We are making ourselves up as we go
The current cultural orthodoxy, often formulated or short-handed as “stay in your lane,” postulates that a writer ought to remain centered in their own community, to write from their own and their community’s experience: to stay home. But Ursula argued that those places, those points of origin, home and community, are themselves acts of the creative imagination.
Fantasy and science fiction say openly what so-called mainstream fiction generally endeavors to conceal: look, I’m making it all up! Not only that, Le Guin reminded us: we are making ourselves up, too. Inventing the stories of ourselves and our communities, not out of whole cloth, but out of all the other stories we have listened to and read from childhood. And the more widely we read, the more carefully we listen, the further beyond the confines of our own personal gutter our escape plans will be able to carry us, the nearer to the stars. —Michael Chabon, Le Guin’s Subversive Imagination
This is basically the gist of cognitive therapy, or buddhism/taoism, or mindfulness—gaining perspective on the stories we tell ourselves and realizing our self is just a story too.
- previously: everything is fiction — we’re all making up the narrative as we go!
- see also: all of us are embedded in our own safe reality, which impedes our perception without even realizing it