What We Tell Ourselves

In “What We Tell Our­selves,” the nar­ra­tive explores the intro­spec­tive jour­ney artists under­go in under­stand­ing them­selves and their art. It empha­sizes that the sto­ries indi­vid­u­als cre­ate about their iden­ti­ties and their work do not encap­su­late their true essence or the essence of their cre­ations. These nar­ra­tives act as a smoke­screen, cloud­ing the real­i­ty of what is sig­nif­i­cant and what con­sti­tutes gen­uine con­tri­bu­tion. The chap­ter argues that the val­ue lies in the work itself—the art that is pro­duced and its reception—rather than the sto­ries we con­struct around our iden­ti­ty and the process of cre­ation.

The author sug­gests that every per­son, includ­ing each mem­ber of an audi­ence, pos­sess­es a unique per­spec­tive, and attempt­ing to boil down expe­ri­ences or artis­tic efforts to sim­ple, uni­ver­sal­ly under­stood con­cepts is futile. With bil­lions of data points in the world, humans can only cap­ture and inter­pret a frac­tion, lead­ing to a lim­it­ed and pos­si­bly mis­lead­ing under­stand­ing marked by the sto­ries we tell our­selves. These nar­ra­tives, accord­ing to the chap­ter, not only lim­it our per­cep­tion of real­i­ty but also con­strain the self­’s poten­tial and reduce truth to fit with­in the bounds of these self-cre­at­ed sto­ries.

Artists are thus encour­aged to con­tin­u­ous­ly let go of the nar­ra­tives they cling to and instead, place their faith in the inher­ent curios­i­ty and ener­gy that dri­ves their cre­ative jour­ney. The chap­ter posits that art rep­re­sents a con­ver­gence of the uni­verse, the artist’s indi­vid­ual essence, and the mys­te­ri­ous yet dis­ci­plined process of bring­ing an idea into tan­gi­ble form. Even when this con­flu­ence leads to con­tra­dic­tions or into realms that appear irrec­on­cil­able, it is sug­gest­ed that there is an inher­ent har­mo­ny and order—a cos­mic under­cur­rent that under­scores the entire­ty of exis­tence, too vast for any sin­gle sto­ry to encom­pass.

Through its reflec­tive tone, “What We Tell Our­selves” invites artists to embrace the unknow­able and to rec­og­nize that the true val­ue of their work lies beyond the nar­ra­tives they con­struct, in the raw and unfil­tered essence of their artis­tic out­put and its capac­i­ty to res­onate.