Become the Story You Want to Tell

 I'll let you in on a little secret:  I'm a nerd.

I love storytelling whether it is fantasy or science fiction.  I enjoy immersing myself in a great story and escaping reality.  I love stories with dragons, aliens, spaceships, wizards, and even a good haunting or two.

Rarely though do we look at ourselves and think of our lives as a story. We have a beginning, a middle, and an ending.  We start off naive and look at the world through rose-colored glasses, then we learn heartache and tragedy that we are challenged to conquer, but instead of us facing one great villain like Voldemort from Harry Potter, we face the conquest of a thousand faceless villains that slowly steal away our optimism and our joy. Whether that villain is an idiotic boss who doesn't treat us with respect or a nosy relative who wants to know if you scheduled your appointment with a proctologist already.

We tend not to view ourselves as heroic because we get caught up in the mundane.  The great thing about fiction stories is that most of the boring parts like going to the bathroom from drinking too much water or speed dressing due to sleeping through the alarm are often left out.  We are just reading the highlights of the lives of the characters when we are reading a story.

That too is also the delusion that people face when they compare their own lives to others on social media. They look at their friends and acquaintances and they think to themselves, "Wow, that gal has an amazing life!"  The only problem with that though is that as a reader, you are only seeing the highlights.  Not often do we get to peek behind the wizard's curtain to see the whole show of what is really happening to them.

So I really have a question for you:  What is your story?

Are you wanting to live someone else's life?  Are you proud of the story you have told about yourself now?

That's perhaps one of the most profound things that I've learned in recent years is that our lives are our own and we get to decide what happens in our story.  I understand that things happen such as an unexpected layoff or the loss of a loved one, but how we choose to face these challenges and the decisions we make regarding these events do become a part of our own personal hero's journey.

When you think about ancient stories like Hercules and the challenges he had to face, it's easy for us to imagine some great person reaching down deep within themselves and conquering those challenges with their resilience and natural talents.  Rarely, however, do we see that potential within ourselves.  We diminish our own problems, we run away from our anxieties and we downplay our fears.

The problem with that is that those things are our dragons and that is our opportunity to become the hero of our own story.  To face these challenges and to push our way through to triumph for it is in our challenges and failures that we learn about ourselves and what we are truly capable of.  Every important lesson you have ever discovered in life has come from a failure of some sort that forced you to grow and become stronger.

We can either build upon those strengths and continue to grow or we can use those challenges as an excuse that impede our own progression.

What do you want your story to be at the end?  You are its author because no one else has a say in what you do except you. Do you want to abdicate the ending to your enemies or do you want to write the ending yourself?

Become the story you want to tell...