My Personal Myth

Testing the story of a privileged life

Joan Didion begins her essay The White Album with this famous first sentence:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

A few sentences later, however, she writes:

“Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.” ¹

The stories we tell ourselves form our personal myth.

Mine is as follows:

I was born with great privileges and then blessed with great luck in career and family and friends. Even considering these advantages, I’ve earned and can claim responsibility for my successful, well-balanced life. I’ve worked hard and made skillful choices, including acting with appropriate gratitude by helping others.

But is that how I really feel? I lack the ability to dismiss unpleasant doubts. If I did, I wouldn’t write!

So immediately upon declaring a personal myth, a person like me will start trying to poke holes in their own story.

Given my education, my family connections, my inheritance, and my affinity for numbers, the pleasant course of my life may have been more or less ordained.

I’d never have to struggle against significant adversity provided I kept to the wide and well-lit career path created for me.

As for family, I married young and spectacularly well, and from that stroke of luck, all else fell into place.

In hindsight, however, my wife and I “mated assortively,” well before that term gained cultural purchase.

We grew up in the same neighborhood, we attended similar schools, both sets of our parents were life partners, both sets lived on Park Avenue, we were both Reform Jews. And we married young enough to finish raising each other. So, everything was on our side.

As for physical hardship, my courage has been untested. I’ve never been in a fight. My most dangerous job was at age 14 in the file room of a family company, where my daylong handling of the sharp edged folders left my hands and fingers crisscrossed with paper cuts.

So what has been the tension in my life, the uncertainty, the risk? Did I direct the course of my life or did I simply follow the course predetermined for me?

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If I were secure in my personal myth, why would comments about the rich on Substack bother me? For example, my Substack friend

Michael Mohr

was fair in criticizing certain trust fund kids:

“How incredibly, stupidly condescending is it to have obnoxious, ridiculously highly educated white kids looking down their pretentious noses at the men and women who work so that these trust-fund kids can do what they do.” ²

I grew up with a trust fund so the comment made me defensive. “That wasn’t me,” I wanted to shout. But maybe it was me.

Freddie deBoer

, in the process of being priced out of Brooklyn, rants about New York strivers who complain that mid six figure salaries are not enough to afford private school.

And since Freddie believes that private schools and public schools are of equal value, he believes that parents who strive after private school are morally bankrupt fools.

“...miserable rich New Yorkers who are trapped in the hell of their own insatiable ambitions. It’s a record of the moral and emotional bankruptcy that results from a certain addiction to getting ahead, the inability to enjoy immensely privileged lives thanks to a studied refusal to simply appreciate what one already has.” ³

I feel defensive because I went to private school as did my wife, my kids, and their spouses. And I’m scared to say what I believe from experience, which is that NYC private schools are worth striving for. ⁴

My defensiveness and fear don’t seem like the reactions of someone who truly “owns” their good fortune.

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It was Carl Jung, the influential Swiss psychiatrist, who appears to have first articulated the idea of the personal myth.

“What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust...I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks...” ⁵

Out of Jung’s “uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities,” one can impose a narrative order, i.e., a personal myth, by using memories that conform and confirm and casting aside those memories that are contingent or countervailing.

But your power of forgetting has to be up to the task.

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I’m twenty and I’m sitting with my father in the red den where he and I used to spend the weekends watching sports together. Back then, he’d place his chair in front of the TV, holding the “clicker,” and I’d sit cross-legged on the floor at his side, loyal supplicant for his attention, looking up at him, eager to hear his thoughts on the game.

But today the TV is off and he’s kept his chair in the corner. I’m sitting on the opposite side of the room on the sofa, leaning toward him to listen.

He has a warning for me. He says, “Dave, you have to realize that no one will give you credit for your financial success, because you had a head start.”

My father’s comment slips quietly into the back of my mind and stays there dormant, hidden from my active memory.

Forty years later, it’s my struggle with the idea of a “personal myth” that’s made his warning spring forward to grab my active attention.

Lately, I’ve been writing about wealth while trying to keep a personal distance from the subject. But my encounters on Substack are forcing a personal reckoning with wealth. And a reckoning with my personal myth, and whether that myth can be sustained in the face of my father’s forty year old warning.

If, as my father said, no one will give me credit, then why should I?

Questions for the Comments : Do you have a personal myth? Do You Want One?

1. In her White Album essay, Joan Didion writes about a period in her life from 1966 to 1971 when all her assumption about the narrative of life were turned upside down. “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it.”

At the time she was a journalist covering the violent upheavals of the 1960s. It messed with her mind, and in 1968, she checked herself in as a psychiatric outpatient to a hospital.

Joan Didion in 1970, by Kathleen Ballard for the Los Angeles Times (via Wikimedia Commons)

Picture from a great post by

Ted Gioia

on Didion called “The Only Sensible Person In The World”

2. Michael Mohr’s post On Writing What Scares You

3. Freddie deBoer’s post  These Deranged Rich Ladies Are Convenient for Explaining Why We're Leaving New York

4. The cost of a NYC private school is $60,000 in after tax dollars, so about $120,000 in NYC pretax income. The math is brutally obvious that a family has to have a great deal of income or wealth to send two kids to private school.

Whether it’s worth it or not is a family decision. That said, the tuition money is not wasted. Most of it pays for teachers and administrators and extracurricular resources. Given the budget and bureaucratic restrictions of NYC public schools, it’s hard to make the case that the two types of schools are equal.

5. From C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation.