Between Me and My Brain

I like my brain. But my brain is also an asshole.

I don’t remember the first time I realized that sometimes my brain wasn’t telling me the truth, but I think it was related to learning about unreliable narrators in high school lit.

This was a way of telling a story, my teacher explained, that makes the reader work a little harder, because you can’t be certain what is an event and what is their interpretation of the events. She never said in as many words that that’s how life is, too, but that’s what I took away from it.

The underlying subtext, then, was that everyone is an unreliable narrator in their own lives, because no one is omnipotent and no one can have all of the facts and everyone is just calling it as they see it.

But also, it underscored that I, myself, was an unreliable narrator, and what I thought were the plain facts were often not the plain facts at all.

If I were more poetic, I might think this is what pushed me into a career that is largely driven by answering questions with data and research, but I’m not and I think it’s probably a coincidence.

In the course of my life, my brain has served me very well. As a young person, much of my school work came easily—and when something didn’t come easily, I was typically able to figure…