You might relate to this in many ways. If you are a book nerd, like yours truly, stories are infectious. The carefully curated words, the lyricism, the magnificent scenes that become lifelike your mind, and the hearts of the players that melt and forever reside in yours.
Stories transport lessons, family mythology, history, or old wounds to front-and-center. They can bring you to your knees. They can wrap you tightly in the warmest and most comforting arms you have ever felt. They are big medicine.
About 20 years ago I did this workshop. I was 23 years-old, working in social services in Boston, and generally the same old-souled person I am now in a younger body. I had seen and experienced some things, the gravity of which drew me to being of service and to the work that I do now. In this workshop you had a write a story about yourself. Not a recitation of dates and facts, but a story. What is your personal mythology or
your operating system? Basically, what's your deal?
I wrote about how I didn't take care of myself. That when I looked deeply at my life (at that point, 23 years of it), I made a lot of decisions that weren't consistent with placing value upon my health, my mental and emotional well-being, or my purpose. I did a lot of things because I was supposed to or because it seemed like the next logical step. Or it was productive.
Then we read our stories, out loud, to a complete stranger in the workshop. Over and over again.
Before I tell you what happened next, you need to know something. I was sitting in a huge room with at least 100 people. Many or most of these people were sharing stories about affairs, financial ruin, divorces, burying their children, caring for their parents with dementia, and being brutally assaulted or abused. There was some heavy, heavy lifting being done all around me.
So I started reading my story. The first time I was all in: intonation and cadence galore. The second time: maybe less enthusiastic but it was still pretty compelling. The fifth time: okay, I am a little bored with myself. The ninth time: I was rolling on the floor laughing. Like dry heaving, can't-breathe-or-talk, laughing.
I'm not sure if that was supposed to be the end result. My assigned stranger partner was not there in his own storytelling, and he thought I was insane.
The telling and re-telling can be powerful. It can be transformative. Like being washed over with water and time. It can give us vantage points and facets in which we would never rejoice if not subjected to exposure, pressure, and forces of nature.
And it can land you on your ass, laughing like a maniac, with only one thing left to do: choose.
Stop telling that story. Stop living it. It's so overblown, bloated, and laughable. It's made up. Let it go.
