Know thyself ... through your own stories

It was the photo that really drew me to the essay.

An older woman holding up a photograph of her younger self.  And Indian looking.

The older woman looked like my mother. Her younger self in the photo that she was holding reminded me of a cousin.

Source

I wanted to know more about the woman in the photograph.  I googled for "dirkmvp41" that was in the "Photograph by".

It led me to the description here:

My grandmother has lived with me for fifteen years, my whole life. If I had to name three of the most influential people in my life, she would definitely be one of them, and this shot is a tribute to her. The picture she is holding was taking by my grandfather in 1959; she was 25. In the near half-century between then and now, my grandmother moved from India to America, had two sons, two grandchildren. I hoped to capture the essence of this wonderful woman in this photograph and display her life story. And even today, at 73 years of age, she still teaches little kids, and still continues to touch many people around her.

That was in 2007.

The essay itself is about narrative identity and how aging shapes and changes it.

It’s a story you’ve got about how you came to be, who you are, and where your life’s going. That’s not your whole identity—there are a lot of other things that are part of your identity—but it’s a really important part, and it’s a neglected part.

It is different from autoethnography, which is "a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings".  Narrative identity is simply about the person--"the story of who we are and where we’re going."  Readers of this blog can immediately see why I am drawn to this!

When telling our stories, are the memories that we use to construct our narrative identity always true?

So you live your life and you collect material as you’re going along for your life’s story and you’ve always got this material, but you could reshape it—you can rewrite it. It could be a problem, but it’s also an opportunity. I think we’ve evolved not to have perfect memory but to have strategic memory, memory that helps us accomplish our goals and so forth. We all grow up in a certain culture and we learn how to tell stories, and what’s a convincing story. Cultures differ on that.

The "strategic memory" is perhaps what I have often referred to as "selective amnesia" when trying to figure out why I don't remember events and people that my siblings or cousins bring up.  As I noted in a different context--a very different context--"The nerd in me remembers a whole lot of ideas and concepts, while maintaining a selective amnesia about people and events."

Now, about the woman in the photograph.  If she was 73 in 2007, and 12 years have gone by ... The photographer was "a junior in high school" back then, in Coppell, Texas, which according to Google maps is adjacent to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.  Practically a neighbor to my grandmother's sister, who lives in another Dallas suburb!

The world makes a lot more sense through such stories.  This requires a lot of reflection on how we came to be, who we are, and where our lives are going.  Why wouldn't we want to do more of this before the narrative ends?

Notes from the reunion: "I always remembered you as a pappu face"

There is at least one practical reason for high school reunions: they remind us how much we have changed physically, aged, all perhaps for the wiser.

Over the last year or so, as I re-connected with many old classmates, and shared my latest photos with them, many had a tough time relating to the new me.

Willie was very happy to see me at the reunion, but it took him some time to adjust to my appearance that has very little in common with the face he last saw in 1981.

"I always remembered you as a pappu face, with slightly chubby cheeks" he said, and added "even when I talked to you when you were at Venu's office a couple of years ago, I only imagined your pappu face."

I laughed.  I can easily recall that face.  The face that also got affectionately pinched a lot.  Facial hair was light, and I had just about started shaving.

The face now has a beard, which is mostly grey. The hair on top is grey and balding.  Pappu no more!

Willy on the other hand is so easily recognizable because, well, he pretty much looks the same.  So do a few others.  Most of the rest of us have gone through various levels of metamorphosis.

Sudha and Uma too had problems relating to the way I speak too.  I distinctly recall the first time I called them up from the US--they could not relate to the new me as the old Sriram of Neyveli, with my slightly Americanized accent and use of words.

One wonderful aspect of the reunion was this: despite all the changed appearances and voices, in no time we were all relating to each other of the old days.  Physical changes do not necessarily mean all that much.

Not seeing the pappu face didn't affect Willie, who sat with a small group of us who were chatting into very late hours of the night.  He was sleepy, but chose to sleep sitting up on an uncomfortable chair.  When I asked him about it the following morning, he said he slept that way because he felt he might never again get such an opportunity to be amongst old classmates.

After a couple of friends freely admitted to using hair dyes to cover the grey hair, Uma asked me something along those lines about me.

"Literally and figuratively it is 'what you see is what you get'" I told her.

I was tempted to get into how I weave my own life into the newspaper columns and academic presentations.  I wanted to talk about autoethnography.  To quite an extent, there is a lot about me in the open.  But then better sense prevailed, and I let it go.  I can imagine how bizarre it will be for a transformed pappu face to talk about autoethnography to a friend whom I barely knew 30 years ago!