I think we all already have personal mythologies. And the word "mythology' shouldn't scare us for we know it isn't true in the same way that history is supposed to be true. If anything, the problem is that far too much of what we believe to be our "personal history" is actually mythology.
I've had much occasion to see this while doing family history. History tends to be either a story or a theory about particular people in particular times. The story or theory is constructed by making connections between a collected set of verifiable facts. Ideally, the facts are a limit on the story or theory. If my story or theory includes someone meeting Jane Jacobs last year that story needs to be corrected because Jane Jacobs died in 2006. What I've found doing family history is that it tends to go the other way around. In family history people have a theory about who and what "we" are and they have a series of stories that prop up this theory. When confronted with facts that are in conflict with the theory and stories, so much the worse for the facts.
Another way of putting this is that most family history is really family mythology. It's real purpose is to justify our beliefs about ourselves. Because it's unconscious mythology, it's easy to convince ourselves that it really is history and my advice to anyone doing family history is to not share it with members of your family. You will inevitably puncture a lot of egos if you insist in muddling the mythology up with verifiable facts.
Okay, but why do family history at all if you can't share it? Unless you're famous, no one outside your family will want to read it and now I'm telling you that no one inside your family will want to read it either. I'd recommend doing it because it's liberating. My great discovery was that my family was a much rougher lot than the family mythology made them out to be. It's only because two world wars and the Great Depression created opportunities for social mobility that my family was able to enter the middle class. That's generally true of the Irish in North America. All of our family "history" when I was growing up, was really mythology, consists of projecting the experience of the generation who grew up during the Depression and World War 2 back into history. It has little or nothing to do with what actually happened. The generation now growing up are, in turn, being saddled with a family "history" that is really a mythology that projects the values of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s back into history.
Why is it liberating? Because family mythology creates a role for you and your family will be loath to let you out of that role. You will be told that you are a certain kind of person because you are part of this family and you will be told that continuing to be this sort of person is a moral obligation that is binding on you. Knowing that the story the family tells about itself is just a mythology frees you from that obligation.
It does this in large part because it frees you from the spell. Your family members can only saddle you with this mythology if you are willing to believe it. The mistake is thinking that your family history has anything particular to do with you. These people are just people who lived before you. You are not responsible for their sufferings and you deserve no credit for their achievements. Most importantly, you do not need to feel any shame for what they were and what they did. If, however, you believe that there is a connection, then you are going to find yourself in immediate conflict with others because you will all be fighting for a particular interpretation.
In my family, there have been intense battles over family history. Most of this has been a matter of memory rather than any actual written history. Who did what and when and what it meant? Which uncles were in military service and what action did they or did they not see? What were the challenges that women in the family faced and how did they face them. Most stories that do get repeated do so because they help make a moral point. And it's either a positive one or a negative one. But it's only useful to the degree to which it is family mythology. Each and every story makes one of two binary points: 1) You should be like this. 2) You should not be like that.
Once you know that facts destroy this binary division—that the real stories aren't black and white so much as shades of grey—you can stop arguing with others about it. And that is liberating.
The other thing about family history is that it is necessarily limiting. Even if your family history were glorious through and through, it defines you according to a fixed standard. It tells you what you are supposed to be according to an existing model. There is no teleology, no potential for development. All you have is a series of duties towards the family. That is why the Hobo Code is so liberating for Dick Whitman. It offers potential for development that his father and stepmother deny him.
An unexpected benefit that comes with this is insight into human behaviour. If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter. What's really at work is some bit of unconscious mythology. Being able to let go at a moment like that is tremendously liberating. But you can only do that if you have some alternative set of values of your own. And that is a subject for further development.
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