Changing the story
October 30th, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |The stories we tell about ourselves change according to our audience and medium.
For example, I’ve previously discussed the importance of a name: I have reservations about using my real name online, as if there is a danger in allowing people to link my online persona to my real-life one. Does my writing give away too much about myself - does it tell people things I wouldn’t tell them in person?
I’m probably more honest in an anonymous survey than I often am in face-to-face interactions: the story I tell changes.
In job interviews, marketing pitches, CVs, author biogs, annual reports and press releases, we’re likely to tell a very confident, positive story about ourselves. Conversely, different perspectives might seep into the other stories we tell - to friends and family, to our diaries, to our blog readers. But these don’t tell the whole truth either. They’re just different.
A few years ago, I had the idea of creating a new kind of business card. Rather than telling people my job title, company email address and other bland details, this alternative business card might reveal something a bit deeper about myself.
Here’s what I came up with at the time:
This example of self-representation subverts the normal purpose of a business card - to impress clients, or at the very least present a positive image of oneself. It’s also possible that my desire to achieve such a subversion influenced the story I told: perhaps I was more negative than I needed to be. Perhaps this business card didn’t really capture my essence, but instead became the site where all my insecurities oozed and merged and took shape.
I’ve always hated the question I’m often asked at parties: “What do you do?” The question appears to mean “What do you do for a living?” but so often the answers people give are littered with negatives: “I do this, but really I want to do that. I’m paid to do this, but it isn’t my life’s work. My real passion’s for this.” For many people (myself included), the question invites a negative self-assessment.
It’s telling when the answer to a question is a story: “I used to be a policemen but now I teach acting”, or “I’m a gardener but I hate it. I want to join the army.” Narrative conveys movement, the idea that things are changing, that nothing is fixed. Our present-tense selves always contain the ghosts of our pasts and the echoes of all our possible future selves. We are transient.
The problem with written narratives like autobiographies (or business cards) is that they create a kind of permanent utterance. What we mumble at parties vanishes when addled memory erases it, but in writing, we inscribe a temporary state into (potentially) permanent existence.
The mistake people make is thinking that autobiography can sum us up, in an absolute sense. So many people wait until the ends of their lives - or until something astounding has happened to them - before they begin to tell their story. I’d prefer it if everyone in the world became a serial autobiographer - if everyone told their stories over and over again, trying out different versions, voices and plots. Serial autobiographies are a series of utterances that may or may not be true - stories we’ve thrust into the world to see how they fare.
So my business card idea may have been a good one, in principle. But few companies would accept it, because their stationery costs would rocket as their employees clamoured on a daily (perhaps hourly) basis to change their stories. Our autobiographies are not permanent.
Related posts:
