I was watching the movie “Memento” with my son. In the movie, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is searching for the man who raped and murdered his wife. He suffers from a form of amnesia caused by head trauma during the attack and ensuing burglary in which his wife was killed. His brain is incapable of holding memories for more than a few minutes. Every day he wakes up and has forgotten the events of the day before. To deal with this, he has tattooed a network of notes and clues on his body so that he will not forget the important information he has found out about his wife’s killer. The events of the film are viewed as Leonard sees them. The story unfolds in reverse order until it finally comes full circle.
The nature of the work I do is to work in the gaps between personal and organizational transformation. The stories you tell about yourself is your identity. The stories your company tells about itself is its culture. Where these two intersect is where magic happens. We will do anything to be congruent with the story we have for ourselves. People who are incongruent are seen as untrustworthy, unreliable, shifty, even insane. It is a powerful pull to be consistent with who we know to be.
By the end of the movie, I realized that the narrator was unreliable. We just assumed his point of view was the nature of reality. It wasn’t. (I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it).
Here’s the crux: We can’t always trust the narrators of our own stories. We simply assume the narrator’s perspective is correct. But we hang onto old identities and old stories that no longer serve us. Its all we know.
Many times in my life, I’ve had a reality check to see if I was being pushed by my demons or pulled by my visions. Sometimes the lines would get blurred. It dawned on me, after watching this movie, that I had based my life on the assumption that I could always trust the narrator. Just because I see the world in a particular way, what I am seeing must be real. But what if the narrator is unreliable?
Why shouldn’t we trust our own senses? We are the narrators of our own stories and we must assume that “seeing is believing”. But that notion is not necessarily true, since “seeing” in the Buddhist sense is an art not a science. It takes practice to really “see” without filters to what is so.
My 16 year old son, Tobin, fell into a terrible substance abuse habit and a sociopathic tendency to lie about everything he did. I saw my son as irresponsible, immature, incapable of taking care of himself and completely untrustworthy. I told him I did stupid shit when I was a kid, but he did really, really stupid shit. My younger son did battle with leukemia and the few years we were in and out of hospitals dealing with his illness, Tobin got lost in the shuffle.
I saw in him, teenage arrogance and a white kid who thought he was a black rapper. I didn’t understand him. The narrator told me to do all the things that one does in these situations: I spent over $100k sending him to therapists, wilderness programs, boarding schools, outpatient clinics, AA meetings, and support groups. I borrowed money that I did not have to give to my son, who seemingly did not care.
I sent him away in his worst time to a wilderness program when he was just 14. This was the first picture I saw of him in 7 weeks. I burst into tears. Nothing was working. What was I doing?
It was my son and I who watched this movie together. And it suddenly dawned on me: I was the unreliable narrator of my own story about the relationship with my son. If I couldn’t trust the narrator, then the story may not be true. I needed to deconstruct the story with the assumption of a false narrator. I listened to Tobin tell me what it was like to be alone in a boarding school with all boys who picked on him constantly. I realized that he was suffering and that was why he was self medicating. I was deeply moved by his tears I had not seen before.
I am changing my entire business practice, this blog being a part of it, to see if I can come off the road and be with my son. He needs me. He is 16 and I have two years left. I will not let this pass. The reason nothing worked is that my son is an introvert and he was in pain. It doesn’t discount all the stupid shit he did. He is still on a very short leash. But slowly, over time I am beginning to make a new connection.
And no matter how I’m feeling, especially when I’m in reaction, when I am stressed, when I am angry and when I am, myself, in survival I have learned to never assume the narrator is all that reliable. So I continually check in to discover: Who’s story am I telling right now?
Don’t trust the narrator.
Life unfolds. Old journeys end. New ones begin
