Re-writing history
History is a surprisingly malleable thing, as I came to realise while writing Druidry and the Ancestors. So much depends on perspective and the tone in which you tell the tale. We can talk about glorious Empire, or the horrors of colonialism. History that focuses on Kings is very different from the history of radicalism and social change. In choosing which story to tell we are announcing which bits we think mattered most. Often we’re making certain kinds of story disappear.
I’m very conscious of the historical absences. Women are often written out, even in times and places where they were clearly significantly active. Mainstream history books do not tend to show much of the lives of the poor. Those who were colonised tend to also be ‘vanished’ from the pages of history. You won’t see much trace of the sick and disabled, or children, and most of the time anything that is not firmly heterosexual is also rendered invisible. All the people who did not fit in the main thrust of the progress narrative. The ones who went the wrong way or got the wrong ideas. There are so many kinds of people history encourages us to think weren’t even there, or didn’t matter.
All of the same things apply when we create tales of personal history, and family history. Some things are edited out – consciously or not. Other things we allow to become the big story about how it was and what it all means. Meanings are especially hazardous. The urge for meaning is a very human one, but the journey from ‘this thing happened’ to ‘this thing means’ is so easily messed up. We can become convinced of all manner of unhelpful, restrictive things, because we’ve made a history story that we think proves it.
As a case in point… I was not the world’s happiest teenager, and that wasn’t all angst. There were some tricky things in my life during those years. I ascribed a number of meanings to my experiences: That affection would be conditional on my utility or sexual availability. That I was in some way inadequate or insufficient. That things going wrong in my life could all be attributed to my personal shortcomings. I carted all of that into my twenties, and found people who were glad to pick up the threads and keep weaving that kind of story for me.
But…
With hindsight, it becomes evident that there was a space where I was valued and cared for. At least one, and because there was definitely one, it becomes easier to imagine there might have been others. I could not see it at the time (for good reasons). I can see it now. I get to re-write my teens, and that lumpish, awkward, unwanted girl can be re-imagined as someone who had a value and place after all. That in turn allows me to think differently about a lot of other experiences, and to see where I am now in a wholly different light. I have a new story about how things were, and through that can change things about who I am.
In any situation that affects you, current or historical, it is always worth stopping to see if there might be other stories. Would it look the same from someone else’s perspective? Is the ‘meaning’ really self-evident, or did we bring it with us and plonk it down out of habit? Are we playing the role we think we’ve ascribed for ourselves? Hero, victim, rescuer, powerless, guilty… What else changes if we change the story? There are no absolute truths here, only what we can do with how we decide to see things.
