If I told you a story would you believe it?
Almost four years ago I intentionally upended my life and altered the course of my entire existence. I consciously and deliberately changed the narrative.
I changed my story.
What one person may see as a crisis, another may see as a window of opportunity.
What may be a problem to this person may only be a challenge to that person.
Someone may see despair where another sees hope.
Where one sees fear another sees comfort. One person will see struggle and another will see a chance for growth.
And on and on it goes.
Our narrative of life comes from how we internally translate everything that we see and hear.
It comes from the stories that we tell ourselves.
What separates our species from all other species is the stories that we tell. We like to think that we operate on logic and facts but…yeah, not so much.
We are walking, breathing, stories and projections that function on emotions. We make decisions emotionally and then our rational mind tries to justify the decisions with what we believe to be facts.
We project our past experiences, our own inner thoughts, perceptions, and expectations onto everything. It becomes our story and the stories that we tell ourselves become our beliefs, which is how we make sense of the world, how we make sense of life and death.
And a well told story is much more influential on our beliefs than logic or facts.
We've all had stories told to us that were true, yet we chose not to believe.
We've all had stories told to us that were not true and yet we believed them.
Just because we believe something does not make it true and just because we don't believe something does not make it untrue.
As a result of the stories that we tell ourselves we can see patterns where there is really chaos.
We can see meaning where there is really randomness.
We see narratives where there are none.
We see things in a way that fits into our story.
How do the stories you tell yourself present themselves in the world around you?
We can spend an entire life believing a story about ourselves. One that we didn't write, one that was told to us that we simply accepted without challenging or questioning it.
But it's never too late to change our story.
I don't write to try to please anybody's sensibilities.
I write my stories to share my thoughts and feelings and experiences.
I write my stories to try to encourage inspiration or motivation, to hopefully provoke thought.
I write my stories to help me process and understand this new life that I now live.
I write, and will continue to write, because I changed my story and I have a new story to tell.
Pic by Grant Krasner