Shankar Vedantam

Can you talk a moment about what Denise is doing here?

She's basically transforming something that's a negative experience into something that is a positive experience.

I have to confess, I sometimes do this myself.

If I'm waiting for something and it feels excruciating to be waiting and waiting for an airplane to take off, for example, I'll tell myself a story.

And the story is, these are the last 20 minutes of my life.

And suddenly, I want those 20 minutes to extend as far as they possibly can.

And I'm not

anxious or worried or exasperated by the delay anymore.

Can you talk a bit about whether this is an act of storytelling and if this is an effective form of storytelling for our mental health?

It sure sounds like it in your case and in Denise's case where you can take a negative experience that's not in your control and transform it by changing the story that you're telling yourself about that.

I think indeed for many of the

challenging experiences in our life like Denise's that leave a lasting mark, that aren't going to go away.

We have to learn how to live with them.

So she initially framed her tinnitus as a visitor.

And then it became a friend.

And I thought, wow, that's really quite a transformation there.

If we can see the negative things that happen to us as teachers who are there to help us, as other characters who are there to help us, that's really amazing.

But then Denise goes one step further and she really does the hard work of integrating it into her own sense of self.

that really transforms the main character of the story, Denise herself, and really makes room in that character for both positive and negative experiences to coexist.

Jonathan, when we lose a loved one, we often reflect not just on the story of our life, but on the story of this other person's life.