The Facts Never Said That

I'm 41, and I just held the first book I ever wrote.

The box showed up, and I opened it, and there it was. My name on the cover. Real paper. Real weight. It officially launches October 20th, and I just stood there holding it for a while.

Because for a long time, I had a sentence for this.

I'm not an author. Authors are other people.

Read that again. There isn't a single fact in it.

The fact was: I hadn't written a book. That's it. That was the whole fact. Everything after that was me, filling in the rest.

That wasn't a fact. It was a story.

Which is a little funny, because that's exactly what the book is about. Facts vs. Fiction is the fourth framework in it. The first three chapters are the diagnosis. This is where we start stripping it out. Every painful thing that ever happened to you has two parts: what happened, and what you made it mean. The pain is almost always in the second part. And you wrote the second part. (The weekend that cracked it open for me, a room full of strangers and a bald ex-pilot with a microphone, is chapter 4. All fourteen frameworks are here.)

One word rewrote the crash

In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer at the University of Washington showed students short films of car crashes. Then they asked how fast the cars were going, and changed one word in the question.

When they asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other, people guessed 40.8 miles an hour. When the word was "hit," 34. When it was "contacted," 31.8.

Same crash. One verb.

Then it got worse. In a second round, they showed everybody the same crash. A week later they asked whether anybody had seen broken glass. There wasn't any broken glass in the film. 16 of the 50 people who got "smashed" remembered it anyway. With "hit," it was 7. The ones who got no question about speed at all? 6.

Pretty fucked up, right? Nobody lied to them. Somebody handed them one word, and the word changed what they remembered.

That's what a story does with the facts you hand it. It goes back and rearranges them until they agree with it.

The story you tell at 25 shows up later

Here's the thing. That edit doesn't stay in the lab.

Christopher Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, worked with Martin Seligman and George Vaillant on a group of 99 Harvard graduates. When those men were 25, they wrote about bad things that had happened to them. The researchers scored HOW they explained it. Was it permanent? Was it about everything? Was it their fault?

Then they waited.

The guys who told it the pessimistic way at 25 had worse health at 45 to 60, as rated by their doctors, even after accounting for how healthy they were at 25.

I'm not going to oversell that. It's 99 men, all from Harvard, and it's a prediction, not proof that your story gave you high blood pressure. But I'm 41. That's four years out from their window. Sit with that one.

How you explained it at 25 was still showing up at 50.

Hiding it doesn't work

So the obvious fix is to think positive, right? Just tell yourself something nicer.

I tried that. Self-help books about forgiveness and positive thinking, "just visualize what you want and it will manifest"... okay, great. I was still broke. Woo-woo bullshit.

James Gross at Stanford and Oliver John at Berkeley compared two ways people handle feelings they don't want. Some people push the feeling down and keep a straight face. Some people change what the situation means.

The people who push it down tend to do worse. Less positive emotion, worse relationships, lower well-being. The people who change the meaning tend to do better on all three.

Pushing it down doesn't touch the story. It still runs. You just quit saying it out loud.

Changing the meaning is different. You go back to the facts, and you ask whether this is the only story they could hold. It almost never is. "I haven't written a book" holds "and I never will." It also holds "yet."

How to catch the fiction

A camera couldn't film it

Run the scene back like you're security footage. A camera can record "I hadn't written a book." It cannot record "I'm not an author." If the sentence couldn't be filmed, somebody wrote it. Probably you.

It's about who you are, not what happened

"She didn't text back" happened. "I'm too much for people" is you deciding what her not texting back says about you. Watch for any sentence that starts with "I'm" and ends with a verdict.

It used to be true, so it still is

"I hadn't written a book" was true for most of my life. Then it wasn't. The story didn't update itself. Nobody's does. You have to go check.

It makes other people the main characters

"Authors are other people." "People like that get promoted." "Other people get to be happy." If your sentence hands the good part to somebody else, by default, forever... that's fiction. The complaint you're married to from chapter 3 is just a fiction with a marketing department.

Where to start

You don't have to forgive anybody. You don't have to call anyone. You don't even have to believe the new story yet.

Just pick the memory. The one you've been carrying the longest. You already know which one it is.

Here's the exercise from the end of chapter 4, word for word.

I'm not going to trash the old sentence. It was built on a real fact. I really hadn't written a book. I just kept saying it after it stopped being true.

Same facts. New story. Different life.

So what's your sentence? Who are the "other people" in it? And what would a camera have actually recorded?

Write the five sentences. Read them out loud.

Then go open your own box.