A reflection on penning our own life's story
Stories are often created from ignoring the truth of a person, behavior, situation, culture, system and the like. Within our own lives, we allow ourselves to become actors, learning to play our roles quite well within these stories, both understanding and dancing around the often multi-layered, underlying subtext never to be spoken. We proudly wear our costumes and masks. We diligently show up for rehearsal. Occasionally we dare to improvise, exposing contextual moments of truth, often unknown to most, including ourselves. But eventually, as good actors do, we circle back to the story’s original intent so as to arrive at curtain call as expected.
Pause. Re-read if need be.
Life itself is made up of a compilation of these stories. On a day-to-day basis, we’re often times too much in the thick of things to see the chapters as they’re being written, and when we do pull up and re-read our life story thus far, we can feel more like the victim than any responsible party to what has unfolded.
2020 has provided many of us, most of us, dare I say all of us, an opportunity to pull up and re-read parts of our story. It has given us the chance to evaluate—how are we tracking against our dreams, hopes, desires? Are we living the life that we want? Are we showing up in relationship the way we need? Or have we unknowingly handed the pen over to someone else to script our life for us?
And are we brave enough to take this responsibility back?
For me, there was a twenty day period in May, during which I lost both my relationship and my job, that really forced my hand at this level of introspection. Both were unexpected; both were what I thought to be long-term partnerships; and both occurred during the beginning months of this global pandemic and our universal need for connection, support and purpose.
No longer with the social constructs where one might normally meet these needs, I experienced an overwhelming grief and intense loneliness alongside an overall sense of lack of belonging. It was painful. It still is at times.
I had no choice but to sit in stillness—to listen to this pain that sometimes whispered to me, sometimes shouted at me, to trace its origins and to learn to feel compassion towards myself and reverence for my own heart. It was not, is not easy. I still often want to (and do) turn away from it, run away from it, numb it. It’s exhausting. It’s never ending. But I know I must do it—I choose to do it. I accept the invitation to recognize these storylines and their underlying truths, to work to reclaim my voice and to break free from what was inherited, what was expected, what was prescribed.
I do need to give myself some credit—it’s not that I have not been doing “the work”; for years, I have been going to therapy, which in and of itself is an accomplishment and not to be downplayed. Ever. But upon reflection, I acknowledge that up until now, my understanding had been more intellectual, more cerebral; less embodied, less somatic. While I might have been able to pinpoint some of these stories in my life and their impact on me to date, I had not yet been able to surrender to them and become free of their grasp. That is the work I am doing now. I am learning to stand in my own truth and write a different ending to my life’s book.
How often do you feel like the author of your own life versus an actor playing a part that someone else scripted? My hope is that more often than not, you do, in fact, hold the pen of your life’s story. And if you don’t, it’s never too late to pick it up, turn the page and start writing.
The late Randy Pausch, known for his book, The Last Lecture, said:
It is not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed. It is the things we do not.
Here’s to starting now to live the life we want to live and to picking up the pen.
