Sarah Conover
The Unstory Corps! Here we go: I believe that all contention, interpersonal and intrapersonal, is the bitter fruit of storying one another. Although there’s a current zeitgeist of narrative therapy—change your story for the better and change your life for the better—that’s not exactly the lens. I’m suggesting a vision beyond the centrality of narrative in relationships.
My memoir adds up the cumulative cost of storying oneself and one another—judgments and assumptions that we believe and act upon. Stories keep us orphaned from challenging family members, peers and neighbors. Stories can fuel contempt for our partners. Stories separate us into political silos. Our own self-story, Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach notes, is all too often a “trance of unworthiness” that robs us of joy.
Can we check ourselves when we divide the world into Self and Other through stories? Frank Osteseski, author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, claims we either have stories about one another or we have intimacy. We’ve all experienced being so utterly present with another person that boundaries and stories vanish. What irretrievable opportunities for connection to friends and kin have been missed from your assumptions? What would you need to do and ask of someone who is an "Other" politically to see their humanity? How can empathy and unstorying heal our separateness?
My memoir adds up the cumulative cost of storying oneself and one another—judgments and assumptions that we believe and act upon. Stories keep us orphaned from challenging family members, peers and neighbors. Stories can fuel contempt for our partners. Stories separate us into political silos. Our own self-story, Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach notes, is all too often a “trance of unworthiness” that robs us of joy.
Can we check ourselves when we divide the world into Self and Other through stories? Frank Osteseski, author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, claims we either have stories about one another or we have intimacy. We’ve all experienced being so utterly present with another person that boundaries and stories vanish. What irretrievable opportunities for connection to friends and kin have been missed from your assumptions? What would you need to do and ask of someone who is an "Other" politically to see their humanity? How can empathy and unstorying heal our separateness?
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