Personal Lore

In Episode XIV, we explore personal lore ... the stories we carry about our own lives, how memory reshapes them over time, and what happens when the story we remember becomes as meaningful as what actually happened.

Co-written by Doug Quigley

Written and narrated by Gary Naccarato.

For more, visit theartofclarity.studio

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Topics include attention, focus, mindfulness, digital distraction, creativity, memory, and the impact of technology on the nervous system.

Transcript

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Maybe, maybe we don't just remember our lives. We edit them. And that editing is how we make sense of them. And that brings us one more step closer to clarity. I have a good friend, Doug, who helps me develop most of my podcast episodes. He's full of fantastic ideas and keeps me on track so I don't veer too far off the message. Doug often says Knowledge of yourself is power. Arm yourself. I love that. But lately I've been wondering what exactly we're arming ourselves with. Is it facts, memories, stories? Editing versus arming yourself. Do those two things interconnect somehow? Or are they two entirely different things? I think the answer may come down to two words Personal lore. And I've been thinking about my personal lore a lot lately. Because just over a year ago I started writing excuse me, because I'm not a fan of this word, but a memoir about my illness. Everything I had before it, then losing it, including my identity, remission, and finding a new identity when my old world no longer existed. But as weird as this sounds, I didn't ask one person who was with me or around me during that time. I didn't talk to my doctors. I didn't research the history of my illness beyond the things I already knew, because it was incredibly important to me that the book came from my memory and my memory only. I didn't want my memories of those fourteen years to be tainted by other people's memories. Only me, only my perspective. No one else's opinions, observations, or documentation mattered to me. I didn't and I still don't want my memories diluted by differing differing perspectives or correct terminology. It needed to feel messy, vivid, but messy, just like my experience in real life was. And I suppose somewhere underneath that decision was the belief that my memory belonged to me, that there was my version of those fourteen years, and then there was everybody else's versions. And if I could keep theirs away from mine, somehow mine would remain intact, untouched, mine. Except there was a problem. It already wasn't. When you take on something like a memoir, it's fascinating to observe how memory works. Some things were so vivid, but ultimately wrong. Most specifically timelines. I would be so sure that this happened then, or that I went to see a particular doctor out of state in the summer of twenty fourteen. I remember because it was right after a big project I had been working on for months. I had actually pushed my doctor's appointment to accommodate my work. Then I'd remember that when I was flying back from the doctor's visit, I was wearing a mask, so it had to have happened during COVID. And then I'd go back and try to connect that timeline to the actual events, and sometimes it was shocking how wrong I was. The amazing thing to me was that when I traveled to that particular doctor's appointment, I was already well into my disability and had retired from my job several years before. I hadn't remembered the wrong doctor, or the wrong airport, or necessarily even the wrong feeling. I had remembered the meaning correctly, the work, illness, travel, doctors, my life being interrupted, but my brain had rearranged the furniture. Memory doesn't seem particularly interested in chronology. It's more interested in meaning. And maybe, maybe that's because our brains aren't filing cabinets. We don't just open a drawer and pull out exactly what happened. We rebuild. And every time we rebuild something, there's an opportunity for it to change. Not necessarily because we're lying, not because we're trying to deceive ourselves, because we're human. The strange part is that the altered version can feel every bit as real as the original, sometimes more real. So does that somehow play into how I remember the events unfolding? Did my brain arrange fourteen years of illness according to meaning rather than time? And if it did, did that make my memoir less true? I'm not sure it did. Maybe factual accuracy and emotional truth aren't always exactly the same thing. That's uncomfortable territory for someone writing a memoir, because obviously facts matter. You can't move twenty fourteen to twenty twenty because it makes a chapter better. But perhaps the mistake itself tells you something. Why did my mind connect those two events? Why did those memories live next door to each other when six years separated them? Maybe that's part of the story too. Welcome to the Art of Clarity, a podcast about creativity, the nervous system, and the strange ways the modern world competes for our minds. When the film The Odyssey came out a few months ago, suddenly you saw all of these people coming forward pissed that the movie wasn't verbatim to Homer's text. But there's something funny about demanding absolute fidelity to a story whose origins are tangled up in oral tradition. Before stories were fixed to pages, they were spoken, remembered, retold, passed from one person to another. And when stories travel through people, they change. A detail disappears, another becomes important, something gets bigger, something gets funnier, the monster gets another head, the storm gets worse. Eventually the telling becomes part of the story. That connects perfectly to personal lore. Because families have oral traditions too. Story we've heard so many times we can practically remember being there, even when we weren't. When I was probably around eleven years old, I was fascinated with books about the Lochness monster, Bigfoot, Roswell. I couldn't get enough of that stuff. Mysteries or riddles waiting to be solved. Could Bigfoot really exist out there in this day and age without us having definitive proof? In the mid 1970s, my dad worked for an asphalt company based in Spokane, Washington. When a county