Tammy Letherer It was a brand new, emerald green Schwinn 10-speed bike. I was thirteen years old, and I’d never owned something so beautiful. The paint sparkled magically in the sunlight and when I rode that bike through the neighborhood, I sparkled too. I rolled easily through a landscape peppered with unhappy parents, mean girls, first crushes, and bad skin with my hands up, nothing to hold on to and, in those moments at least, nothing holding me back.
Then one day the bike was gone—stolen from our garage before my hands could become accustomed to the curve of the handlebars. And I went back to being ordinary, believing that magic was out of reach or meant for other people.
This memory came to me, unbidden, a few days ago while I was walking my dog. I hadn’t thought of that bike in years, but suddenly I saw it in all its glory and I wanted to cry. In fact, the waves of emotion I felt surprised me.
What the heck? I wondered. It was just a bike.
Then I noticed that the memory had some nasty thoughts attached to it: I don’t deserve nice things. I’m irresponsible. I can’t trust people.
It was the voice of doubt, criticism, and blame. In other words, the ultimate unreliable narrator.
In writing, the unreliable narrator is one who tells a story with a lack of credibility or skewed view. It’s an interesting literary device, but just as interesting is how we each have our own unreliable narrator within us that judges and comments on every experience.
It says things like:
I didn’t write today; I obviously don’t deserve to call myself a writer.
I’m too old to start writing a book.
No matter what I want to write, someone else has already done it better.
And so on.
I’m a big fan of Michael Neill, a performance coach who has a weekly podcast called Caffeine for the Soul. In a recent episode, he talks about the unreliable narrator from a spiritual perspective. He says that our experiences don’t cause us pain. Our thoughts about our experiences do.
Our personal point of view is never objective and—I like this part—just because a thought is in my head doesn’t make it true.
Remember that the next time you judge yourself for not being creative, or for not producing enough, or for something that happened when you were thirteen.
Just keep writing. Maybe even play with creating an unreliable narrator on the page.
But ignore the one that lives in your head.
