What do the stories you return to time and time again tell you about yourself?
Wait! Don’t click away. This isn’t a BuzzFeed quiz where you click on a book cover, movie poster, or TV show image and we tell you your attachment style.
However, as a lover of stories, I have to wonder what the stories we collectively tell—and each person’s individual taste in them—might tell us about ourselves. Sometimes the stories we love reflect a hurt. Sometimes they let us rehearse a hope. Sometimes they give us language for something we hadn’t understood yet. And sometimes they’re simply pleasurable.
So let’s examine some of those stories that have taken the world by the metaphorical throat and kept us coming back.
Cinderella: We’ve retold the story of someone overlooked and mistreated finally being seen and recognized as valuable in about eight billion ways. This is a common theme across cultures, not just a case of “How many times can various groups retell the same story?”
Beauty and the Beast: What if the parts of someone that make them frightening, strange, or difficult don’t make them unworthy of being known and loved?
Harry Potter/Star Wars: An unwanted child discovers that there is an entire world in which he belongs and eventually builds the family he didn’t get to have.
Superhero stories: The thing that makes you different, isolated, or even frightening can also be the thing that makes you powerful.
Romance as an entire genre: We know how it ends! That’s literally part of the contract. And millions of people keep reading because perhaps knowing that these two people will ultimately choose each other is the point rather than a failure of suspense.
Fanfiction: Why are there approximately nine trillion stories about our beloved characters as supernatural creatures finding The One? Why vampires? Werewolves? Monsters? Why do we keep writing stories in which someone who is literally not entirely human asks, Am I still someone who can be loved?
Sometimes a horny werewolf is just a horny werewolf, but sometimes it’s a metaphor for who gets to be loved.
But what happens when we get the opportunity to do more than read or watch our favorite stories?
Think video games, D&D, or LARPing. All of a sudden, you’re part of the story. You’re helping tell it.
With an open-world game or a comfy farming simulator, you get some ground rules about what you can and cannot do, but beyond that, what’s the story you want to tell? Where is Link going next, and why is it important that he goes over there instead of following the main plotline?
One does need more mushrooms, after all.
What happens when you get to create a character from scratch in D&D or another tabletop role-playing game, or step into a character in a LARP? What does your character get to do? How much of them is you—and how much is the version of you that you wish you could be?
Sometimes Taako the Wizard is just a wizard because wizards are objectively cool. But sometimes the wizard at your table might be exploring their own fears or what it feels like to be the most important person in the room for once. In their everyday life, maybe they don’t feel particularly powerful or necessary.
But here?
They’re the only one who can cast Fireball and save the day.
The object is not judgment or diagnosis. The object, like everything else, is curiosity.
What does this story tell us? What does it tell us about our hopes and dreams—or, conversely, our deepest hurts? What does it tell us about what we might want or need in our lives?
Sometimes the answer is, “Melodie, I just need a really good story.” Sometimes it’s, “I need background noise, so here’s The Office for the 96th time.” And sometimes the answer is, “I’ve never noticed that pattern before. Maybe I should get curious about that.”
Maybe you notice you’ve spent your entire life loving stories about found families.
Huh. Interesting.
Maybe every romance you adore involves someone being chosen despite believing they’re fundamentally unlovable.
Huh. Interesting.
Maybe every character you create is loud and demanding and takes up enormous amounts of space, while you spend your real life trying desperately not to inconvenience anybody.
...Huh. Interesting.
You don’t have to immediately do anything with that information. You can simply notice it.
Or maybe it’s time to ask yourself about the story you’ve been handed about your own life. Is this a story you have to keep telling? What other story could you tell?
Maybe the story is that you’re difficult. Or irresponsible. The smart one. The disappointing one. The caretaker. The successful one. The person who doesn’t need anybody. The person who always screws things up. The one who keeps the peace.
What happens when you get curious about that story, too?
What evidence have you collected to support it? What have you conveniently edited out? What other characters might tell the same events differently? What possibilities become available if this isn’t the only story you’re allowed to tell?
Because perhaps the stories we treasure can do more than tell us something about ourselves. Sometimes they remind us that the same collection of events can become a very different story depending on how we tell it.
Beauty and the Beast can be a story about monsters—about what we believe disqualifies someone from love, care, and all the good things in life. It can also be a story about seeing the humanity underneath a “monstrous” exterior.
The Legend of Zelda can be a story about darkness, saving the princess, and who gets to be saved. It can also be a story about the power of individual people who, by their very nature, should be powerless—and who change the world anyway simply by continuing to show up and fight.
Neither telling necessarily makes the other one wrong. They’re different stories we can tell about the same events.
So what happens when we apply that same curiosity to our own lives?
What if the daughter who grew up hearing, “You’re the only one I can count on” and “I don’t have to worry about you” can tell more than one story about what that meant?
Maybe hers is a story of survival and capability. But maybe it can also become a story in which she learns that she, too, is allowed to take up space, have needs, and ask for help.
What if the child who was told, “You’re the difficult one,” had all of their strengths overlooked by people who were too focused on the challenges involved in caring for them to notice?
Maybe the story isn’t only, “I was difficult.”
Maybe the story can also be, “I have to learn to acknowledge my own power because no one else is going to.”
What else was true?
So whatever else you take from this article, I want you to remember this: sometimes a horny werewolf is just a horny werewolf, but sometimes it’s a metaphor for who gets to be loved.
Don’t take the first story at face value. Ask questions. Get curious. Do the age-old “yes, and” from Improv 101 and see what else is under there.
Yes, this happened. And what else is true?
Yes, this is the story I’ve always told about myself. And what other story could I tell?
Yes, this is who I’ve had to be. And who else might I become?
