will help you step out of your story, reclaim the power of your own voice, and find your way home by exercising your innate ability to be the master of your own magnificent work in progress. I also invite you to step into your power as a storyteller and spin doctor, fortified with the conviction that personal transformation is both literally and figuratively at your fingertips. All you need is a pen (or a keyboard) and a sense of adventure. So put on your story glasses, shift your perspective, and enjoy the journey!
EMBRACING THE STORY LENS ON LIFE
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Every life is an unfolding story, a dynamic, unique, purposeful, and potentially heroic story with bright spots, turning points, and abounding opportunities for personal growth and transformation. From the day we’re born, we become the star and spin doctor of our own work in progress, with the power to tell our stories as triumphs, tragedies, or something in between. Our story has supporting characters who provide love and assistance and antagonists who cause us to realize the substance we’re made of and what’s really important. Like stories, our lives are filled with suspense. Our personal decisions, both big and small, affect our storyline — the relationships we choose, how we spend our day, and how we nourish ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Yet few of us take time to explore the character we’re playing. We don’t stop to discover what our story is about, who’s writing our script, and how the challenges we face can help us develop the insights and skills we need to move to the next chapter.
Stuck in the same old story, many of us remain so entrenched in tales of victimization and martyrdom that we can scarcely imagine an alternate, positive, or redemptive reading of the text of our lives. Perhaps because we have been taught to view life through one particular lens, we simply don’t see other, more inspiring versions of our tale that could liberate us.
Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly sifting through various competing narratives to make sense of our world for ourselves and others — whether it’s describing our day to a loved one, explaining why we didn’t get promoted, sharing our political perspective, or justifying why we spend a fortune on organic produce. We may struggle with many contradictory stories to explain our biggest decisions: why we got divorced, or never had children, or changed careers, or never pursued our dreams. Our perspective can change from day to day, and even moment to moment, depending on our mood and where exactly we are situated in the timeline of a problematic chapter. For example, the bitter tale we tell a month after ending a failed romance is probably not the sentimental story we will tell twenty years later after we are happily married to someone else. And neither of these stories will be the same as our former romantic partner’s, even though it’s the story of the same relationship.
You can see this for yourself. Think of something funny, touching, interesting, or meaningful that has happened to you in the past few months. Now imagine telling this story to your spouse or your best friend. When you’re done, imagine describing the same story to a parent or a boss. What about to a stranger in a café? What about five years from now, or twenty years? How might it be different?
While some details might remain the same, you might, depending on your audience, emphasize certain aspects of the story over others, or omit certain details that seem irrelevant, inappropriate, or too complicated to explain. As you tell it over and over, you might remember certain parts you had forgotten initially, or new insights might lead you to spin the story in a totally different direction. Over time, your values might change, and so you would revise your story accordingly, or hindsight might connect once-disparate episodes of your life.
Following a loss or a tragedy, many people engage in a prolonged period of story-wrestling in an attempt to make meaning of events that are hard to digest or that seem to defy explanation. Whether you consider yourself a heroic figure overcoming obstacles or a tragic victim of destiny often depends on how you choose to read the text of your life and the way that you tell your story. Take Milo’s story, for instance.
Milo’s story: superstar or Glorified Hack?
Milo, a thirty-one-year-old political reporter, had recently begun working at a fledgling online news magazine when an editor from another major newspaper invited him for coffee. He met the editor in her office, where she peppered him with questions about his new employer and complimented him on his increasingly visible body of work. On the way out, Milo shared an elevator with his hero and mentor, who had helped him break into the industry ten years earlier. Milo, who often second-guessed his abilities, felt reassured. This seemed like a sign that he was on a right path.
However, following the meeting, Milo attended a press conference with a local politician, who scoffed at one of his questions. Suddenly, all the good feelings from the morning evaporated, and he felt like a glorified hack.
Later that evening during our psychotherapy session together, Milo recounted the chain of events. He said he regretted his choice of questions at the press conference; they were an embarrassing error. Consequently, he wondered if the positive meaning he had read into the morning meeting at the daily newspaper had been “a lie.”
As a psychotherapist with a background in journalism, I gave the matter some thought and framed my answer as a metaphor: “It’s like writing an inspirational chapter of a story and erasing it because of a typo.”
Reclaiming and Reframing Your Personal Narrative
Milo’s story raises an important question. If there are a variety of ways to view our story, how do we choose the best version of our narrative so that the telling leaves us feeling inspired and hopeful? How do we find the redemptive storyline without whitewashing over unpleasant circumstances, repressing feelings, or discounting important life lessons?
For starters, you need a framework for understanding your story so you can explore what’s positive, redemptive, and possibly inspirational about it. Ideally, this framework would be something simple and relatively familiar that would help you take charge of the narration of your story adventure. Additionally, it would place importance on character development, reframing any disappointments or losses as stepping-stones to a more open-hearted or broad-minded experience of life and a richer understanding of yourself. It would measure your worth — not based on the number of zeros in your salary, on your job title, or on your marital status — but rather, on the extent to which you, in the starring role, could grow in compassion, wisdom, depth, and responsibility regardless of circumstances. Finally, when you stepped outside your story to look at the full picture of your life, you would discover that no matter what was happening in your plotline, you held the power to be cocreator of your story by reframing how you perceived and shared it.
Next, you need a new lens on life, one that elevates your perspective, frees your imagination, and overrides your inner critic. This new and improved prescription, so to speak, would help you view “the same old story” from new vistas and through kinder, more empathetic eyes.
Thankfully, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel — both the lens and the frames already exist. And you’re probably familiar with both of them — it just never occurred to apply these lessons to your own life. The lens I’m referring to is the third-person voice and the framework, the elements of a story. Not what you were expecting? Let me explain.
Putting On Your Story Glasses
Perhaps
