It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words and that a movie is made up of thousands and thousands of pictures. As human beings we have found so many different ways to tell our stories. From cave paintings through stone tablets and then bronze, from paper to film to the ever present screens that take both our attention and our time.
Yet the real stories that you carry are the ones that you probably never tell.
Because the most powerful stories are not the ones we lay out for the world to see or share in our feed on whatever platform you are currently logged into. The real powerhouse stories are the ones that you keep quietly inside, locked away deep in the depths of your soul. Chances are you learned them when you tried to make sense of something that you couldn’t understand, and you probably never questioned the meaning that you took from whatever it is that happened.
And those stories are probably all about you.
Because the tales we’ve made up that define us are the ones that control us. Like a subtle and insidious form of programming, we decide who we are and where we fit into the world not by an objective evaluation, but in the intense moments of our heightened feeling, whether from anger, sadness, joy or peace.
The stronger the feeling, the greater the power the story has over us.
And chances are we never questioned them. As long as they are working for us, we go on living our lives. Whether they are true or not is less concerning to us them whether they allow us to be happy. There is no person less likely to question the story they believe than the person who is happy with the outcome, or who is afraid to face the reality that the story may not be true.
It’s been said before that when people are successful they tend to party and when they suffer defeat, they tend to ponder.
I started a new project recently, one that involves a great deal of writing, and one that I doubt I will ever share. The goal of this is not to publish a book, but rather to challenge how I remember the past, and hopefully change how I show up in the future. I never thought of somebody who would have a story worth telling, until I realized that the person I most need to tell that story to is myself.
So I’ve started writing my own biography.
Even writing those words seems incredibly pretentious. I don’t claim to have any great wisdom, and what little I do have I share here freely. I don’t think I’ve had the worst or the hardest story; I know of many who have had incredibly harder lives than I have. I don’t even claim some massive success that justifies the writing of a memoir.
For me, writing my own biography is an attempt to put back together the many fractured pieces of my life, and to try to find some semblance of peace in a unified whole.
Because the worst part about the stories that we carry inside of us is that we never get to see them from somebody else’s perspective. That which is carried quietly in your soul cannot be seen until it is dragged into the light of consciousness, examined from a perspective other than how it feels, and then and only then can it be judged according to its merits, or modified as may seem necessary.
But the act of committing to paper that which is inside of you creates a separation that actually allows you to see the truth of it.
And it has been said that the truth shall set you free (although in my experience it usually hurts for a little while first).
So over the next however long it takes, my goal is to find truths to help me see who I am, and also help me write the next generation of stories to take me through the next chapters of my life. Because while there are some things that are true, I’ve also come to understand that as we define ourselves, there are a lot of things we make up, and if I’m going to make something up, I’d rather it be something that empowers me than something that doesn’t.
Because so many of the ‘truths’ that we carry are actually anything but.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings