Transcript for Forget Your Self

Jim Fleming: Do you want to tell a different kind of story about yourself? Producer Sara Nics says, “forget it.”

Sara Nics: Want to know the story behind why you’re hearing this show right now? However true or fictional, here it is.

As the only child of a single parent, my mother’s story shaped my life. It was not joyful or pleasant, and the moral was this: life is difficult, you’re not safe, trust no one, expect bad things.

My mother would have small dinner parties, invite old friends and recite the saga of her self. It was a tale of victimhood and pain, of her own brittle defiance and brilliant will.

When I was a kid my mother was the center of my world. I watched her carefully. I believed her biography of hardship and then saw her choose over and over again to make her life difficult.

As her child, her ever-available audience, she tried to make her story my story, and she did until I saw that her story was only her interpretation of events.

For a while I tried to show her the truth, that life could be different, that she didn’t need to repeat and repeat and repeat the past. It didn’t work. Rebellious, I tried to craft a story of myself that was the opposite of hers. If she was a valley, I would be a mountain. If she was shadow, I would be sunshine. I told myself that I was compassionate, I was trusting and easy-going, I would not see life as difficult, and I would not have children.

Think of that cliché’d vignette, a woman in her thirties as reprimanding her child or fussing over a spouse, and then her hands fly to her mouth, she groans and thinks, “Oh God, I’m becoming my mother.”For years I worked hard to avoid ever having one of those moments.

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My mother has Alzheimer's now. Memory by memory, she has lost the story of why she is the way she is.

As the disease stripped away her personal mythology she didn’t seem to feel more free, she seemed more afraid.

 After her diagnosis, I realized how few true facts I knew about her life. I asked questions to try to fill the gaps. She got confused; she couldn’t answer.

With no living siblings, no spouse, and no memory, my mother’s story is fading fast. I’m supposed to feel sad about that, but honestly? Right now? I feel free.

Remember when I mentioned those dinner parties, those stages upon which my mother performed her theater of self? There’s a reason why I didn’t regale you with her sagas. I don’t believe them. They’re not true. They are just myth and misshapen memory.

As I get older, I also believe my own stories less and less, they’re powerful but false. As I stop believing in my stories, a lot of comforting myths begin to look like lies as well: God, romance, even the idea of my self.

Disbelief doesn’t feel comfortable, but it does feel true.

Fleming: That’s TTBOOK producer Sara Nics. This isn’t the first time we’ve questioned consciousness. Want to dig through our archives? You can find them online at TTBOOK.org. I’m Jim Fleming, it’s To the Best of Our Knowledgefrom Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International.