Ave, Charles!

Charles on people as storytellers and mythmakers. Parts of his essay reflected things I've written about before. Consider when Charles writes:

The point of personal myths is that you want to tell yourself positive stories about who you are—you want to be the hero of the narrative—in order to achieve better mental health.

Compare that to a post of mine from 2019:

A disciple of Otto Rank, Becker put forth the idea that human beings anchor their self-esteem and self-worth in the notion that they are the heroes of their respective stories. Man is both a physical and a symbolic (or symbol-generating) being, thus inhabiting both a physical/fallen and a symbolic/heroic world. Depression and suicide are what await the man who ceases to believe he is the hero of his own story, who sees himself as temporary, mortal, fallible, and frail.

Charles's post also talks about how humans are story-making creatures: we make sense of the chaos around us through narrative. He writes:

Humans are, to quote a book title from Jonathan Gottschall, storytelling animals. It’s not just that we like telling stories, though; narrative is an important tool that we use to understand the universe, including the world around us and our very own selves.

And here, I wrote:

In one grad-school course on narrative ethics, we discussed the relationship between narrative and theory: narrative can act as an effective vehicle for theory because narrative enfleshes—makes experiential—those aspects of theory that we wish to convey. If I want to teach a moral maxim, for example, I can tell a story like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" to do this. The narrative provides our experience-hungry minds with characters and events that we can latch on to, something "tangible" in which we can ground our theoretical notions. Without this, the theory itself is dry, ethereal, abstract, and even skeletal: it's hard to relate to. Experience incarnates principles. In Buddhist language, it's form articulating emptiness.

We make sense of the world through stories, and we use stories to articulate truths. We also make myths, which one of my professors defined this way: "A myth is a story expressing a truth that can only be expressed in a story." This may seem circular at first, but break the sentence down and change the wording a bit: a myth is a story expressing narrative truths. And what are narrative truths? They're truths you get at only by walking through the story. This makes narrative truths different from, and more elusive than, the "theory" mentioned in the above-quoted paragraph. Narrative truths have a lot in common with so-called "lived truths": you can access these truths only by living through the story or living through your own experience, not by verbalizing them or intellectualizing them. Such truths are ineffable—not merely felt, but experienced. Narrative truths and lived truths are living truths, which gets one closer to understanding how a scripture can be a "living word." This is why, above, I refer to theory as "dry" and "skeletal." A theory taken from a narrative is a lifeless distillation of the narrative; a narrative/lived/living truth, by contrast, is still juicy and squirming, and your relationship to that truth changes over time, just as a parent's relationship to a child changes over time as the child grows older.

Anyway, yes: it's important for us to be the heroes of our personal narratives, especially if we want to surmount the obstacles alluded to in Charles's piece. And yes, we're crafters of myths and stories because narrative is how we make sense of the cosmos.

Go read Charles's essay (first link above).