A storied manifesto

Our stories offer a glimpse of who we are, who we want to be, what we feel shame about, what we overlook and exclude, what we hope for, and what we value.

Being disillusioned is good for us.  It is often painful to feel our taken-for-granted stories crack and crumble as we change and move beyond them.  We have the potential to write new and better stories through this painful disintegration of narratives, including those that have been both important and necessary and to which we’ve been attached.

To work with relationships is to work with conflict.  To work with conflict is to work with relationships.  We are social beings, and our social relations are necessarily full of conflict, even though it our social selves are crucial to understanding the sort of creatures we are.  We must see the challenges of living among the hell of other people not as a failure, but as inevitable, and never simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Stories are not to be found in people, but between them.  Our approach is therefore both relational and hopeful.

This conflict is interesting.  It shows us our best and our worst selves.  It allows us an opportunity to choose better selves; to fail again, and to fail better.

Our choices are meaningful, but we always make them in contexts we did not choose.  Our choices, in turn, shape the contexts in which we live and act, and from which we will make or fail to make further choices.

Stories are material, and it is possible to rescue narrative approaches from the idealism of politics which start and end with identity. Narrative approaches uncover the cultural foundations of the stories we tell about ourselves and the material conditions which create them. They also offer the hope that things can be otherwise than the way they are.

Seeing clearly where we are is necessary in securing our first steps to something new.

We live our lives through stories.  We are pattern-finding, storytelling animals.  We keep the confusion and madness of ‘incorrigibly plural’ reality at bay and make the world intelligible and tameable through the telling of stories.  We cannot do otherwise, but in telling stories we exclude much of the richness of existence.