The Douchebag Bible (15 page)

voice was unmistakable.

Failure, for him, had been no accident. It had been an

accomplishment—his defiant middle-finger to the tyranny of his

own expected greatness.

It occurred to me, listening to him with what I imagine was

a bemused grin, that we all craft a narrative for ourselves. We give

our lives all the trimmings of a myth and then believe that myth

as devoutly as any religious person believes in their whacky

dogma. We are all, within our own minds, great warriors,

misunderstood prophets, unappreciated visionaries, defiant

rebels or any number of other archetypal heroes.

Identity is not, I think, a matter of our thoughts and ideas

alone. Nor is it simply the culmination of our talents, opinions

and idiosyncrasies. Identity is the illusion that our lives have a

storyline, that who we are can be found in what we’ve been

through.

My contention is that our lives are meandering and

plotless, and though they certainly contain stories, they are not

stories in and of themselves. Any semblance of order in our

pasts—the notion that every event is linked in some fatalistic way

to every preceding and following event—is an illusion

manufactured by our needy consciousnesses. We call this illusion

self.

I was born. I was raised. I went to school. I quit school. I lazed

about for a while. I got a job. I made some money. I lost the money.

I started trying to make the money back.

You’ve just read about my 23 years of life on this planet in

one small paragraph. Does it tell a story? Certainly the events are

causally related. If I had not been born, I could not have been

raised. If I’d not gone to school, I’d have never quit school. If I’d

not lost all my money, I’d not be trying to remake it.

Cause and effect are present. Events lead to other events,

actions have reactions. There is a beginning. There is (or will be)

a middle. There will be an end. So why does my life only have the

illusion
of a storyline?

For the answer, let’s look at some men whose lives have

been adapted into stories. The movie
Ray,
for instance, tells the

life story of Ray Charles, a famous singer and musician. From the

movie, we learn that Ray lost his vision as a small child, not long

after seeing his brother drown. We see him learning to play music.

We see him innovating music. We see him falling in love. We see

his marital infidelities. We see his struggles with drug addiction.

We see him overcome obstacles and earn his place as one of the

most famous musicians of all time.

The movie was a story, for certain, but was Ray Charles’ life

a story? I’d say no. These moments we see in the film have been

embellished, idealized and edited together to make the audience

draw conclusions that would not be entirely apparent if we were

privy to all the events that occurred in the vast gulf of years

between them. Given the same facts about his life, different

writers and directors could tell entirely different stories. The

movie leads us to draw a conclusion that if Ray’s brother hadn’t

drowned, Ray would never have become the genius that he was.

This might be true, but it’s not a certainty. Cause and effect are at

work in our lives, but often obliquely.

People often say, “If only Hitler had gotten into art school.”

What if he had? Who’s to say that he wouldn’t have still

perpetrated the evil that he did? He might have quit art school

after a year and then found himself shortly thereafter on the same

path that he would have taken had he been rejected.

My friend Cody views himself as a heroic failure who

bucked everyone’s expectations of him and broke free of the

shackles of their ambitions for him. Let’s look at the facts from

which this archetypal Cody Weber was drawn (We can’t really

know these to be facts, because they were relayed to us by a biased

party, but we will not presume Cody a liar):

1. Cody was expected to do well in life.

2. Cody did not do well in life.

Based upon just these two facts, we can make Cody Weber fit any

number of archetypes. We can make him a hero who stood up

against the role others were trying to impose on him. We can

make him a weakling who buckled under the pressure of those

who wanted him to achieve great things. We can make him an

ingrate who spurned the love and support of his family out of pure

spite. We can make him a spoiled brat who glutted himself on

everyone’s love and admiration to the point that he took it for

granted.

How can we know which of these are true? How can we

know if
any
of them are true? Surely there is a cause for what

Cody perceives to be his failure—but why is it necessarily to be

found in the support of his family? Perhaps it was caused by a

chemical imbalance or an event that no one would think to tie to

said failure? Further, how do we know—and how does Cody really

know, for that matter—that his family really did expect a lot of

him or that he really is a failure? In the former case, memory has

been shown to be far less reliable than we would comfortably be

able to admit1 and in the later case his failure is contingent upon

1
Eyewitness Memory Is Unreliable
by Marc Green

http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/eyewitnessmemory.html

his personal definition of the word. Those who admire his

brilliant photography 2 certainly do not view him as a failure.

Under scrutiny, our narratives fall apart. They are our

fragile and inadequate attempts to bully our lives into making