Albus Dumbledore’s final words in the Harry Potter novels didn’t make much sense to me when I read them for the first time as a kid in elementary school. After coming face-to-face with death and being knocked into an unconscious state of limbo, Harry saw a vision of Dumbledore for the first time since his teacher’s passing. He was told he had the choice to regain consciousness and return to fighting Voldemort, or he could board a train and go “on.”
“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”1 (Rowling 723)
I felt like this exchange undermined the conversation they had beforehand. If that wasn’t really Dumbledore and the meeting was simply a concoction of Harry’s imagination, why would his teacher’s answers matter? I wanted concrete answers, but I realize now that this exchange was perfect. It was not only significant to Harry’s character development, but it alluded to something far more universal: Things that happen “inside your head” may not seem materially “real” to you, but they directly affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Doesn’t that make them “real” to some degree?
What is Your Story?
I recall reflecting on this question deeply when I was applying to universities and writing personal statements. For a lot of us, that’s the first time we’re asked to detail who we are, what we want, and who we hope to become. It can be a difficult question to answer, in part because there is an emotional toll we pay when we look back on our traumas and embarrassments. Further complicating matters, we often conflate the concept of personal history with the concept of one’s story, or their personal narrative.
Personal history, as I am conceiving it, can be boiled down to a collection of facts: people you’ve met, places you’ve been, things you’ve done, and so on. Personal narrative, on the other hand, is the story that links these facts together. It is the collection of thoughts, emotions, and biases that color your experiences. It is the meaning and significance you attribute to the events you live through. It is the filter through which the objective is subjectively experienced. Your personal narrative shapes how you think about yourself, the world, and your Creator, as well as how you interact with them. Gaining an awareness of your narrative can be a powerful first step in controlling your direction in this life and the Next.
When you lose a loved one (may Allah [ﷻ] protect your loved ones and have mercy on all who have passed), there is the objective event of losing a person who was close to you, and there is the subjective way we experience it. The way we think about it and process it will directly affect our actions in the future. Maybe you feel like you lost the one person who ever understood you, and this belief contributes to you having a difficult time opening up to other people. Maybe you feel like you have a duty to honor their memory, so you find yourself striving to achieve something that would make them proud.
Revisiting Your Past
Look back at your life and try to identify moments when you experienced intense feelings of happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, nervousness, pride, embarrassment, and other emotions. This is one way to start identifying significant checkpoints in your personal narrative, and it can help you understand why you may have been moved to do certain things afterward. Reflect on the moments when you had to make decisions, be they related to career pursuits, romantic partners, or something else that caused you to question who you are or what you “should” be doing.
Consider writing these reflections down. Why do you think certain moments were particularly emotionally impactful? Where do you feel like your assumptions and expectations were coming from? How did you feel in the moment, and how do you feel now? You may have thoughts that seem to make sense in your head until you untangle them from your mental filters and reproduce them with pen and paper. Reviewing the internal and external factors that affected how you arrived at some conclusions can shed light on patterns of thought that you may want to adjust. This can help you take ownership of your narrative moving forward and make measured decisions based on the knowledge and wisdom you’ve accumulated over time.
The Demands of Narrativity
The purpose of your reflections isn’t necessarily to come to concrete answers. Reflecting on your personal narrative is a way to become more aware of and intentional with your reactions to the world around you. It can give you a better sense of who you are, what you care about, and where you should go, but you should be cautious of trying to search for specific meanings in past events. In Peter Goldie’s The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind, there is a chapter on what he calls “the narrative sense of self.” In a section titled, “Making Up our Minds and Breakdowns in Narrativity,” he writes:
The demands of narrativity on us as external narrators looking back on our past, seem to drag us towards thinking of our past thoughts, feelings, and deliberations as more determinate than they in fact were, and as reflective of an agency of which at the time we seemed quite bereft. In our reconstructions, we find ourselves saying things like ‘I decided that, all things considered, the best thing to do was to leave him’; and ‘Although it was terrible at the time, right through the process I just knew that it would turn out alright in the end’… It is as though we cannot bear the thought that there is no narrative explanation available of what happened in a way that provides internal meaningfulness.2
Our minds are constantly and unconsciously revising and editing our memories, but we can choose to play a more active role in this process. When you revisit your memories and past self, you are looking through a lens that has changed over time. Rather than trying to appease your current emotions, rationalize your decisions, or comfort your ego, consider treating your reflection as an exercise in understanding how events happened, how they affected you, and what you can learn from them moving forward. We may feel compelled to attribute meaning to things to increase or decrease our current feelings of responsibility, but we can rarely be certain that our understanding is complete or correct.
As Muslims, we are guided by the words of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), who said,
Wondrous is the affair of the believer for there is good for him in every matter, and this is not the case with anyone except the believer. If he is happy, then he thanks Allah and thus there is good for him, and if he is harmed, then he shows patience and thus there is good for him.3
This is probably my favorite hadith. It teaches us that no matter what our story is, no matter where it begins, having imaan (faith) will ultimately shape it positively because of the actions that will be inspired. The goal of reflecting on your personal narrative should be to inspire gratitude toward things that make you feel happy and to increase patience toward things that make you feel harmed. However, it should go without saying, of course, that this hadith is not implying that acts of injustice with a social component should be simply resolved with patience.
In Surat al-Baqara, Allah (ﷻ) says,
وَعَسَىٰ أَن تَكْرَهُوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ ۖ وَعَسَىٰ أَن تُحِبُّوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ شَرٌّ لَّكُمْ ۗ وَاللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ وَأَنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ
“But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not.” (Quran 2:216)
A friend of mine once told me, “You don’t stop halfway through a book and say, ‘That’s the whole story.’” Your perspective as a human being is incredibly limited. Remembering this when we reflect on our stories is an exercise of humility. We can become so immersed in our thoughts that we forget there are other variables at play. We don’t have to reach conclusive answers about who we “really” are, but we should strive to become aware of the story we tell ourselves if we wish to control our direction moving forward.
Conclusion
When Professor Dumbledore found an 11-year-old Harry Potter gazing into the Mirror of Erised, a mirror that shows the viewer their deepest desire, he knew the orphaned boy was visiting it to see an image of his late mother and father. Dumbledore told him he’d be moving the mirror so Harry would no longer seek it out. He said, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”4
Despite the potential feelings of pain and discomfort that can come from revisiting your history, gaining an increased awareness of your personal narrative can become a powerful tool to steer your future in the direction you want to head. Our goal should be to reflect on our memories to see how they can serve us in coming closer to our Creator. We know the destination we are seeking, and we can utilize our past experiences to better understand ourselves and the strengths and weaknesses we hope will ultimately move us toward humility and prostration.
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1. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Scholastic Press, 2012.
2. Goldie, Peter. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford University Press, 2012.
3. Chapter: The Believer’s Affair Is All Good (13). (n.d.). Retrieved July 14, 2020, from https://sunnah.com/muslim/55/82
4. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Scholastic Press, 1998.
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