Everything is fiction
Lest we get so attached to our stories we can’t surrender them, remember: what we experience and the way we describe it is fiction. We are constantly editing, tweaking, cutting, rewriting our vast, chaotic narrative.
And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos. —Keith Ridgeway, Everything is Fiction
- see also: all of us are embedded in our own safe “reality”, for good or for ill
- previously: healthy stories are fluid not fixed
- see also: we exist only in relationship to others