In her first column for SIEGESSÄULE, author Sarah M Harrison ponders how our autobiographies are shaped by existing narratives

Dec. 26, 2016 – My friend tosses a pebble into the canal; I copy. Gray, oily ripples radiate from twin impacts in neat, concentric circles, becoming vague and messy as they fracture, bend and split against the interference of the other. My thoughts turn to a doctor experience I’d made a few weeks earlier.Horizontal on a hospital gurney, I strain to follow my doctor’s quick, East-Berlin dialect, and as my neck cranes with the effort, my eyes catch the glare reflected in a row of crystals lined up under the window. They glow and glint in the sun, sparkling refracted light like rainbow twinkle fingers.

Though she operates as a regular GP, on this day my doctor leads me through a hypno-visualization. The goal: to uncover the psychological cause of a wrist pain that has been troubling me. She begins by placing picture cards on my abdomen and asking me questions. She doesn’t require verbal responses, she divines answers by testing the resistance of my arm. Once she has collected enough information, she tells me a story; a story about women holding stones, an infinite hall filled with mothers and grandmothers all the way back to Eve, “...or whoever.” I find the story sweet, innocuous – until I realise it is supposed to be about me.

Twisting it around in my thoughts, I try to look at the story from another angle, try to see a curve amongst its straight lines. Quietly reshaping it into my own sense, I find a way to accept it, and we settle into a faux-comfortable understanding of why things might be the way they are. I am fronting. And I figure she is too, because the story she just told – held together with heteronormative relationships, nuclear families, a white European history, a middle class childhood, good-enough parenting, acceptable emotional responses – doesn’t seem hers either.

Kinesiology, hypnotherapy, her graying flat-top and sunrise-gradient jeans, a referral for a holistic gynecologist and an initially baffling link between vaginas and dentistry, the 6-inch, rose-quartz phallus glittering on her windowsill. All this I had read as a beautiful meeting of gruff middle-aged lesbian mysticism and good-old German quackery, but none of it made it into the narrative she’s told me. The mummy-issue story – not necessarily untrue – is a safe, convenient representation of what one expects to hear. So generic and unassailable that it is almost meaningless, and whether I like it or not, it exists now somewhere inside me, tossed in there like a little pebble in a canal.

The impact of this single story seems pretty simple, a few little rings circling around an experience I’ve had. But there is never just one, and these neat patterns become vague and messy as they fracture, bend and split against the interference of another.

Sarah M Harrison is a writer living in Berlin since 2008. Her debut novella All The Things is available via Arcadia Missa and at Motto here in Berlin