The Stories that Are ME

It is pure fiction that there is a ME.  This being that I call ME is a collection of short stories, novels, poems and essays on various themes that present themselves as “real.” 

There is the novel about the emotional life of ME:  Suppressed Passion.
This ME that I am is not an emotional person.  She learned early in her life that her fears, grief, rage, and joy must be hidden from others at all costs.  In Chapter One we read the familiar story that has been told at the Monastery so many times that all the monks and neighbors can recite it by heart.  “One day when she was about three years old, Little ME was set down by the radio (yes, it is a very old story) to listen to Bambi so that her mother could do the house work.  When Mom came by later and saw ME crying, she turned off the radio so that ME (or she) would be spared the sadness of Bambi’s mother being killed.  And so ME learned not to let anyone know she was sad – or anything else.”

There is the short story “I’d Rather Do It Myself” about ME’s propensity for introversion.  It’s short because ME is hesitant about speaking at length to people she doesn’t know.  She avoids crowds and new and unfamiliar situations.  Actually, there is no story, just a title.

This week, as temperatures in the foothills soar well over the 100-degree mark for many days in a row, she is living her poem of “Weather.”  ME is a cloud and rain person; she simply does not do “heat” and “sun.”  She has Seasonal Affective Disorder in the summer, not the winter.  ME writes:

                                    I do not understand the soul
                                                that can call this land its home.
                                    Endless days of piercing sun
                                                bind me like a tomb.

                                    My soul can’t feed on cloudless skies.
                                                Bluer’s never better.
                                    It’s rain brings me to life again,
                                                born to live in weather.

When ME looks to her experience, not her stories, she sees that she can be powerfully expressive with her feelings, that she enjoys being a contributing member of many groups, and that she can at least survive the heat.  But so often the fiction seems really, really real.  This is who she is.  And, if not these stories, then who is ME?  Who am I?

What would life look like if ME woke up every morning into a new set of stories?  What if tomorrow ME was a daring risk taker, unafraid of consequences?  If she was eager for a day of house cleaning and yard work?  If she saw herself as a “mover and shaker”?  What if the entire old library was given away and replaced by a new collection of fictional works?  Then who would ME be?  Would I recognize ME, or not?  Would there be familiarity even amid the new stories of how ME is, or would it be a whole new world?

In my practice, I am simply watching who believes the stories.  I am remembering that they are works of fiction and that I can choose new stories or no stories.  I see that they create the ME that is a separate self. 

I am in the space between breaths: the no word, no story, no thing moment where ME is not even interesting.  I might say I am learning to un-author my life, to erase not necessarily my biography but at least my interpretation of it.