Whenever we tell someone about something that happened to us, we’re telling a story. Humans tell stories to make sense of the world. And even when we think we are just recounting what happened, we’re actually making dozens of unconscious editorial decisions—emphasising some details, omitting others—to put a particular spin on the events in order to give them meaning.

For example, one morning I was a little early to my bus stop, and I decided to run into the drug store next to the stop to pick up one item. I thought I had enough time. But there was only one clerk working check out, and an older gentleman in front of me had a small number of items, but a huge number of coupons, and his transaction took so long that I missed the bus.

One time when I told that story, I gave a summary similar to the above paragraph, and concluded with a self-depracating comment of how silly it had been for me to risk missing my bus, when there was another drugstore close to my office where I could have stopped after getting downtown.

But the day of the incident, I was annoyed about missing the bus, so that night when I told the story, I went into great detail about how the man in front of me had argued and fussed with the cashier over every single price that rang up, and which coupons were expired, which ones applied to a slightly different item than the one he had, and particularly the long discussion he had with her about one bag of holiday-themed Hershey Kisses® that he was certain he had a new coupon for at home, and why she should let him have it at the lower price and how when she refused, which meant he berated her for a while before finally ordering her to keep the bag behind the counter because he was going to walk home, find the coupon, and come back.

And before he walked out the door he came back three times to interrupt her attempt to check my one item out to warn her about not putting that bag of candy back on the shelf.

Both accounts are absolutely true. But they sound like very different events, don’t they?

Because the day it happened, I was upset about missing my bus, and so the meaning of the events was how another person’s stubborness had messed up my day. Later, as I was walking past the second drugstore one morning after getting off the bus, I realized that the earlier incident had been my own fault for not thinking things through and planning better.

Same events, different perspective, different stories…