Musings of a White Haired Teenager

Narratives are never innocent. They are crafted artifacts, spun out of fragments of observation and stitched into coherence not because the world demands it, but because the narrator does. Unless a tale is sheer fiction, there is always an initial spark — a gesture, an overheard sentence, the sight of a raised glass — that becomes the seed of a story. The story is what the narrator does with the spark, how the flame is coaxed into a particular shape, how it is bent to illuminate one figure while leaving another in shadow. It is rarely the event itself that dictates the story, nor the person who is the object of the tale. The purpose lies in the needs of the narrator: to defend, to accuse, to justify, to protect, to erase. And when told with enough conviction, these spun tales do not merely sit alongside reality — they replace it. They become the received truth, repeated until the event itself is buried beneath layers of narration. The 1996 film Courage Under Fire understood this well....

 A narrative is always imposed, and when the newcomer arrives, it is not merely an arrival but an occupation of the narrative field. To exist within a story is never enough; permanence must be secured, and permanence requires authorship. Thus, the newcomer takes up the pen and redraws the script. In the logic of narrative survival, others must be made into villains, foils against which the new protagonist can claim legitimacy. It is a familiar violence, subtle but unrelenting, because as Barthes reminded us, authorship is always a performance, an arrangement of signs that privileges certain characters while banishing others to the shadows. The one caught between stories—the attempted mediator, the figure trying to hold multiple truths at once—suffers most acutely from this rearrangement. They are forced into confusion, for Ricoeur’s notion of emplotment makes clear that coherence requires a selective weaving, and once the weaving begins, no thread can remain neutral. To balance co...

Personal narratives are never as innocent as we might wish them to be. They are manufactured, crafted with the precision of an editor who knows that some pages must be kept and others must be torn out so that the new storyline appears seamless. Ricoeur (1984) reminds us that narrative identity is always an act of emplotment, a stitching together of fragments to create coherence, and in this sense the introduction of a new character requires a revision of the entire plot. When a new person enters the scene, the stories are refashioned to show convergence, as if the two lives were always meant to meet, as if the rhythms of their pasts had been quietly rehearsing for this inevitable duet. What was once contingent is rewritten as destiny, and what was once merely accidental is reframed as necessary. The old text is folded, hidden, sometimes deliberately destroyed, because its persistence would betray the artifice of the new narrative. People who once mattered, who once carried the weight o...

I have spent my life dealing with narratives. Indeed, once, my notion of narrative bits (narbs) took on global prominence. And thus, I believe, people are made of stories. This is not a poetic indulgence but the fundamental reality of how human beings exist in the world, for every person carries within them a woven text of memories, gestures, and acts, each one forming part of an unfinished manuscript that is constantly revised. To meet another person is not to meet a body or a face, it is to allow one’s stories to brush against theirs, to test whether their archive might rhyme with your own, to sense whether a shared narrative could be written together. And yet, contrary to the gentle myth of “growing apart,” these stories do not weaken simply because time passes, nor do they fade like ink abandoned to the elements. They remain stubbornly alive in memory, ready to be recalled, ready to be retold, waiting for the occasion when the silence is broken and the old convergence can be heard...

The arrival of a new presence in a life does not simply draw attention away from the older friend; it requires a re-telling of the story itself. Overtly neglecting the old alone is not enough to secure permanence — a narrative must follow. A specific plot must be woven, one that elevates the newcomer as more precious, more indispensable, while quietly recasting the older companion as an unnecessary burden, especially in the eyes of the newcomer who may have no knowledge of the authentic narrative or the narrative from the point of view of the one being replaced. The re-narration is not always done with malice; it is done because human bonds demand coherence (Ricœur, 1991). To integrate the new, the old must be written differently, the script altered so that what was once essential now appears excessive. And yet, there are tell-tale signs that linger. The kindnesses once performed by the older friend — the simple task of reading through a document, the late-night phone call during a cri...

The unraveling of friendship is not always a story of neglect. More often it is a story of distraction, a quiet shifting of attention rather than a deliberate act of erasure. When a new person enters the scene, the earlier rhythms of friendship are not cast away with malice but slowly pushed aside, because the new requires constant presence, immediate responses, a consuming attentiveness. The everyday acts that once served as tiny proofs of intimacy — a meet up at a coffee shop, the wait for the person to show up, a simple statement, “come”— begin to vanish. Not because they lose value, but because someone else begins to supply them. Memory bends easily; when the gesture is repeated by another, the original becomes faint, a trace rather than a pulse. It is in the loss of the asks that the displacement becomes most visible. Friendships are not held together by grand declarations but by small, familiar requests — “Can you write up this document?” “When will you be back again?” “Can you ...

Social penetration theory tells us that relationships grow by revealing — layer after layer — the deeper selves we hide. But what happens when the process reverses? When instead of opening, we begin to close? People rarely confess that they are pulling out of a friendship. That would sound too deliberate, too cruel. So, the retreat takes another form — silence and absence. In the technological world, it is literal — messages unanswered, profiles blocked, visibility erased. In the real world, it’s more graceful — a slow unavailability, a growing distance, a calendar that never seems to align. Sometimes the retreat doesn’t arrive as silence. It arrives as scheduling. Calendars suddenly grow mismatched. One is always traveling, the other always “just busy.” The rhythm that once aligned so effortlessly begins to stumble. Every invitation meets a gentle deferral — “next week maybe,” “things are a bit hectic right now,” “let’s catch up soon.” But “soon” never arrives. Because it was never me...