So, last I posted, I was wrestling with the somewhat admirable goal of discovering what it was I could learn from all the pain and anger generated by the little liar in my life. Still working on that.
Here's the thing: writers as you might guess often think a bit differently from the rest of you. It may be I'm touching on the single most significant difference: the narrative.
Narrative as any wannabe writer or first year literary student can tell you is simply a story, a constructed series of events where one thing leads to another and at the end you have an outcome. Writers think in the narrative.
What's that mean? It means that the very thing that can make a writer effective professionally can also screw up his/her private life to a fare-thee-well.
When you were a kid, they called it "daydreaming." You were sitting in class and while other students were trying to pay attention to the teacher you were staring out the window imagining something.
It is almost pathological at times, the inability to look at events or data and not extrapolate a narrative out of it. "If they did this, then the next thing to happen will be . . . "
So, to recap, the little liar embarked on a campaign last July to get me to fall in love with her so that she could reap, to her anyway, large monetary benefits. When I found out, I was devastated. Let's skip the disbelief part of it, and move straight to the second phase. A sense of loss. OK, what did I lose? A lying, cheating whore? Absolutely, but it didn't feel that way. It felt as if I had lost someone very dear to me, someone who had brought wonderful things into my life. That sense of loss was profound for days. Why? Because she had engaged the narrative, she had created something for me that allowed me to take what lies she spun and build them up into a narrative far greater than the reality.
Had I been objective, I could have looked at our entire relationship from a functional point-of-view, a causal one-thing-leads-to-another and I would have come up with a vastly different analysis of the situation. Inconsistencies that should have been red flags with her were easily explained away because I had already committed to a narrative.
She had convinced me certain things were true, therefore as I extended the narrative to say "then this will happen, than that will occur, leading us to this outcome," I began to modify my view of process to fit the expected outcome. The expected outcome was not the product of data, but rather something I had created within myself.
Are you beginning to see the trap here?
Strengths are weaknesses, as the old saying goes. Let me illustrate by using a friend as an example of exactly the opposite problem, no narrative in the term I'm using it. She certainly can view a narrative from hindsight, but the forward projecting type, not so much. Sure she has her ambitions and dreams of the future, but they are abstracted, vague at times, "I'd like to be successful," "I'd like to be happy" and can even break those concepts down to what success and happiness mean and their constituents, but the one thing leads to the next path to get there? No so much.
So, what was her take on the entire series of events with the little liar? She listened, nodded, and said, "That's horrible. I'm sorry you got hurt." Then she paused and said, 'Still, I haven't heard the other side of the story." OK, here's where things get weird for me.
I was lied to, cheated, misled, and worked like a rented mule. What "other side" is there? Some sort of defense of that behavior? Justification? Some hidden motive that somehow makes what the little liar did less onerous? Less vicious? Apparently my friend considers the possibility. Now, she neglects to realize what this says to me about her view of my credibility, not to mention the simple fact of, "the little liar hurt your friend." In short, she looks at this in a way that almost is beyond my ability to understand.
See, she had this need to be "fair" in a very abstract fashion. Her view of self appears to have some kind of judicial robe wrapped around it.
But this was very instructive, because it drove home the fact that not everyone out there looks at life as a series of narratives, but rather can look at life from any number of views, process, outcome, balance, "rightness," or a host of other things that push the narrative into the background.
Now, the thing about being inclined to the narrative is that while it's a great gift to have if you're writing fiction (or a political PR spin doctor) it can be a bitch in your real life. For example, I'm cruising down the freeway minding my own business and my mind turns to something, let me say the little liar, and before I know it I'm pissed off again. Why? Because I didn't just have a passing recollection of her, but before I could stop I launched off in an entire movie in my head, complete with dialogue, sound effects, back ground music, and no popcorn.
The only good thing about these spontaneous little dramatic moments is that you can use them as some of a barometer of how you're doing. If you've gone from murderous rage to only slightly annoyed, progress is being made.
So what does the narrative fantasy tell me right now? Well, it shows some progress, but in an unexpected way--which is really the entire point of this posting: be ready for the unexpected.
After I got over the sense of loss and hurt, and the rage started coming, there was a very long period of over a month where I just wanted to hurt her. I mean chase her down and kicker around like a soccer ball. Hardly the mature response, but then feelings rarely have anything to do with maturity. That's a non-affect concept.
So this morning I find myself in a different place; my narrative imagination wanders and suddenly I'm an objective observer witnessing a phantasy whereby she is suffering greatly, but not at my hands. Her agony is the undeniable result of some stupid thing she did, and she's in tears, winging her hands, begging the universe for forgiveness with no one coming to her aid. In my imagination, she even came crawling back to me as her last resort and, boy, did I get to tell her what for! All kinds of pithy aphorisms and blanket declarations of my moral superiority and why I'm going to have thousand of people at my funeral and no one will even notice when she's dying in some alley . . . . Then I tell her the secret of being good and she promises to go and sin no more.
All it all, it was a pretty bleak image. So why the shift? I think because it is my nature to see good in people. As I said in the first blog I posted on the matter, it would be swell if she could somehow evolve into the person she pretended to be, because I can attest that person was very lovable--realize it's almost choking me to say it. Still, the universe would be a better place on average if she morphed from that lying little whore into the bright young woman I thought she was. Maybe it wouldn't raise the average of the world all that much, but any bit helps, right?
So, I'm now struggling with redemption fantasies, and next on the list is to examine the reason for that shift in the paradigm, because if it's just a case of "there is great rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner who repents," well, that's cosmic enough. But if locked deep down inside is some neurotic hope that somehow she'll return to me as I once imagined her to be, that's a bad thing.
Here's the thing: I can spin narratives over either one, so how am I to know? That, boys and girls, is the subject of the next exploration.
I don't mind not having answers as long as I have some really good questions left.
Copyright 23rd June 2009 by Raymond E. Feist.
No reproduction without permission.
