The other day I was talking with my mom about the gap between what I hear from friends living in various places and what’s in the news about those places. The news, of course, reports disasters and dangers, while the lived experience of people's day to day lives is mostly pretty mundane.
So, of course, I loved this quote from Amanda Ripley when I came across it:
“no one I encountered in person ever fit into a prefabricated narrative.
It is almost as though the purpose of the stories we are told is to obscure reality, not to reveal it. Because to observe reality is to trust your own perceptions. You might even start to notice that most stories are not tidy parables with morals. “The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright,” Dillard writes. A satisfying true story tends to be complicated and irreducible.”
When I was spending most of my time reading news articles and academic/government reports about care work, I had a certain understanding of what it was like. This understanding often went counter to my own experiences with care work, but I'm just one person and my experience is likely atypical.
Then I accidentally unhooked myself from the ties of a specific location and drifted off into the world. I kept getting myself invited to stay in the homes of strangers, strangers who were frequently current or former care workers. They told me their stories while we cooked and ate dinner and washed up or while we ran errands. Those stories were quite different than the narrative told in the media and those official reports.
The reports and the articles are true, it's just a different way to experience the world. They're reporting what's easy to measure. They're churning out stories with no time to delve deep. They’re looking for the newsworthy, something we can reduce to a pithy headline and a tidy narrative. I have time to follow people around for days or weeks and sometimes months. I'm not writing up articles and data points to publish or meet academic standards. I don't need to produce 'content.'
Spending the past few years in other people's homes, with other people's communities and families, has shown me just how many realities can exist within the same overarching circumstances of working conditions, housing markets, and medical systems. It's one thing to skim a report full of statistics. It's another to hear it from people generously sharing their lives with me, either by inviting me to live with them for a while or sitting next to me on a long bus ride.
It's difficult to understand what aspects of our lives are changeable and which are simply aspects of the human condition. It's not always clear what's within our control and what's outside of our power. Being open to other people — real people who are being vulnerable and honest about their lives, be it over coffee or in a book — is how I've begun to learn to tell the difference.
What’s helped you break free of the constraints keeping us from imagining a better world? A lot of people tell me this is what they love about sci-fi. I struggle to see beyond the limitations of what’s in front of me, although it appears that this is something humans are generally pretty good at.
An article to accompany all of our advice on journaling.
When people talk about guaranteed income, they can be talking about some pretty different visions. Here's what MLK advocated in terms of guaranteed income.
Good news for people in the US: Medicaid’s Money Follows the Person program has been extended to 2027.
It's time to rethink peer review.
How to have a family meeting, to read with Do we treat strangers better than our family?
On slipping back into versions of ourselves we'd rather leave behind.
Advice for managing the dreaded vulnerability hangover.
A reminder of how much our comparatively small actions matter.
WOW! Did you ever hit the nail on the head with this post. Even outside my dementia caregiver world, I am constantly amazed at how little I recognize the world around me from what I read in the press. I live in the Middle East, in Israel, in my ancient homeland on the east coast of the country - what many refer to as the West Bank (west of Jordan). Few who do not live here are willing to look at the reality of Jewish-Arab co-existence that we experience day in and day out. Bad stuff happens and when it does it is BAD. But we also have the option of living focused on the good, the experiences that are ignored because it does not fit someone else's narrative (about my life). And in my caregiver's world, how often do I hear people cursing all the things that are wrong in every government office. And yes, sometimes the bureaucracy is exhausting. But sometimes, if we look for the good, it is there to be found. No one will write the story of my annual encounter with a mid-level bureaucrat in the Tax Authority. An annual form that I must file, that 90% of the population now files on line, is complicated by virtue of my husband's disability status. It takes 5 minutes in the knowing hands of the bureaucrat. Our annual meeting last 20-30 minutes. We discuss faith, humanity, gratitude, etc. When I asked last week if she could set up the internet connection so I can file the form on line, she stopped short and said absolutely NO!. And why? Because then we would be denied our annual conversation that is good for both of us. Find the good. It's often there, right here.
Thank you for this post. Your observations feel very relevant to me at this moment & I loved your links. Even more than usual today.