somewhere in the Pacific Northwest wanted freeways, highways or roads repaved or repaired, they would contract the company where my dad worked. Inland asphalt would truck in and build a plant near wherever they were going to pave. Somewhere they had access to rock so they could turn it into asphalt for the job. Pretty intense blue collar work. This particular job was on a road way out from any town or population in northwestern Montana. About eight or ten guys went out to do the job, get the asphalt plan up and running, then start the actual paving of the road. Most of the guys had their own campers or RVs. A handful slept in tents. Again, way out in the middle of nowhere. After a rough day at work in the heat, the men came back to camp, sat around, drank the day away, probably swapped hunting stories. Probably one of the most common examples of personal lore. That fish was this big while holding both arms out as far as they'll reach. But back to my dad. After everyone went to bed, as my dad would tell the story several times throughout his life, he woke up from a bright light. So bright he thought he had overslept. Sensing something wasn't right, he stepped outside of the camper and just stood there. Most of the other men had awakened as well. Everyone silent, looking up at the sky. My dad would say the entire sky was blocked by a structure moving slowly overhead. He couldn't see the black of the sky. Even near the tree lines and the mountains climbing the sides of the valley. I remember him saying the bottom of the structure sort of looked like Swiss cheese. The light that emanated from it was a soft green. There was no sound coming from whatever the moving structure was. He said he didn't remember speaking with the other men. Everyone was just kind of in a daze. No words came out. Then, after what he said felt like ten minutes of staring up at the sky, it disappeared. He didn't remember how. Did it shoot up into the sky? Did it continue tracing the earth until it eventually disappeared behind the mountains? Or did it literally just disappear? He couldn't remember. The next morning he said the guys on the crew spoke about it briefly, but oddly, only briefly and casually. There wasn't much drama surrounding the night before. They all actually wondered if they had really seen anything. The trucks had AM radios in them. It was hard to get a signal, but if you were diligent, you could tune in to a staticky station from Kalispell, Montana. The news reported that there had been sightings of something in the sky the night before, but no details. Two days later they heard reports that it had been one of the largest UFO sightings ever in the Pacific Northwest. It was supposedly even reported in the Missoulean, although I can't confirm that. Years later I went looking, and there were really significant UFO reports in Montana around that time. What I couldn't find was his story, the enormous structure, the thing that had supposedly covered the entire sky. Maybe I'll never find it. Maybe there isn't anything to find. Unfortunately my dad has since passed, so I can't ask him, and maybe that's part of why I've been thinking about this. I remember hearing that story throughout my life. Not a ton, but if the moment called for it he would bring it up. It almost seemed like the moment started to fade for him as the years went by. He would acknowledge it, but not in the same detail like when he first came home from the job. I was fascinated by his description. And now, whenever someone I'm with brings up that they saw something in the sky or that their uncle had a close call while driving along the Columbia River in the middle of the night in southeastern Washington, I'll bring up the story of my dad. And here's where it gets interesting to me. I wasn't there. I never saw the green light. I never stood beside that camper. I never looked up at something that apparently covered the sky. I don't remember the event. I remember him remembering the event. And now he's gone. So in some strange way I've become the keeper of the memory. Except it's not my memory. My memory is a memory of my dad's memory. And every time I tell it, I'm doing exactly what people have done with stories forever. I'm passing it on. Maybe I emphasize the Swiss cheese because that's the detail that fascinated me as a kid. Maybe he emphasized something different when he first told it. Maybe something I now believe he said was actually something I added thirty years later. I don't know. I can't ask him. Whether the UFO encounter was real or not almost doesn't matter because it's real to me. Not necessarily as an event, as a story, as part of him, and therefore part of me. That's personal lore. A friend of mine recently told me about a woman he'd interviewed years ago while researching UFO experiences. She remembered an extraordinary experience in remarkable detail, the kind of memory someone can describe as though it happened yesterday. But years later she questioned it herself. Did it actually happen? Had she wanted something to happen? Had imagination, expectation, and memory somehow became tangled together? I love that she could hold both possibilities. I remember this and I don't know if it happened. These two statements sound contradictory. Maybe they're not. Because vividness isn't proof. Certainty isn't proof. And uncertainty doesn't automatically make an experience meaningless. That's where this gets much bigger than UFOs. We all have memories that became part of our identity long before we ever thought to integrate them. The teacher who told you that you weren't very smart, the parent who said you were the difficult child, the relationship you tell yourself you ruined. The moment you became the funny one, the responsible one, the fuck up, the successful one, the sick one, the strong one. How much of who we think we are comes from things that happened? And how much comes from the story we eventually constructed around what happened. That's where personal lore can become dangerous because a story doesn't have to be factually perfect to control you. You only have to believe it belongs to you. And this brings me back to the memoir. I thought I was protecting my memories from everybody else's versions. I wanted them untouched, but they weren't untouched. My mind had been touching