My favorite thing about unreliable narrators is that their stories tend to unearth something fresh in my brain. Like using strong fingers to flip over a heavy rock in a garden, they reveal the worms and wet dirt. Unreliable narrators are adept at presenting their stories completely unfiltered, interpreting everything as truth, even their most intrusive thoughts. What might flag an objective reader as deceptive or informed by obvious influences (insanity, self-hatred, alcohol, rose-colored glasses, etc.) becomes all the more crucial for their character development.
How then do you know whether you’re dealing with a reliable narrator or an unreliable one?
It’s November, friends. A new moon coincided with Halloween, the election is just around the corner (have you voted yet!?), and, my headline update, I am falling in love.
If we choose to engage it, social media positions us each in the role of Narrator when we curate the ways we present ourselves to the online world. My coming of age coincided with Instagram’s, and I eagerly allowed this to inform much of my understanding of who I was. Social media taught me to view myself through the eyes of others. I learned to love and hate myself simultaneously, a complex and slippery duality for an impressionable teenager.
I’ve since cultivated a relationship with the nebulous beast of social media that harbors less hate, but dating always tests my progress. As a result, I spent years vehemently declaring my pessimism towards meeting love interests on the internet.
Then: a month ago something compelled me to DM a handsome man who found me online, and I’ve been eating my words ever since.
It turns out he lives in a different city, but temporarily. I met him in person on October 15th and six days later he left New York as my boyfriend. My thoughts are moving fast, my head is way in the clouds, and suddenly, in reckoning with the question of my own sanity, I fear I may be becoming an unreliable narrator.
How do I remain grounded while being swept off my feet? And, after almost four years of being single, how do I stay reliable when my old conditioning sends me right back to hate’s doorstep because, now that I am wholeheartedly committed to him, I can’t help but evaluate myself through the eyes of my new man?
Is there an argument to be made that all narrators are unreliable? That by simply engaging with their story, you’re allowing space for their notions of truth, even if you don’t agree with them?
I’m 26. I live in Brooklyn. I am an artist. It’s a frenzied chapter in my life and this enthralling addition is, of course, all part of the plan, but still: now that it’s actually happening I’m confronted with the ultimate test of staying true to myself.
So, as the only narrator of my own story, I guess it doesn’t really matter if I am reliable or not.
xo,
Isabel
i am obviously and reliably in love with every single word of this