Mythology

I posted a few days ago about the death of someone from my hometown in Michigan, and I deleted the post the next day—not because I said anything I regretted, but because it didn’t seem relevant to this blog. As more time has passed, the relevance is becoming clearer. The details about her life or my trying to make sense of why her death mattered to me weren’t so important. What is important is that when something pulls me in—intellectually, emotionally, or, preferably, both—that’s something I want to pay attention to, because that’s the nucleus of who I am.

I used to tell myself I was shy, and I used shyness as my excuse for not approaching strangers to take their portraits. In one week of confronting that fear, I found that I wasn’t shy at all. In fact, if you watched me approach strangers, you’d see someone confident and friendly, able to put people at ease and make them laugh. And I’ve done this without a struggle. It’s been fascinating to step outside myself and see me doing these things. But what it’s left me with are questions: What else am I telling myself that’s not true? What other myths am I perpetuating? And what are these myths keeping me from doing, keeping me from being?

This all comes together with the death of Mrs. Wyngarden in this way: I wasn’t close to her on a personal level. I hadn’t talked to her since high school, and though I knew she was ill, I didn’t expect to feel anything when I heard she died. Yes, it would be sad. But sad in the way it’s sad when you hear about the death of anyone. Instead, I couldn’t get it out of my head all week. Like a movie reel running through my mind was a string of memories from my hometown, my childhood.

I was stunned not only by my sadness over her death, but by the sense of connection I felt to that place and the people who live there. I love Southern California—I think I’ll likely live the rest of my life somewhere between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. But an essential part of who I am is where I’m from. It’s in the bio I wrote for myself (“and raised in the same town in Michigan where her parents grew up”), and as I edited that bio, I thought about deleting those words because they didn’t seem relevant, but the bio didn’t sound right without them.

I don’t have answers right now, but I think this is important—not just reexamining the things I tell myself, but looking at what where I’m from means in terms of who I am and what interests me.

What are the things you tell yourself about who you are? Are they true?