The Stories I Told Myself That Were Not True

I had a story about why I had left my previous job that was coherent and flattering and not entirely honest. I had a story about why my relationship at 24 had ended that located most of the fault somewhere other than in me and that I had told so many times I had stopped being able to see it clearly.

I had a story about why I had not pursued the career direction that had interested me most strongly in my early twenties, which was built on practical reasons that were real and on a fear of failure that I had edited out of the narrative because it was not a reason I was comfortable claiming.

I did not identify these as self-deceptions because they had been with me long enough to feel like memories rather than interpretations. This is how self-deception works at its most effective: it is not the deliberate construction of a false story but the gradual sedimentation of a story that was never quite right into something that feels indistinguishable from what actually happened.

At 27, working in Phoenix and in a period of unusual honesty with myself prompted by a combination of therapy and a friendship with someone who was constitutionally incapable of letting comfortable stories go unexamined, I started writing in a journal with a different kind of attention than I had previously brought to writing.

I asked myself, about the stories that were doing the most work in my self-understanding: is this what actually happened, or is this what I needed to be true about what happened? The distinction was uncomfortable to apply and produced, over about six months, several revisions to the narrative I had been living with.

The job I had left had not been left primarily for the reasons I had been stating - there were reasons about my own performance and fit that I had been minimising. The relationship had ended in a way I had contributed to more significantly than my account acknowledged.

The career I had not pursued had been available to me and I had been afraid of it, which was not the story I had been telling. None of these revisions were catastrophic.

What they produced was a more accurate picture of the choices I had made and a better understanding of the patterns that were actually driving me, which was more useful than the comfortable version had been.