We become the story that we tell ourselves.
From the time we’re born, people that we love–and even complete strangers–feed us a script about who we are. We see foremost what they call forward. We become what they nurture–and we learn to hide (or feel shame) about what they dismiss. We keep this script close, reverting back to it when we feel off-base.
But, sometimes, the script is a lie.
When I walked up into Alcoholics Anonymous in my cowboy boots, feeling mighty superior, I had my script firmly in hand. I was a smart, sensitive, tragic victim. The world simply couldn’t understand someone as deeply empathic and intuitive as I was. So, I drank to shield myself from the tragedy of the every day as it unfolded around me.
You can imagine how quickly the A.A.ers called bullshit on that.
They immediately started asking me to find my part in my own pain. I resisted mightily. For real. I thought I was exempt from the basic truths that, in every situation, we have choices. Often we don’t choose what happens to us. But we do get to choose how we deal with it. We get to write our own story.
But writing your own story is hard.
It means excavating psychic pain, long buried, to figure out what really happened… and to examine how your beliefs, attitudes, and/or resentments (mix & match any of these!) play into how you experience that pain now. Shiiiiiiiit. And then there’s the whole “making a list of people you’ve harmed”…. which really could be its own level of hell.
BUT.
In doing all that–in laying out my own pain & the pain I’d caused others–I could see patterns in my behaviors and beliefs. I found triggers that I could then defuse. And I could speak it all… and begin to let it go.
None of us get to re-write our past. In fact, I’ve long stopped wishing that I could. What’s way more important to me is writing my future. In order to do that, I have to create my own script about who I am. And that is the work of every day.
For a long time, my script read that I was a tragic fuck-up with lots of potential.
I mean, if you’ve got dramatic flair, you can be good at playing that part. But, ultimately, it’s not very fulfilling.
As I re-frame my story, I don’t see wasted years. I see an illness that drove my life to a standstill. I see the ravages of unchecked mental health issues. I see darkness—that, ultimately, I emerged from. I don’t see a fuck-up. I see a warrior.
I have to check my script every day, to make sure I have the right one. There are moments when I remember vividly–too vividly–the pain I caused people I loved and the agony I put myself through. And the old script plays. I have to check it. Stop it in it’s tracks. I do not have to be that person any more. Full stop.
I get to write my story. And it’s compassion, and love, and rising up from the wreckage… It’s being worthy and loved simply because. It’s being real and loving hard and not letting fear shut me down. It’s being fully alive and watching my real story unfold.