Our Stories Can Save Us

"According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience.... However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience."
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

We all have our D-Day stories, don't we? We all go back and pore over the days, weeks, years that led up to D-Day. Was he cheating when we were visiting our sister? Was he cheating when we were pregnant? And on and on.
We beg for details to help us fill out our stories. What we don't know, we invent. The Other Woman was a gymnast in bed. She had long legs. She laughed charmingly at his stupid jokes.
The mind movies are devastating. We lie in bed playing them over and over again. Or they ambush us when we hear a certain song, drive past a certain restaurant, notice a certain time of year.
Thing is, we weren't there. We will never ever know what it was really like. Nothing is ever really as fabulous as we think it is. Not the celebrity lives we envy in magazines. Not the other moms' lives with their kids who never seem to whine. Not the Other Woman with her imagined sexual sorcery.
Which is why we need to tell our stories with ourselves cast as the heroine. Maybe a tragic heroine, but a heroine nonetheless. Our stories can save us, if we let them. I'm not talking about creating a fiction, necessarily. But as Lidia Yuknavitch notes, there's a ton of brain science about the value of stories in healing trauma. It's why rape survivors need to tell their stories. It's why plane crash victims need to tell their stories. Over and over and over.
And it's why betrayed wives need to tell their stories. It's how we make sense of what's happened to us. And it's how we re-insert ourselves back into a narrative that we've been written out of. Our husband might have conveniently ignored our role in his life, the OW might be able to pretend we don't exist or that we shouldn't exist. But we don't have to buy that story.
No way.
Our story begins and ends with us – fighting like hell for our bodies, our hearts and souls. Yuknavitch's book, The Chronology of Water, is about a resurrection, a rebirth. It's about a woman who refuses to give up on herself, who refuses to accept others' stories. She is whole, just as we are. Not bit players in another's story but stars in our own.
Tell your story. Tell it as many times as you can to anyone who will hold it in their own hearts, without judgement, without flinching at your pain. Tell it until it fits your life and resolves the past. It is your truth and it will be your rebirth.