**therapist notes (sharing if it helps you to define and assign)

The term I was looking for earlier is “unreliable narrator”

In writing it looks like (according to Purdue)

“UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: A narrator that is not trustworthy, whose rendition of events must be taken with a grain of salt. We tend to see such narrators especially in first-person narration, since that form of narration tends to underline the motives behind the transmission of a given story.”

But, in my experience (both written* and personal**) the unreliable narrator is *completely* believable and trusted as a source of truth.

To wit, I will now try to think of my damn brain as an unreliable narrator. So for potential issues, as a favorite manager once said, “Trust. But verify.”

—

Brain: “You’re definitely gonna die on that overpass/when that fool cuts you off/bc you had dinner in an open air diner (whilst vax’d/boosted)

Me (hopefully):… mmmmkay, I am gonna need you to settle the fuck down. Let’s just count up our favorite top five songssss…and oh, look you merged onto a highway without hyperventilating. Go you! Good job. Getting up to hwy speed, four movies you can’t live without….

So those are the lighter (!) issues. The heavier ones I still grappling.

* – stories I have read and written

** – my brain, on any given day