts‘.

photo by Nick Hewling

As soon as I began trying to find a ‘way of telling’, knowing what I wrote could only be a reconstruction, I realised that what was most important was the ‘message’, the ideas and concepts that come from your story - and you can’t do that if you are anonymous! Workers suggest anonymity for your own protection, part of client confidentiality. But, ‘I believe’ has no impact if we don’t know who is saying it - and there is no right to reply if you don’t know who you are replying to. At worse, user writing gets used as a free ‘endorsement’ by service providers. And the reader should also always ask, what is the writer’s relationship with the people and places he writes about?

In the current culture of the Recovery approach, workers encourage or assume that ones experience should be framed in terms of an imagined pathway or journey. A progression to a brighter future, rich in positive meanings and full of hope. Alas this can only encourage the shoehorning of past experience to fit an idea of happiness, which is always tomorrow. I’m only interested in today, and I’ll make my meanings from the only real motivation there is - my attachment or attraction to others in the here and now. Which means I get ‘out and about’ with someone I like today, and not plan tomorrows. Others inspire.

So there is no reason in theory why there shouldn’t be a collective portrait of mental wellness. So often the story we tell ourselves is one of an obsession with self. It may be as simple as whether you notice the differences rather than the similarities between people! So much care is organised around ‘individual needs‘, when the answers are communal and collective, about sharing and intimacy. Staff talk of individual ‘pathways‘, I’d rather they lay an actual pathway from the hospital entrance to where the pavement ends on the edge of our town! And how about renovating the bus shelter at the hospital entrance, but without removing the decades of graffiti, which in itself is a kind of collective testimony.

How much of your life seems to have turned upon chance events, or things you did without being aware of having made any choices at all? The idea of our lives leading to somewhere, even without the help of partial recall, is aided by our commonsense notions that we have an essential character, identity or personality which becomes more fixed over time. This is the greatest danger of storytelling about oneself - that it actually narrows possible futures! It is actually good if others challenge rather than validate the story we tell ourselves. Being flexible enough to live with uncertainty is mental health.

The first time I was the recipient of another client’s work was during my second admission in 1990. A client who had been ‘on the roundabout’ for some years in various hospitals, showed me a poem he had written. Unexpectedly I liked it. It described his addiction to various street drugs, and the inevitable consequence of further admissions - it seemed to show great insight. When I handed it back to him he told me to keep it, though he had no copy. What struck me most was the way it looked (it still does). Written with a real ink pen (rare even then), the required rhythm was ‘spelt-out’ by words written in capitals and others underlined. He explained that it had no meaning for him in itself, it was the creating of it that gave a release from unwanted thoughts and feelings, and in giving it away he hoped others might share that.

A while ago I did the MDF self-management course, on the first day the facilitators asked us to consider 'reframing'; and as an example, describe ourselves and our lives without the 'language of illness'. I thought the idea ridiculous! But back at home I concluded I'd better come-up with something, in case I was challenged later. So in about forty minutes I scribbled down a dozen lines; fed it into the computer, tidied it up, printed it off, slipped it into the file and forgot about it. It was a contrived piece of work, an exercise - and it certainly wasn't how I felt about myself at the time.
　
Nick - reframed!
When I left school they said
You must have a job, a career
It gives meaning and purpose to your life.
I just wanted to go Walkabout
To wander aimlessly, in the hope
Of meeting interesting people
And learning something new every day.
So I am forever a student
Of the strange ways of individuals and groups
Of people in offices, shops, factories
Classrooms, lecture halls, hospital wards
Day centres, consulting rooms, therapy centres
On trains, in cars, buses, boats and airplanes.
I seek movement and change
To be always in the moment
Letting go the past, and the future
Travelling, but never hoping to arrive
Allowing the brain and body to take me where it pleases.
It’s an intellectual adventure
Finding-out, how human life evolves
But never for a moment believing
That the ‘I’ or ‘me’ of a so-called ‘Self ’
Is fixed forever
Just an evolving story I tell myself
About a person on a journey.
　
Strangely it was greeted with enthusiasm by those running the group, they asked if they could include it in a newsletter! Sometime later I showed it to someone from another mental health organisation; they called it a poem and asked to put it in their newsletter. Later still it appeared in a third. Much has changed in the eighteen months since. At present I have no symptoms of Bipolar, so objectively I cannot use that 'frame of reference'. And in reality I have become a student again, reading for a Masters degree. I still write similar things, but now the focus is - what is of practical use to others?
　
Catch Tomorrow Now

Can you stop?
Let go of thoughts and feelings
Of the past and future
And just be in the present moment.
Now is all there is.
Re-attach your emotions to your senses
In the real physical world of the present.
Notice what cues your thoughts now
Acknowledge them and let them go
Good or bad.
Allow yourself to feel the bad when it happens
Then it passes quickly.
Allow yourself to be ‘surprised by joy’
And let go those feelings too.
Knowing they will return unbidden.
Think of yourself as having no fixed self.
Able to construct a self anew every day
Attentive to others, unconcern for an ‘I’ or a ‘me’.
Aware of the others who make you what you are.
You learn most by imitation.
You only remain fixed
When you remake yourself today
As you were yesterday.
You imagine the past must persist into the future
But only because you reproduce it afresh everyday.
Don’t look forward or back, but around.
Seek to be more relaxed and aware.
Absorb what’s around you
And catch tomorrow now!
　
When we write for ourselves, in joy or misery, our stories are about ‘coming to terms with’. But when we write for others they are realer - for an actual pathway is only created after many walkers have taken the same trail. Finally,
　
Writing to recover…

To explain to oneself
To make sense to oneself
For oneself.
Then,
What can I share
Can others understand
Can I make them listen
Even think differently
Will my meanings be their meanings
Does it matter
Do I want to help others
Is there an audience…?
Can we transform each other
Can there be a communal portrait
And in a world of madness,
Can anyone call another ‘companero'…?

(written 2008)