The Story of Oneself

A guy I really like not only for his outstanding professional skills, brilliance in exposure or posh dressing, but mainly because he seems to be the only cool guy I happen to know carrying with him the magic touch of the sixties, is Gary B. Gary has psychology training and he is using his vast knowledge and experience to fix fractured marriages and to mend workplace misfits. From him I learned that our core self has three development stages:

1. Biological Self: The Rough First Draft - The lifelong, prewired genetic, biological, predispositional biases and traits that we naturally and unconsciously use to experience, filter, interpret and guide our life.
2. Psychological Self: The Edited Version - The pattern of psychologically adaptations that emerges based on our biological preferences and biases in response to the specific environments and challenges we happen to face in the course of our early, adolescent and adult life
3. Biographical Self: The Final Version - The story or narrative we develop and use from the first two stages to make sense of our lives. They are not necessarily true stories, but simplified and selective reconstructions of the past, often forged by or connected to an idealized version of the future.

If you have gone over the previous three paragraphs by reading every word, I have to give it to you: you deserve big kudos, if only for the reason that if you didn’t do it you’ll have to come back later anyway, by the end of this post, to understand what the heck did I mean by that. And if you didn’t do it and you just changed the web page in disgust for another smart ass who poses as a pub philosopher, that’s okay too, because this post is in no way meant to annoy people who feel at ease in their bubble of comfort and complacency (this being a highly recommended combination for a stress-free life recipe.) And thank God that I wasn’t a popular figure in 12B, not then, not now, to risk to disappoint you in the same way a person of interest would disappoint you if it were to be proved from reliable sources that between being a politician, making money or writing, he actually loves and would pick - if a fairy gave him the option to choose - the writing!

Anyway, let’s hop back on the saddle of the rhetoric we ride on… Which are my points exactly?

My first point (exactly) is that we all are now at an age when we dislike the environment (what am I saying, we reject it!) when the environment doesn’t fit to our story's prewired expectations (you may notice that I am using the term story as defined in the third paragraph above.) In other words, if the people are not the way we expect them to be, or they don’t behave as we’d like them to behave, or even display physical traits that do not entice us, then just forget it, we do not need them! If our children are not as smart or as successful as we expected, they'd better get their story right because this could become a deal breaker (imagine the embarrassment you'd feel when sharing their failures with our dear friends whose children are rowing next year for Oxford!) If the political parties do not perform as we expect, or align to our moral values, or to any moral values for that matter, to hell with them! Better go with a cunning, and equally smartass dictator! If the native country's landscapes reflect nowadays the sun light differently than in our teenage years, when Fagaras Mountains were the best product of God’s imagination, then better live without them: who needs those mountains and who needs God when we have Oasis channel and Ricky Gervais Show, both in HDTV? The list can continue…

What I am trying to say is to be explained by my second point (exactly), which follows…

When we were young, inexperienced and even retarded (this is actually a good term, as it’s coming from French and it means moving slower, therefore being capable of absorbing more, or - my preference- coming late of age, which is not counter-productive, it’s even advantageous since I myself was retarded, I still am, and I'm very well, thank you!), we wanted to fit in the surrounding medium, to indulge in the environment's favours and please its players, to become the successful users of a world that has been given to us, put at our disposal entirely for enjoyment, nourishment and usage. We wanted to get good marks (and in the process to please both the teachers and the parents), to get good looking girls out for a date (Oh, Joanna, how much I wanted to make you like me!), to look cool in a new pair of jeans (and how much I longed for that, since I was a poor no-one in a class of a-ones with opportunities – notice that I don’t use the term rich as that notion didn’t exist at the time I am talking about here!) And the list continues...

Some of us have trudged straight through the muddled waters of those slow and boring growing stages, some others took either efficient shortcuts or scenic detours, have been exemplary students (where are those math Olympics and their theorems heroes?) or maybe just horrible teenagers, i.e. pain in the ass youngsters, which means that actually they were freedom fighters against the (parental) staleness and misconceptions that stopped them from being social-environmentally adapted and acclimatised (the long hair and the bootleg pants being the rule!) The idiotic leaders, the absurd dictatorship, the food shortage where the bread and butter were a luxury, the favouritisms, the racism and xenophobia as pillars of the Romanian way of life, who gave a crap on that? Who had time for that? Who thought that that was important? Who had the age for that? We studied communist revisited history  in communist schools , we read communist compliant literature, we watched television communist shows with actors who have formed themselves in communist acting schools, we listened to interviews given by communist scientists who based their researches on communist funds. Of course we didn't give a rat’s ass on those things. Who cared about those? All we wanted was to become successful in that kind of environment, in that kind of society. We strived through everything we did to become part of IT, the environment, to have a seat at the regime's powerfuls' dinner table. And now I'm not talking about the genuine 12B, of course: I'm talking about 12B-ers in their late twenties, early thirties...

