Monday, July 10, 2006

sides of a story

i wanted to start this entry with a quotation about life... but after much search in the internet, i can't seemed to find one that exactly captures what i had in my mind (i found some quotes that were close, but i was looking for something perfect). so i gave up the search before my ideas about this blog fly away (di na nga ako ganun kadalas magblog, mahirap ng mawala ang idea ;0)

what i wanted to say is that life is a story, we write the stories of our lives. i remember people (unfortunately usually after a break up) that its' another chapter in your life, that when you end one chapter, it's an opportunity to start a new one.

we tell all kinds of tales, from a story about a good meal, a good buy, natapilok ka sa harap ng crush mo to the more serious narratives about the difficulites and challenges of our lives, the separation of your parents, the untimely pregnancy of a teenager, the drug addiction of a friend. we not only tell our story but the story of other people. basta everything is a kwento.

now i begin to think ( as i always enjoy looking into the endless questions on life) how many sides does a story have? i am pretty sure, all of us have told stories about our own and others' experience, but how do you know what's the real deal to a story? for example, sa isang away ng magkaibigan or magka-ibigan, there's supposed to be two sides. i will take the latter as a case in point for further examination. pag nagaway ang mag boyfriend-girlfriend, there's the side of the boy and the side of the girl. but there's the side of the people around them, relatives, friends and even enemies. even for some people who don't know the couple but have heard of the story, will have something to say about it, thus becoming another story.

To further "complicate" a story, is the perspective of people, the usual subjective evaluation of a story, that when people retell a story, it most often than not contain (in content and in the manner of narrating) their opinion on the story, thus "distorting" the story even further. In short, the sides are directly proportional to the number of times the story is told? Now the sides become perspectives...

After being confused with this story, what i realized is that people should be very cautious telling stories, especially that of other people. a small or big "editing" puts the tale in a totally different angle and may have some bad repercussions to the person concerned, and this is one thing that can't be easily rectified (in case it still can be rectified). In plain and simple words... let's do justice to the story and to the characters of the story (showbiz na showbiz) ;0)