Re-storying Our Lives

The year was 1997. All of the kids who lived on the street crowded in my driveway for a game of basketball. It was our usual. We would play for hours on end after school until our parents called us in for dinner, even defying the setting sun with use of strategically placed car headlights. Every now and then, games got heated. A block misinterpreted as a flagrant foul. An elbow thrown on a rebound making contact with a rib. A hot tempered preteen talking shit. 

That day, our normally competitive game of basketball started going downhill fast. In a flash, tempers flared and yelling began. If you haven’t been around 8 and 9 year olds in a fight, consider yourself lucky. They hurl insults like empires hurl bombs. Their words hurt. That day, I was on the receiving end and at the time the best way to hurt me was to tell me the truth. 

After some general yelling, my best friend shouted, “Santa’s not real!” The words burned into my mind. 

As he was running back to his house, he added in, “And the Easter Bunny too!” 

I began to weep as my friend ran home consumed by his own anger. When I confirmed these claims with my parents, my world felt much more fragile. I wondered if Christmas could ever be fun again. If Santa wasn’t the one bringing my gifts, what even was the point? To 8-year-old me, it felt like the world was ending. The irony is that my vocation almost thirty years later is wrapped around the very story my grief blocked me from seeing. But most interesting now are the other questions that arose that day and the days following. The truth about Santa made me question fundamental parts of my life. Reflecting now, I was dancing around the question: what other stories am I believing? 

Over the last few weeks, I have heard from people who, like me, wonder about how the penchant for and attraction to lies have seeped their ways into societal norms. For some reason, this topic of conversation comes up every four years or so…

In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary named the word “post-truth” as the word of the year. Post-truth, they said, is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In other words, as philosopher Lee McIntyre says, “Ideology takes precedence over reality.” 

Just a year later in 2017, Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts,” on a live broadcast when asked about differing opinions about Donald Trump’s inauguration attendance.

Lies and spin have long been a political tool. However, we are now encountering further entrenchment over those lies and more blatant and vile lying.

I want to avoid the impulse to say anything is worse now than ever. But the ways we craft stories–including spinning lies–has drastically changed in recent years, which makes me wonder: is everything a story?  

Storytelling has long been central to the human ability to make meaning in the world. Yet, in recent years, the process of creating a story has become invisible, making it difficult to discern what is a story and what is the raw material that makes up a story. Blame social media, the pace of technology, the divisive political climate, the story-filled creatures we are, or perhaps a bit of all of it. The process of taking raw material–experiences, data, etc–and weaving it into a larger narrative is astonishingly fast and almost second nature, making invisible and private the intentional and formerly public act of crafting a story. 

An example of this can be seen in reports about how individuals received their news during the 2024 election cycle. Many of the stories that we know influenced the election most were quickly and invisibly fabricated from false raw material and then propagated on a national stage. The line between reality and storytelling dissolved. 

We ignore the fact that many of the stories we believe are indeed stories and have been constructed – sometimes even intentionally and deceptively. 

When we create a communal story, we take our perception of an event (perhaps even a story itself?) or a particular set of data and make it more universally accessible by weaving into a larger narrative. We transform the particular to a universal. Religion itself is a mode of storytelling, telling the particular stories of individuals–some real and others symbolic–in such a way that they speak to the larger universal experiment that is life. 

Religion teaches us that just because a story is written down doesn’t mean it is true. But religion also teaches that even the most contrived, mythical stories can be profound. Some of the most meaningful stories in the Judeo-Christian traditions are embellishments or even all together mythical. Think here about the Exodus story for which there is no archeological evidence, or even more mystical stories like the transformation of Saul or the visions of the thousands of mystics through the generations for which conventional evidence would not be available. 

When I sit down to read, I approach words on a page differently depending on the nature and medium of what I read. For example, reading the first chapter of Genesis invites me to engage with it in a different way than reading the newspaper. But it is because I have been trained–or, even conditioned–to view the newspaper as the raw materials of a story and the narrative of Genesis as a story. What if both are, in fact, stories–intentionally crafted, shared to convince it’s reader/hearer of a lesson or call to action–and treated as such? 

I want to be really clear here and say that I am not trying to convince you to find moral lessons in the newspaper; nor am I trying to demystify the Biblical narratives that so many understand as sacred. What I am trying to do is ask a question about the way we approach the stories we are told. 

