Why Storytelling Matters

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote. “We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” I think of this often as I struggle to fit a narrative line onto the years since I first watched my mother’s sanity fray. After nearly three decades of managing untreated schizophrenia, her life remains a story of slippages into and out of reality, and it’s still difficult for me to describe myself in a way that includes these slippages and how they shaped us.

I was about nine years old when I first noticed my mother’s thoughts and actions going awry. A couple of years later, my father sat me down and explained that she had “schizophrenic tendencies.” But I was mostly left to decipher my mother’s behavior on my own. Soon those tendencies became overwhelming symptoms, and she was hospitalized twice before taking off on a paranoia-driven trek around the world. She eventually stabilized enough that my siblings and I could live with her half the time (my parents were divorced), but schizophrenia continued to distort and break apart her sense of space and time, robbing her of a continuous life narrative. This is what oral historians call a narrative crisis, and it seems to me that this kind of crisis is a fundamental experience for people who suffer from mental illness, and their children too.

After my mother returned—-still delusional but functioning better—-schizophrenia settled in as the ghost in our machine, an invisible force that shaped our lives without being fully recognized or understood. Even my father comprehended her illness only in abstract terms—he rarely witnessed how it affected her. He, like her parents, siblings, and friends, had difficulty grasping how deeply compromised she was. Only we, her children, really saw it. And we had few of the tools we needed to make sense of it.

As an integral participant in the drama of my mother’s shattered reality, I felt my own life story fragment just as hers did. To cope with the madness all around me, I stayed cloistered in my safe world of daydreams and books, and I tried not to notice what was going on in my family. As I shoved more inexplicable and painful events to the back of my mind, my crisis only intensified. I could not see how to fit the growing pile of disturbances into a bigger picture, so I stored such moments as I experienced them—out of context, in isolation. I still find it challenging to fit together the disjointed pieces of our life as a family. This is why storytelling matters.

A narrative is a kind of map. When we tell stories about our lives, we nail down what is what, and link cause with effect. Theorists who study narratives point out, however, that narrative continuity can easily be disrupted, broken, or fragmented. This happens when an event seems inexplicable, or utterly separate from everything else in life, or in conflict with a preexisting conception of the world. Yet people need narrative continuity, and when we tell our life stories we struggle to fill in the gaps and arrange the fragments in order. Memories acquire meaning through association: successive events enrich and shift the significance of previous events as we retell our stories over time. Storytelling becomes an act of integration and self-creation.

At some point in high school I realized I could describe my situation to my friends—sort of. I would carefully assure them that they shouldn’t be alarmed if my mother did something strange, explaining that she had trouble knowing what was real. But the language I used was borrowed from my father. I couldn’t allow myself to feel schizophrenia, to find my own words for it, or form my own sense of what had happened to us. So my pile of unprocessed memories lay waiting, until I escaped my mother’s house and finally my self-protective buffer began to break down. One winter, at the age of 25, I sat down to my word processor and started recording a flood of recollections. It’s clear now that I was trying to pull them together into some kind of shape, but they came out in abject disarray, and stayed that way. I did at least begin to deeply consider the emotional impact of those events—to try to make sense of the thing that had torn sense away from me.

It was a good first step. However, I needed more than simply to open myself up. I also needed stories from other people, and basic facts that could help me understand what I had lived through. I needed context. Now, after a decade of reading, listening, learning, and telling and retelling, I do have some sense of context. But I still have many questions. So as I write for this blog in the coming months, I hope my stories and thoughts will help all of us to better make sense of ourselves, our lives, and our special position in the world as Daughters and Sons.

——Marin Sardy