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This morning I texted my mother to fact check something: I wrote an essay about the stories we tell ourselves. I know this is an odd question, but do you remember what year we went to the family reunion at Aunt Izzy’s turkey farm in Florida?
A little later she replied: The only thing Dad and I remember is it was at the Gerard Turkey Farm in Framingham, MA. One of Grandpa’s sisters was married to Mr. Gerard. We don’t think it was Aunt Izzy’s house. You must have been very young at the time.
Interesting. I tell my mom that I would love to see that picture of Aunt Izzy at the Great Wall of China. I tell her: It’s in the old photo album we had. It had pictures of us, but there were also some loose pictures in the back. That’s where the Aunt Izzy photo was if I remember correctly.
While I wait for her to find it, I poke at the memories in my head. I envision the photo, the conversation at the turkey farm, the brooch. I am confident they are part of the story I told in my essay. Yet doubt nags at the edges of my childhood memories.
Eventually mom replies: You have a good memory! And there it is on my phone: the photograph of Aunt Izzy at the Great Wall of China.
Only I don’t have a good memory. Not at all.
There’s no denying this is the photo. The Great Wall of China authenticates the image just as much as the photograph’s location in the back of that old album.
But the image is in color, not in black and white. Aunt Izzy is a lot older than I remember, and there’s no tweed suit…no white gloves, no sturdy handbag. And she’s looking off to the side of the camera, not proudly and confidently at it.
I contemplated deleting my essay. Was I even telling a true story anymore? Instead, I shut the laptop and went for a walk.
Later I came back and looked at my essay again. I realized I was still telling the true story of the story I’d told myself about Aunt Izzy—just not the one I’d set out to share. The essay wasn’t finished. I wrote this epilogue to finish it.
Aunt Izzy was a story I told myself based only on an old photograph, a single ten-minute meeting when I was eight, and a chipped brooch. She was an idea I held on to, representing something I couldn’t even name as a child. She inspired me. She encouraged me. She made me more.
But the story I told myself about Aunt Izzy wasn’t really about her at all. It was about me: what I recognized in myself but couldn’t identify or wouldn’t dare name as a child, a teenager, a young woman. A wildness. A rebelliousness. A need for more. To see more and do more and be more.
So this is still a true story about the stories we tell ourselves. I was just never really telling her story at all. I was telling mine.
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