Last week I wrote about storytelling and romance: how when we're young, the stories we tell about ideal love are different from the ones we tell when we're older.
I'm still thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. Here at the hospital, I'm giving therapy to a 19-year-old boy who suffered a brain injury that largely took away his use of language. He lives without access to most words. He can speak four- or five-word sentences, but that's about the limit of his vocabulary. While he experiences emotion, sensation, and images, he doesn't have labels for them. In turn, it's hard for us to imagine what his world feels like. One strange thing is that when he does speak, he actually doesn't show the frustration most of us would feel if we'd temporarily forgotten our words. He just speaks a quiet sentence then stares blankly, as if his desire, pride, and anger had vanished with his vocabulary.
Maybe we do need words to turn events into something that feels personal--into something desirable or important or delicious or evil. My patient is partly in the hospital because a year ago, he got shot in the stomach. One of my jobs is to figure out if he's suffering from "trauma," or painful memories of the shooting, in the way another person might. He does sometimes say he feels terrified about what happened to him. But his terror is not personalized in a story. For instance, he doesn't sit in his room ruminating, like many of us do, with angry language about his fate. He doesn't shape and emphasize the memory by telling it to his shrink. The images of being shot, and of being left in a hospital bed without visitors, must move in and out of his visual cortex like a dream. I imagine he has emotionally intense flashes of the man who almost killed him. But he has no narrative to tell.
If you live in a world of emotion without a story binding it together, it's probably hard to own any experience as "mine." If you can't name the actors in the story, and your own role, and what caused what to happen, the story can't feel like your own. In turn, your future probably doesn't feel like a real thing which you can shape, either. Looking at this boy is frightening for me--as if he's suspended in space. Even his peers on the ward come and go without his being able to think "I'll go play cards with him after lunch."
Of course this sad fact has its flipside, too. Those of us who love our words know--in contrast--that words are the tools that give us a handle on life. Words help us name and remember the things we like and the things we want to avoid. We can label parts of our identities to emphasize in our relationships with others, shaping personality by naming, valuing, and choosing. I'm thinking of how we are authors as long as we have access to our grammar. We turn the visuals stuck in our memory and the surprises of our bodies into a story that is "mine," and steady, and subject to our will.
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