Tell A Familiar Story In A New Way

What makes you, ‘you’? What memories, people, places, habits, big events and mundane pastimes make up the person you are? What smells remind people of you? What food do you cook for comfort? What stories have shaped your course of life?

Woof. Heavy hitting questions for a Thursday morning.

We are made up of hundreds of narratives. Some we tell ourselves through our own experiences. Some are passed down for hundreds of years.

What is your narrative? And how is it impacting you?

The stories we tell ourselves, and the way we tell them, matters.

Sometimes our narratives are for survival. Sometimes they’re for thrill. Sometimes they establish us as a triumphant soldier emerging from battle. Sometimes they make us curl into a ball. We tell ourselves things to prevent cutting a fresh healing emotional wound, to feel success over the unavoidable monster of change, and to self-sabotage positivity because positivity may feel just as monstrous as change.

What makes you, ‘you’?

Is it that painstaking day in elementary school when you remember the first time you caught the wrath of a bully, believing for the rest of your life that ‘trusting people gets you hurt’? Is it the day you found out a loved one passed away, believing for the rest of your life that ‘bad, unexplainable things, happen to good people’? Is it when your best friend moved away, believing for the rest of your life that ‘people always leave’? Is it when you didn’t get into your dream college and believing for the rest of your life that ‘you will amount to nothing’?

Telling a familiar story in a new way isn’t for the faint of heart. It requires you to dive deeper into the most painful moments of your life and pinpointing the parts of that narrative that you sank your teeth into and with grit and grace and a lot of perseverance, making you the person you are today.

The painful and beautiful and mundane experiences that have made up our lives will always be there. No one will ever be able to take those away from you. I just want you to know: you are so much more than that painful or beautiful or mundane experience. You are the hundreds of days leading up to that moment and the hundreds of days after that moment.

It may feel easier to access hurt or anger or powerlessness you felt in a story that has driven you to the destination where you now call home. As backwards as it may feel, there is comfort in the pain that made you, you. There is comfort in knowing the end of the story.

You got bullied; I can never trust people again. Your loved one passed away; bad things happen to good people. Your best friend moved; people always leave. You didn’t get into your dream school; I will amount to nothing.

There isn’t comfort in telling that familiar story in a new way. It takes patience. It takes deep reflection. It takes a belief in recognizing that you are worth it; you have driven yourself to the destination that you now call home.

You got bullied; I learned how to advocate for myself.

Your loved one passed away; My loved one lives in me and how I honor them matters.

Your best friend moved; I have learned the importance of true, honest, and loyal friendship.

You didn’t get into your dream school; I was flexible and applied to other schools, learning to accept imperfection.

There is a time and place for each ending of the story. Both deserve your acknowledgement, and both deserve love and acceptance.

I don’t want to make this a post about toxic positivity. In fact, I want to do the exact opposite. Our lives and experiences are so nuanced — one change in one ending to one story isn’t going to shift your entire way of living, but it could shift the way you talk to yourself. I recognize that emotions aren’t that simple; it doesn’t take one shift of a sentence and all complexity of our feelings are gone. It takes time, patience, and practice, to be able to hold both. We all deserve to feel our feelings in the painful and beautiful and mundane moments, and those moments will always be with us. I want you to remember that the way you define your life matters. The way you talk to yourself will be the way you impact the world. The way you tell your story empowers your narrative.

So, what makes you, ‘you’?

Take care of yourselves. :)

Emily