The Book Is Done (But the Stories Never Are)

The book is done. Finally. After months of listening, transcribing, analyzing, and occasionally arguing with myself like a deranged panel of one, it’s finished. You’d think that would feel definitive, but even as I close the last chapter, a familiar thought sneaks back in — like that uninvited guest who shows up just as you’re doing the dishes. Managing change — or crisis, or anything that threatens to ruin the illusion of control - isn’t really about managing facts. It’s about managing stories.  Not the grand epics of the powerful, not the government’s carefully pressed statements with their shiny slogans, but the small, handcrafted tales we spin just to stay upright. The stories we use to make chaos feel organized, to justify our choices, and to convince ourselves that we still have agency while the roof is caving in. The focus groups I spent time with drove this home. Everyone had a story — their survival kit. The logic didn’t always hold, but the narrative did. They needed a version of events they could live with, retell, and — ideally — believe. Until someone died. Whether it was true or not was, frankly, beside the point. Because here’s the dirty secret: we all trot around as historians of our own lives. Just as the victors write history, we write personal victory stories. We edit, reinterpret, and conveniently delete with the skill of a state censor. We manage our narratives to suit our needs, please the right audience, and smooth the sharp edges that might otherwise draw blood. Every story has its cast of characters, its settings, its crises, and its turning points. But when the real plot doesn’t fit our preferred version—when the ending doesn’t flatter us or the supporting cast doesn’t behave — we do what any good showrunner does. We rewrite. A few characters get recast. A few get killed off. A couple of scenes are cut for “pacing issues.” And the moments that make us look bad? Those never even make the director’s cut. It’s not lying, exactly — it’s narrative housekeeping. A little emotional editing to keep the storyline coherent. The problem, of course, is that reality is a terrible employee. It refuses to follow the script. Just like the pandemic data I waded through for this book, there are always other stories humming underneath the official one — the stories we can’t manage, the characters who refuse to stay deleted, the events that keep haunting the edges of the frame. The truth, stubborn and nosy, keeps peeking through the cracks of the beautiful palimpsest we’ve built to hide it. And that’s the fear, isn’t it? That someone else will come along and tell the story differently. They’ll have receipts. They’ll have memories we’ve conveniently misfiled. And suddenly, our meticulously managed narrative collapses like parchment left in the sun. We call it “narrative management,” as if it’s a corporate skill or a PR campaign. But it’s really just survival with better branding. We all do it — at work, in relationships, in the little speeches we give ourselves before bed. We curate our histories to stay functional. We edit timelines so our past selves and those who surrounded us don’t heckle our present decisions. And sometimes, if we’re really good at it, we start believing our own edits. But here’s the catch: narrative management always fails. Eventually, the deleted scenes resurface. The “removed for creative differences” characters come knocking, even if as a burden. The events you buried show up in someone else’s version of the story — probably less flattering. The data, that cold-hearted archivist, remembers everything. And maybe that’s the ultimate lesson of this whole messy project: you can manage the narrative for a while, but sooner or later, the narrative manages you. Especially when the person you crafted it for finally notices that your carefully curated truth was just a story — starring them at the center, while everyone else quietly disappeared from the credits suddenly show up and mess up the story. Narrative management is not easy because you can manage narratives but not people. Because in the end it is exactly like what Braidi Carlile says in her song, "All of these lines across my face tell you the story of who I am."