Narrative, trauma and randy flying ants

on trying to find a story out of real-life events

I could be forgiven for imagining that the swarm of flying ants I encountered on my walk home the other day were an ill harbinger. They jittered frenetically, angrily, in the humid post-rain, late summer evening, darting into my eyes, nostrils and mouth. As I passed by the pickleball courts, I noticed the players also fanning their hands in front of their faces, though the hard, rhythmic thwack of the tennis ball never paused.

When I finally got home, I screamed GNATS at Eric, which was both incomplete and, it turns out,  inaccurate, and ran into the shower to scrub off the little black nubs. 

Even with my relatively light Old Testament education, I know that pestilence is a bad omen.

 But then, the next day, Eric texted me an article from Boston.com that indicated that the ants that descended upon Boston that evening were not angry, but rather, distressingly enough, mating. Reframed in that light, I could sense their aggressive sexual energy, and I was increasingly disturbed to have inhaled some. But: could these mating ants, bringers of life, not in fact be a good sign? 

Who knows? Narrative can only be applied after the fact, and so far my time since that evening has been relatively uneventful.

Although narrative only takes shape once events have occurred, there’s a plethora of research showing that it’s healthy to process trauma as a story. These studies tell us that it is not just what we say or how we say it, but the meaning we can glean from suffering. Only when we create complete narratives, studies indicate, can we expect to move forward, unstuck from PTSD flashbacks.

I now have a (VERY PRELIMINARY!) first draft of a memoir, but I’m still not quite sure what it’s about. In my intro to memoir class through the wonderful Boston-based nonprofit Grub Street, we learned about Vivian Gornick’s concept of the situation and the story.

The Situation: What happens to the “I” character

The Story: The meaning that the narrator makes of it

But I have often felt like a bad memoirist (bad patient?), because I still don’t know what to make of my narrative.

The Situation: I got sick, and was stuck that way for two years

The Story: ????

But I don’t have a coherent narrative, or even any particularly wise bon mots to distill from my experience.

It happened. My life since then almost certainly would have unfolded differently if it hadn’t. Better? Worse? Who is to say?

I’m sure I have a different lens on the whole thing now than I did in the thick of it, than I did at thirty, than I will at seventy. I just keep telling myself that if I can think hard enough, some sort of narrative will emerge. Some sort of story, a lesson, will arise from an unlucky situation. But in real life, the pieces don’t quite fit neatly.

And, as with the ants, it’s never clear what the story will be when we’re living it — or even in the first draft.