The stories we tell ourselves

There’s this thing called Mental Models that is pretty prevalent in the world of tech, where I have spent the last twenty-plus years of my career. I think I first came across the term a decade or so ago, probably through Shane Parish’s Farnam Street blog. Mental models are heuristics with which to interpret and manage the world an individual finds themselves in, or at least that’s my rudimentary understanding. I think there are a number of already established mental models from which to draw from, but to be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to understand them. It seems a lot of logic from non-direct experience, and logic doesn’t come naturally to me; it’s a wonder I’ve been as successful as I have been in my career as a software programmer, with logic, math, and analytical thinking being very foreign skills to me, and skills I’ve had to really work at to improve.

But what mental models show is that we, as humans, tend to want to map the world onto a known framework, a way to interpret the chaos with some semblance of order, of saying that since A happened, B is likely to follow. We want a global heuristic in which to map our direct experiences. It makes life easier if we don’t have to continuously ponder how the event fits into our view of the world if it’s already fitting into the map we have in our head.

People do this naturally, don’t you think? They take their direct experiences of their lives, turn that into a rule or idiom or axiom or some other fancy word to mean this-is-the-way-that-goes and begin to operate with that rule/idiom/axiom as a backbone to how they operate in the world. Sometimes—and I would argue, almost never—these rules are correct. The rule created from the direct experience maps onto other similar situations with other people, and we can use it again and again. But nine times out of ten (no, that’s not something I have tested), the rule is incorrect, spurious, just plain damn wrong. Even repeated events that support the rule can be wrong.

I have had a rule like this that I am now finding incorrect. I thought I wasn’t worth much, that people didn’t want me in their lives, and that I was a burden to others simply by existing. And I have the experiences to support this statement, though those experiences were translated incorrectly in my own brain.

I was married once, to a wild, passionate, broken woman. We were called lipstick lesbians, and we loved making boys go wild, us on her motorcycle, kissing at stop lights, touching each other inappropriately in public (ah, youth and the disregard for personal safety). She asked for a divorce, even after I supported her through psych ward stays and the tumultuous times of navigating her own issues.

My most recent relationship, the one that has caused such a difficult 2023…when I stated to my ex during a walk a few days after the breakup that it seemed like she didn’t feel I was worth working for, she sheepishly said, “No, you aren’t.” And then, two months later, she told me she didn’t really see me as a friend, didn’t see me in her life.

Later that summer, my best friend told me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore after a mistake I made, after I asked for more time to process, asked to be fallible and fucked up and broken, just as we all are. Instead, her rejection of our friendship just added another stick and stone to my broken mental house.

With every important relationship, there was a reinforcement of the statement: “You are not worth the investment of my time or love because you are a burden I choose not to bear.” And that isn’t something anyone should have to hear or feel; I hope I have never made someone feel that way but I am sure I have. Coming from a family that was taught unconditional love and a family-first philosophy, this was a hard pill to swallow. What I have been taught, over and over, is that love IS conditional. That lesson has had a direct impact on how I feel about myself, my worth, and has led me to question whether I matter, whether or not I should even be in this world. I feel flayed, filleted, raw and bloody and unloved.

Paul Gilbert, in his book Mindful Compassion, writes that “[t]he way we have experienced other people relating to us can have a major impact on how we relate to ourselves.” The external metastasizes into the internal. The beliefs about who we are that come from the people outside of us are ingested, force fed through no fault of our own, move that absorption and the words and hate and misunderstanding become our skin and bones and beliefs about ourselves. The members of the GLBT community are some of the strongest, most resilient people; not because of some inherent character trait but because they have to be.

I have changed over these past years, working hard to relearn what it means to love one’s self, to hold my heart in careful hands. But the damage has been done. The mental model of who I am and how I operate in this world still exists. The story I’ve told myself about my worth is still there. I’ve worked hard to dismantle it, to deconstruct the narrative and suss out where it all originated from, pointed out the character flaws and where the plot drops, seen that the thread doesn’t move consistently through the story. This story is a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott famously wrote. It needs to be rewritten, and I must be the author of this story. Not my family. Not my friends. Not the people of this world. So I begin again.