We’ve all heard the expression, “You write your own story,” or a version thereof. And while this is true in the context that our lives are the stories we are the authors of, it is also true you are a piece of fiction to someone else.
Only you and you alone know everything you’ve ever felt, thought, said, dreamed, and did. You know every experience and every secret thing.
Everyone else doesn’t nor do you know the same of them.
Despite how close we might be to some people–even those we swear we know up and down and left and right–we still don’t know them. Not the real them, and we never will.
We know fragments. We know the stories they’ve told us of their various experiences, thoughts, words, actions, dreams. We know the stories from the joint experiences shared.
But we are never them.
What happens is we end up creating a narrative about someone to make sense of them. We subconsciously fill in the gaps between their tales on an ever-assembling timeline of their life. They do the same to you.
It is all stories.
At best, it’s a case of “based on true events” but, in the end, we are all bits of narration to each other with varying degrees of accuracy.
We are all fiction.