them for fourteen years, reorganizing them, connecting them, dropping things, holding on to strange details, building meaning. My father had done the same thing before he gave his story to me, and I've been doing it ever since. Generations of people did it with stories long before anybody wrote down the Odyssey. Maybe there isn't an untouched version. Maybe we're looking for something that doesn't exist. A pristine original memory sitting somewhere inside us waiting to be recovered. A master file. Maybe memory isn't the archive. Maybe the edited version is the archive. And if that's true, perhaps knowledge of yourself doesn't mean discovering some perfectly accurate original version of yourself. Maybe it means becoming aware of the edits. Which stories did I inherit? Which ones have I repeated so many times that they've become facts? And which stories about myself stopped being true years ago, but I'm still living as though they are. Maybe that's where editing and arming yourself finally meet. Knowledge of yourself is power. Arm yourself. Maybe arming yourself isn't collecting more evidence about who you were. Maybe it's understanding the stories you've been using to explain who you are and realizing you're still allowed to edit. Not the facts, not what happened, but what it gets to mean now. Which brings me back to something I've been struggling with since remission. Who am I now? For years I knew the answer, or at least I thought I did. I had a career, a title, a life I'd built. Then I became sick. Eventually illness became its own identity. Then I got better. And strangely, getting better didn't automatically give me the old identity back. That person wasn't waiting for me. For a while I thought my job was to find him. Maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm not supposed to recover the original version. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe I'm allowed to become an adaptation, not a replacement, not a recovery, an adaptation. Some things carried forward, some things lost, some things inherited, some things rewritten, and some blank pages. I don't really have the plot, or even an outline. I'm writing it day by day, writing, erasing, rewriting, erasing. Maybe I'm editing my future while I'm living it. Maybe we all are. For years I thought I was a flake because I was I was repeatedly told by others I was. Not that I could be flaky, that I was a flake. There's a difference. At some point, something I sometimes did became something I believed I was. And once you've decided something about yourself, it's remarkably easy to find the evidence to support it. I said I'd go, and then I didn't. Flake. I canceled at the last minute. Flake. I genuinely meant yes when I said it. But when the day came I couldn't do it. Flake. Everyone became another exhibit in the case I'd already built against myself. What I wasn't doing was looking at all the evidence that contradicted the story. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I would flake often. But what people didn't understand was that my intentions were always good. I wanted to go to my coworkers' wedding reception. I wanted to go out for birthday drinks with a friend. I wanted to go to the beach on Saturday. And I'd said yes because I genuinely meant yes. But then the time would come, and I just couldn't do it. It wasn't because something better came along. It wasn't because I didn't care. There was something internal stopping me that I didn't understand. So other people gave it a name for me. Flake. And eventually I did too. Now that I have some distance from it, I believe at least some of that aversion to social situations may have been connected to what was happening with my health. My illness hadn't fully emerged. I didn't know yet what was coming. But looking back, I can see things that weren't quite right that eventually became much worse when I got sick. And all these years later, now in remission, I understand something about myself that I didn't understand then. I have to pick and choose. And here's the important difference. I don't say yes and then decide whether I'm going to show up. I decide before I say yes. I don't commit to things simply because somebody wants me there, or because I think I'm supposed to go, or because saying no might disappoint somebody. I commit to things that resonate with me, things I actually want to experience, concerts, museums, a backyard barbecue, dinner with people I love. And when I commit, I go, I keep my word. I still say no to a lot of things, probably more than some people would like. And apparently, instead of being known as flaky, I'm sometimes now known as difficult. Fine, I'll take difficult over flaky any day. Because in this context, difficult isn't a flaw. It means I'm not automatically available for everything. I'm more careful about what I say yes to because I understand myself better. And the word difficult only stings if I let somebody else define what it means. Maybe that's the difference between being defined by your personal lore and actually knowing yourself. Knowledge of yourself as power. Arm yourself. And that's when personal lore becomes more than an interesting story about your past. It starts determining your present. Because there's an enormous difference between I did something and that's who I am. Maybe that's one of the most consequential edits we make. We turn verbs into nouns. Something we did becomes something we are, and then we start living accordingly. But maybe the reverse is possible too. Maybe once we recognize the noun we've been carrying around, we can stop living as though it's our name. Maybe we don't just remember our lives, we edit them. And maybe knowing ourselves isn't about finding the original version. Maybe it's about recognizing the edits, the ones we made, the ones other people made for us, the ones we inherited, the ones we're still making. Because clarity may not come from finally figuring out exactly what happened. Sometimes clarity comes from understanding what we've made it mean and deciding whether we still want to carry that meaning forward. That's personal lore. And maybe knowledge of yourself really is power. But before you arm yourself, it might be worth checking the story you're carrying. This is Gary Naccarato, and this has been The Art of Clarity.