When my husband and I decided to split, I spent a goodly amount of time writing an email to tell my closest friends. As with all my writing, I paid attention to how I phrased it...what I said...the reasons I gave. I needed to get it right. I knew this was a story I was going to have to repeat...that it was a story that was going to shock and disappoint friends and family...that it was a story that would sting. But I also knew that it was a story that needed to be the truth framed hopefully...positively...not just for me and my ex, but for the Monkey...because someday, he'd need to hear the story too.
As adults, we shape our lives by the stories we tell ourselves. We take a fact and give it weight and meaning with the stories we weave around it. And then we react to the story as if it's gold-plated truth.
Perception is reality...and we make it so.
But what's been on my mind recently is the simple fact that we choose the timbre of these stories. We, consciously or otherwise, make a decision which side of the coin becomes our story...whether lack of success is "failure" or "a learning experience"...whether victory was "hard won" or "dumb luck"...whether an ending is "the end" or "the beginning." We each author the book of our lives.
Except, of course, when we don't. Some stories are hard-wired into our psyche from childhood...they run on auto-pilot by Pavlovian trigger. I listened recently to a friend reciting his auto-pilot stories...defeating, disenfranchising, powerless stories...and I listened...and struggled in his pain...but I couldn't help him. I've yet to help myself.
I don't yet have the answers for how to retell the negative stories I've been dragging around for three decades...only that I know, for me, it's critical...that doing it will be the thing that gets me unstuck from those places where I'm stuck and will let me finally be all that I will become. Maybe the realization of choice is the first step... Maybe a good set of wrenches wouldn't hurt either.
What I know with certainty is that the stories we tell ourselves are important.
Life is how you describe it.
...I think I just named my blog.
3 comments:
Bravo! Or should that be brava???
Regardless, this is more about helping yourself perhaps than you might feel. Flip the script, don't let the script flip you.
I just went back and reread that e-mail message. (Is it weird that I save all my e-mail? Well, I do.) You did a good job with it. I was alternately going "no! no!" and "yeahhhhh, I knowww..." as I read it.
Note that I wrote back with such helpful advice as, and I quote: "Brave face! Brave face! RAWWWRRRR!"
I have been thinking a lot about this same subject, our personal stories, but in a different way. You gave me a new spin to what I have been thinking about. I'll have to blog about it so we can continue to live in our parallel universes.
Post a Comment