Rewriting our Stories

We are all brilliant storytellers. Deeply convincing, highly imaginative inventors of wildly elaborate tales. Our minds spin these stories and whisper them in a constant stream through our brains as if they are whole truth, instead of ideas we’ve decided to accept, locking them into our bones with stubborn force. The readers, listeners, and editors also live within our own skin. Our subject matter may range from the outside world, our vision of ourselves, anxieties, what ifs, and endless other topics that we weave ourselves around and get fully tangled up in. We create stories about how other people perceive us, about how the world works, about the process of life. Within the infinite space of our minds, an entire world is built, an often faulty construct of our own realities. 

But each story we sit ourselves down around the fire with may just be a first draft, one we eventually realize doesn't actually work for the plot of our lives. Thus we must undergo a rewrite or make some adjustments. Perhaps the story goes that nobody likes you, and therefore you must self isolate and decline social invitations. You’ve constructed a reality in which everyone else dislikes who you are, you’ve decided you know the thoughts inside every other person’s head, and you have chosen to believe this as fact, a strict storyline in permanent marker on the walls of your mind. You’re the only one who can throw the pages out. Cross the words out in even brighter ink. Choose a new truth, perhaps that there will always be people who love you and there will be some that do not wish to have you in their lives, and that is okay. Every thought floating through our minds is not fact. If you believe the world is against you and bad things happen to you, your psyche will search and create the proof of that. It will be written until you decide to forcefully scribble out the fable with bright red marker, and seize to live as a victim of this story you’ve convinced yourself of. Maybe you find yourself at the end of a relationship you didn’t see coming. You tell yourself they’ve left your life because you are unworthy or you did not do enough, when in truth it’s simply the feeling.

The right energy may not be there, and it has nothing to do with anything in your control. Telling yourself it’s your fault is your own false belief strung together with the bruised hands of your ego, and you get to shred that toxicity and rewrite the story in a way that satisfies your own world. We assign ourselves strict roles that we adhere to so passionately. The victim, the hero, the badass, the failure, the mother, the leaver, the wallower. With sharp pencils raised, we confine ourselves to our beliefs, forgetting that we are the only ones casting these roles. Herein lies the boundless beauty of being the creator. We get to choose the storyline; we get to rip up the pages fiercely, throw them into our rage fueled fires roaring in our chests, and form a whole new belief. 

We get to write our story as we please, and we can rewrite, edit, and throw out every first or one hundredth draft we choose. Litter the pages with cross outs and scratch marks and countless rewrites. Not a single novel exists that was written once and completed. It is not this seamless, perfect entity, bound with gold string and kept in a glass case on the shelf. The book is sliced and rearranged, with notes in the margins, pages torn, and papers stitched in a messy, marvelous quilt that wraps us our entire life. Picking up the pen and claiming our own stories so fully and fabulously lends our own hands the power, and gives us the ability to choose our lives instead of victimizing ourselves. We get to edit until we are satisfied. The pen rests solely in your hand, your voice is the narrator, and you are the only one who has the power to change your world, beginning by adjusting the stories you are telling yourself.