Characters In Other People’s Stories

Essays

Oct 6

I was watching a BBC YouTube piece on Karl Ove Knausgård, where he talked about his series, My Struggle, which I read in full, and what it was like to tell other people’s stories from his perspective. It wreaked havoc on his life, but also made him wildly successful. It got me thinking about how I write and whom I include in my stories. Creative freedom is not always as free as you think.

I tried to look at some of the worst moments in my life and frame the movie from someone else’s perspective. What did it look like for my Uncle Norman to be a doctor in the room when my mom was dying, but not her doctor? I don’t think I’ve heard from him since then. Does he still think about me standing by her bedside waiting for her to stop breathing? I doubt it. His story had other turns.

I learned a long time ago to frame my annoyances in a different light to assuage my catastrophic expectancy. Someone who cut me off in traffic went from a total douche bag who has no regard for anyone else in the world to a husband rushing his wife to the hospital to give birth. That’s such a better story than my original one.

Reframing is an important mechanism to use as an adult. Thinking of myself as an afterthought gives me more freedom. If the story isn’t about me, will anyone really care if I’m eating a cookie while I am driving? They just want the car to be part of traffic in the scene; they don’t care about how good the cookie is. But the cookie was really good.

Maybe it’s easier to wander in and out of other people’s lives while they tell their own stories. Maybe it’s easier to think of all of us as having billions of intertwined stories that meet, then pass, then disappear. Think of how many stories are going on during a morning ride on a New York City subway going from Queens uptown.

In other people’s stories throughout my life, I could have played many different roles. Mentor, fuck boy, annoying supervisor, boyfriend who gets cheated on, kid in class, old friend, total prick; the list never ends. The stories never end. We are fragments of ourselves littered all throughout other people’s stories.