Stories are dangerous: a story

When my mom's illness bloomed into full-on schizophrenia, she told urgent and improbable stories of how Chinese crime syndicates were harassing her. Things would break or go missing. Friends and neighbors were spying on her. Soon, I was complicit in these stories, too.

Stories gushed forth, mostly about how the Bad Guys were skimming percentages of her purchases at the store, how her former business partners stole her customers, how my father's failed businesses were a front for embezzling from her parents. Several times she alleged that the Bad Guys were cutting holes in her clothing and profiting off that, too -- several years before the South Park "Gnomes" episode.

For years I wrestled with her stories. I tried explaining why they were impossible; it didn't take Underpants Gnomes to explain how there was no money to be made in harassing her. I defended myself and the people she accused. I lashed out at the way she was lashing out while her own life fell apart.

I took her stories seriously, so I fought them. But I did not take her seriously.

I tried to make sense of her sensemaking. I didn't try listening to her.

Stories are powerful, and important. They are also dangerous. Jay Dragon wrote, in Wanderhome:

It is easy, I have found, to seek to imprison the world inside our stories... To build a reality where everything ties up neatly with a bow, and everything makes sense. There is a comfort in stories like these, disconnected from what it means to be alive.

Just as maps are not the terrain, stories are not the truth. At best, they are tools for find your way there.

I fought with my mother's stories of petty embezzlement, but I didn't validate her feelings of financial oppression and dependency. I fought with her stories of being spied upon, but didn't acknowledge the judgment she felt trying to live an honest life between multiple, impossibly demanding, cultures.

I made this game in an effort to empathize with my mom's lived experience. I am sure it, too, is instead trapped in my own subjective perspective.

Stories are dangerous. I have just told you a story of how I got lost in my mom's stories. Does that story move me any closer to either her truth or my own?