The "I-got-here-all-by-myself" narrative is appealing, particularly to a conservative electorate.
In that respect, the "I can't help myself" narratives become as unhelpful as gay cure narratives; indeed, they become the basis of gay cure "hopes", only this time based on eugenics rather than pseudo-psychiatry.
Of course, the more I forced myself into this narrative the harder it was to believe this myself.
They hold off any temptation to resign myself to the narrative of decline.
Angelica rushes home from England to comfort her sister, and Eliza sings a fearsome anthem, "Burn," taking revenge on Hamilton by destroying their correspondence — which Miranda cleverly casts as a self-aware historical act: I'm erasing myself from the narrative.
I was stunned that I could have it with such ease — that not only could I enter the world of Edith Wharton, open the cover and lose myself in her narrative, but I could actually own a book that was her contemporary.
Because of this, I can watch movies where there is not one Black person present - let alone one Black woman - and easily insert myself into the narrative.
I found myself skipping the whiney narrative.
And then in the end, when Hamilton has died far too young, Eliza sings, "I put myself back in the narrative".
"I put myself back in the narrative," she tells us — interviewing soldiers who fought with Hamilton, raising funds for the Washington Monument, and establishing the first private orphanage in New York City.
When I am sad, feeling my temperament unsuited to the brightness of summer sun, fiction allows me to lose myself in its kaleidoscopic narrative layers, to escape the recesses of my own logic.