But then we got older and we started to build up our stories, or the biographical selves, how Gary nicely (and sagely) puts it. Our stories are already final. I saw it in the videos of your gatherings in Craiova, in your discussions recorded live during the dinner, I read it in every email you send… Everyone has a story of herself or himself, and is eager to share it (like publishing or "in your face"-ing) on every communication channel. This is the final version that is going to shortly outlive us in the memories of our children, who will probably say things like “man, my father was a smart guy, he did good in life, but sometimes he was such an ass, I’m telling you!”, or in some friends' short-lived recollections ("that guy was smart for himself, the son of a bitch, but such a pompous ass, never sharing the pie with anybody!") or in brief obituaries on the last page of an (online) newspaper with the lowest number of hits ("loving father and outstanding citizen who leaves behind a long lasting legacy.").

This final version is who we are now, after a long journey throughout which, after making scores of mistakes, misjudgments, and missing tons of love (given or taken) and tons of opportunities, while living the sweet moments of life and outliving its sour mishaps, we came to what we are now. Who we are and what we are. And nothing is going to change us now, no new environment, no new society, no new world. Not even a revolution of the common sense, that’s happening from time to time in the mankind history but lives too short to be mentioned in any serious historical tome.

Now we are a group of fifty plus-ers, the former students of a Class 12B, of a provincial high-school, of some alumni, of some year, 1979. And after sharing chunks of our initial stories that were either part of the biological self (faking the vocal ability only to get to the second voice in our prodigious choir), or psychological self (Oh, Joana!), hence making our successful blog work, we finally got to the biographical self. That conversion happened when we started to talk about ourselves and the accomplishments we are rightfully proud of (business, money, emigration, politics, family, travel.)  That’s when we started to sell our own stories, with the understated clause that the sale is final, no adjustments can be made after processing the transaction, and the returns are out of question. And if you cared to notice, all these stories are like riverstones embedded in a thick, indestructible wall of cemented indifference, with no hammer able to displace or even seriously dent them. Basically what everybody says is: Listen to me, this is how it is! Based on their own story. Nobody tries to be flexible or make an amendment, because any adjustment would mean a denouncement of their own story, and nobody would even accept the idea of being wrong in front of their fellow story-tellers. His truth is above anybody else's truth, indestructible, invincible.

I? I did the same… I cannot accept the idea that others may be right, and I may be wrong. Or that sometimes I am lopsided, or plain biased, in my judgement. God knows I have been doing this for a while. Only recently, after coming from a mentally exhausting trip to Romania, during which what I had found was different different of what I expected (of what my own story mentions under  the column "to be expected from this journey in places you know"), I ended up by rejecting everything. Nothing was good, all was bad, down the drain with it. Me? No to challenges. No to corrections. I am done with my story. Without it, or even with it slightly changed, I'd be nothing.I'd be back to square one, discovering things...

We are too old to be at another stage than stage 3 above, ladies and gentlemen! After all, this is the natural course of life. After a certain age, the only way we have left to communicate with each other is by enforcing our story in every conversation we initiate. With the foreseeable side effect of paying a price: that of becoming confrontational (and who cares about that, since it’s about defending our story?) So, what happened in our good-turned-bad email debate is just normal: it’s part of life. And guess what? From this perspective, every single one of us is right, because every single one of us has a story he or she worked hard to make it sound true, and bring it to its final version. No changes in the environment (less of an angel come down to Earth to reveal that only the no-story-owners will make it to the after-life) will make us change our lines.

But there's an appendix to the story: the one that requires us to take care of our youngsters who are still at their first two stages (biological and psychological.) They do not have their stories finished yet. They strive to take a dive in the strong currents of the environments we have been building for them. To lose themselves in both warm and cold currents. Let them do that. Let them grow and get by themselves to the point where they can write the closing paragraphs in their final versions of their stories. After that be free to start selling their stories to each other. And in the process become confrontational. Because without a story there's no confrontation, and without confrontation there's no life.