In the last edition of A Modern Canon, we talked about the need to re-story our lives and thereafter re-story our world. We have become disconnected from the stories that bring joy, justice, compassion, and meaning into the world. Stories that have ordered society and movements have failed the very communities to whom the stories belong – lookin’ at you Christians. 

The more I thought about this dynamic, the more I thought about that afternoon in 1997. A story was taken away from me that day. I could have denied it, but I knew that was not a way to live and move in the world. So I had to find new stories that brought meaning to my life. 

Perhaps this moment we are in today is not unlike the day I learned the story of Santa. Maybe you, like me, find yourself feeling unmoored by a lack of stories to hold onto to give you meaning and purpose in this wild and precious life. Or perhaps, stories that once gave you meaning and purpose, joy and hope, no longer elicit those feelings. 

I want this Substack to be a place for people to begin the process of re-storying. And I want to be clear here. I don’t want to use literature to interpret the times, although it could be used in that way (see The Parable of the Sower, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, need I go on?). Rather, I want to turn to the stories in literature to find tools that help us in the re-storying. 

One of the tools Mateo Askaripour gives his readers in This Great Hemisphere is the tool to see stories for what they are: created for a purpose. Some of those purposes are good and honorable and others are not. Some stories that begin with honorable intent are co-opted for manipulation. But to re-story ourselves, we must first be able to recognize a story as an intentionally crafted narrative to convince us of something. 

Toward the end of the book, Askaripour writes, “A lie is not a thing that survives on its own. Like a sapling, it needs to be sustained and cultivated, and these two men, with a true understanding of how the world works, weren’t shaping reality, but creating it right in front of her eyes. One word at a time. She was surprised to find part of herself jealous of them, of their capacity for creation, for incredible invention.” 

People are not the only ones to experience invisibility in this story; stories themselves are invisibly manipulated to make people believe they are not stories, but rather a story’s raw material. I want to be clear in describing the difference here: there are stories and there is raw material. 

A large part of what we take in today is sold to us as raw material, but is actually an intentionally crafted story. There is nothing wrong with us taking in stories. In fact, we need stories to survive. But when we receive a story disguised as raw material, we can easily be the kid weeping in her driveway over learning the truth that it was a story all along. 

Askaripour highlights the dynamic of selective storytelling that we are experts at today. Some might call it spin or even propaganda. He says, 

“Invisibles were only shown what DPs wanted them to see on the display, and the prevailing narrative was that [character name hidden to avoid spoilers] was good and [another character name] was bad. But, then, why was he bad? If he was bad, it was because he didn’t want to uphold the status quo, and if he didn’t want to uphold the status quo, then he must have been an ally to her people, or something like that.” 

Askaripour’s reflection on storytelling provides us with a tool in this journey to re-story ourselves. He invites us to reflect on critical questions: Who is crafting the stories we consume? What is their purpose? What narratives are being upheld, and who benefits from them? These are not new questions, but they are urgent ones in an age where the line between truth and fiction often feels tenuous. This Great Hemisphere makes visible the invisible action of crafting a narrative–sometimes even to the detriment of the recipients.

That day in 1997 in my driveway, I learned a painful truth. I also stumbled into a gift that would nurture me for years to come: the ability to question the stories I’d been told. Stories are powerful—they can inspire us, guide us, and unite us. But they can also manipulate, divide, and distort. To live well in the world, we need to learn to hold our stories with open hands, examining them for the truths they reveal and the lies they might conceal.

So what does it look like to begin re-storying our lives and our world? It starts with acknowledging that every story we encounter—whether from a book, a pulpit, a campaign ad, or a tweet—has been shaped with intent. It means reading critically. It requires us to reflect on assumptions. And it even invites us to pay attention to the voices who are silenced and those who are amplified.

If I could have foreseen what was on the other side of learning the truth about Santa in the heat of an argument I might have felt less devastated. Because since then, I’ve learned that when one story falls apart, it creates space for another, better story to take its place. The loss is real, but so is the opportunity.

This Substack is an invitation to step into that opportunity together. Let’s explore the stories that are shaping us and re-shaping us, interrogate the ones that constrain us, and create new ones that move us toward a world more full of joy and meaning. Literature will be our guide, but the work will belong to all of us. Because re-storying isn’t just an individual endeavor. It’s a collective undertaking. It is a radical act of hope. And in a world so often divided by lies, hope may be the truest story we can tell.