![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 6th, 2009 09:17 pmI've been letting this essay percolate for a few days, ever since a very late-night conversation I had with an acquaintance of mine. And it made me reflect on just how important the stories we tell ourselves really are, and the far-reaching implications they carry. Movies, television, books--the media doesn't matter, but the stories do.
See, I'm a reader. I'm not a writer--at the very most, I am a wordsmith--and I am certainly no storyteller. Characters don't speak to me. But I have the greatest respect for those people who do have stories to tell, because their skill is, in my mind, one of the greatest ones there is. Those tales, those characters, help readers like me understand the world around us, the people around us, in ways that nothing else could. And sometimes they help us understand ourselves.
I still remember picking up Mercedes Lackey's book, The Oathbound, when I was about twelve or so, and while I loved the plot and the world, the thing about those books that always resonated with me strongest--especially back then--was the character Tarma. Tarma is distinctive from other women I'd read about, indeed from every other character I'd ever curled up with, in that she is effectively asexual. And it's hard for me to describe how validated that made me feel, how comforting that was, as a twelve-year-old aromantic ace, to hear the message "there is more to life than sex and romance, and it is perfectly fine to go through life without wanting either." When one story, without variations, is all you ever hear from childhood on, and you don't fit into it, hearing a story that does fit you is like having heard all your life that you're strange and broken and weird, then suddenly finding a person who tells you that you're perfectly normal.
But this isn't just about asexuality, or comforting yourself with characters who are similar to you. It's also about learning, about trying to fit into the heads of people who are totally different. When you never have to stretch yourself like that--when the viewpoint character you're listening to the story with, whose thoughts you hear and whose emotions you feel, is always you--it can be difficult to understand how other people feel, how they think, how they interact with the world. Especially if you're me, and that empathy has never come naturally. So... thanks for the practice.
See, I'm a reader. I'm not a writer--at the very most, I am a wordsmith--and I am certainly no storyteller. Characters don't speak to me. But I have the greatest respect for those people who do have stories to tell, because their skill is, in my mind, one of the greatest ones there is. Those tales, those characters, help readers like me understand the world around us, the people around us, in ways that nothing else could. And sometimes they help us understand ourselves.
I still remember picking up Mercedes Lackey's book, The Oathbound, when I was about twelve or so, and while I loved the plot and the world, the thing about those books that always resonated with me strongest--especially back then--was the character Tarma. Tarma is distinctive from other women I'd read about, indeed from every other character I'd ever curled up with, in that she is effectively asexual. And it's hard for me to describe how validated that made me feel, how comforting that was, as a twelve-year-old aromantic ace, to hear the message "there is more to life than sex and romance, and it is perfectly fine to go through life without wanting either." When one story, without variations, is all you ever hear from childhood on, and you don't fit into it, hearing a story that does fit you is like having heard all your life that you're strange and broken and weird, then suddenly finding a person who tells you that you're perfectly normal.
But this isn't just about asexuality, or comforting yourself with characters who are similar to you. It's also about learning, about trying to fit into the heads of people who are totally different. When you never have to stretch yourself like that--when the viewpoint character you're listening to the story with, whose thoughts you hear and whose emotions you feel, is always you--it can be difficult to understand how other people feel, how they think, how they interact with the world. Especially if you're me, and that empathy has never come naturally. So... thanks for the practice.
