Just before I moved to Portugal, someone told me that I was about to recognize how American I am even if I was raised in a Portuguese household. Out of the U.S. context I would recognize my loudness, my hang-ups about what should or should not be, my impatience, my love of ice cold drinks, and my open willingness to issue an opinion. Even though I felt a deep sense of recognition here — accompanied by my frequent refrain “These are my people!” — I also noted my otherness.
I have often said that I’m 100% Portuguese and 100% Californian — nurture and nature commingling in a hodgepodge of mindset, attitude, core values, world view, and life philosophy. Over the last six years, I have come to appreciate both identities, yet my Portuguese one has had more opportunity to simmer and develop. In conversations with Americans, I note the traits that other Europeans find either charming or jarring.
This has led me to reflect on the question of ‘home’ and how that is defined. Is home a location or a mindset? Can that change over time? Is it where we feel most ourselves? And what is our self, anyway, if not a collection of stories we have collected and cultivated throughout our lives?
As Rebecca Solnit writes, “We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.”
We use stories to catalog our experiences, to provide coordinates and plotlines, which help us make sense and meaning of our lives. Recognizing our internal stories helps us to see the connections between them and the systems and assumptions in which we operate. “Stories provide our rationale for what is going on; they are our interpretation of the facts,” say the authors of Crucial Conversations.
The challenge is that most of our narratives are inaccurate, incomplete, or downright false. “The brain is quite adept at deceiving us with its fictions, “ according to David Drake, author of “Narrative Coaching: The Definitive Guide to Bringing New Stories to Life.” Or as the pithy meme says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”
Imagine when you’re watching a football (or futbol) game. There are two announcers. One gives us the play-by-play, or the action down on the field or the pitch. The other provides so-called color commentary, inserting context and other random bits of information about the players. Our mind does the same thing about everything we see, hear, and experience. There are the facts — observable actions. Then there are the colored translations that weave those actions into what we believe to be the full picture of what’s happening. All this happens so fast that we hardly recognize them as separate activities.
“Distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren’t so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Our interpretations of experiences are filtered through our belief system, which then lead to how we feel and, finally, how we act. In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl says, ““Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I would add that in that space is the story we tell. We are more likely to respond to our story than to the facts.
Over time, our stories accumulate and create an increasingly thick filter through which we view our life. Think of it like playing the game telephone, where one person whispers something in someone’s ear. That person then passes along the message to the next person, and so on. At the end the last person says the message aloud, often to peals of laughter at how different it is from the original message. Our memories can work the same way, but we’re just telling and interpreting the stories to ourselves. The original incomplete story, based on memory fragments and noodled repeatedly in our minds, becomes part of our autobiography.
“Our biggest fairy tale may be the truthfulness of so-called reality, when hidden fictions steer us through the darkness of our days,” says Diane Ackerman in “An Alchemy of Mind.”
Which brings me back to Portugal. The last six years have provided a laboratory to challenge my assumptions, detach from dearly held stories, reframe personal narratives, and imagine other stories. This not-so-distant territory has given me a new context from which to discern my own history, my story. It’s uncomfortable. It’s disorienting. It’s still a work in progress.