On Lemon Slices

Hi – 

Have you ever seen Marcel the Shell with Shoes On?

Marcel is a one-inch talking shell who wears lentils as hats and uses a raisin as a beanbag chair. His one regret in life is that he'll never have a dog. So he ties a hair to a piece of lint and drags it around as a pet. Its name is Allen.

I thought of Marcel this week during hypnosis when an image arrived, a bit ridiculous but thus the imagination :) so here it was, dozens of people I had known, walking around with lemon slices on strings. Dragging them behind like pets. 

My lemon slices. Pieces of me they had apparently taken when they left.

So I went to collect them.

One by one, I approached these people in my mind's eye. And they looked at me like I had lost my mind.

"Tamara. Do you really think I've been walking around with a lemon slice on a string this whole time?"

I mean. When you put it that way.

They weren't lovingly tending to pieces of my essence like Marcel tends to Allen. They were just living their lives. 

The lemon slices existed only in the story I told myself about what they took when they left.

the truth: the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences shape our identity as much as the experiences themselves. Two people can go through the same event and come away with entirely different stories, which create entirely different emotional realities.

When someone leaves, the departure is just a fact. What comes next is narrative. Did they take something from me? Did they leave with a piece of my heart, my confidence, my ability to trust? If the story says yes, then functionally, they did. Because now I'm operating from a place of incompleteness. Now I'm a lemon with missing slices.

Marcel knows the lint is lint. He knows it's not a dog. But the story transforms what it is. Our brains do the same thing, which is both the problem and the solution.

Neuroscientists discovered that when we recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, open to modification before it gets stored again. This is called memory reconsolidation. Hypnosis accesses this directly. In that relaxed state, the brain's fear response quiets down, and a window opens where emotional memories can be updated.

When I went back to collect my lemon slices and those people looked at me with confusion, my brain received new information: the original story wasn't accurate. The parts I thought others took had never actually left. They couldn't leave. They were always mine.

What happens when you collect all your lemon slices and realize they were never gone?

You realize you can make lemonade. Not because you tracked down the pieces and forcibly retrieved them. But because the lemons were always whole.

Maybe you have your own lemon slices out there. Maybe you've believed certain people left with pieces of you. Your trust. Your lightness.

What if they never actually took those things?

The people who left your life are not Marcel, tenderly dragging pieces of your essence around on strings. They're off living their lives, thinking about their own lint.

Which sounds harsh, but is actually the most freeing realization in the world. Because if they never took it, you don't need to get it back.

You're a whole lemon. You always were.

Easy peasy.


Happy New Year. I hope this year you get to rewrite the stories you've been telling yourself.

Reading: Dan McAdams' work on narrative identity, Emily Esfahani Smith's The Power of Meaning, Bruce Ecker's Unlocking the Emotional Brain on memory reconsolidation,and obviously the original Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.