The stories we tell ourselves…
So I haven’t been writing as much this last week, as you can tell.
That is, I haven’t been pinning words down on paper or on a computer. I’ve been writing non-stop in my mind – as I do dishes, while I’m trying to fall asleep, while I’m listening for the popcorn to finish in the microwave. The stories go something like this: a middle aged mom bites off more than she can chew and gets nowhere with her many projects – or, woman quits her day job and ends up impoverished and living in a shack after a year.
My most recent story was health related and involved me dying of some terrible disease. When I discovered, to my great relief and mild embarrassment, that what I’ve been dealing with is just a 3mm kidney stone mucking up the works, it seemed all too appropriate a metaphor for everything else.
We let so much get in our way. Through the stories we tell ourselves, we often make things so much bigger and so much more insurmountable than they really are.
“The story I’m telling myself is…” is a phrase I learned in a non-violent communication class I took a while back. It’s supposed to be used in difficult conversations, or any conversation really, to help you vocalize what you are perceiving and to give the other person the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings that may be arising.
I think we need to start using it in conversations with ourselves. Once my uncomfortable little reality check snapped me out of my funk, I was able to look around and see beyond my current perception. The story I’m telling myself is that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew and I’m getting nowhere. The reality is that after just over a month out of traditional employment I have a home office/sound studio nearly completed, I’m two months away from graduating from my first herbal apprenticeship, and I’ve written more of my own work than I have in the last two years.
And as with all stories, there’s always so much more going on between the lines. I’m learning so much about so much and that’s a big part of what this year was about. Even more so, my son is right in this with me. He is watching me pursue my passions by setting goals, creating action steps, and working to overcome obstacles. Now he’s even seen me deal with the funk and work my way around the obstacles in my own brain.
Stories matter. In my former life as a communication teacher we talked a lot about how the stories we consume shape our lives. The stories we tell ourselves have an even deeper impact. They can move dreams forward, they can stop us in our tracks, they can deeply shape the way we interact with our world. And often, they aren’t even true. We need to try and recognize when the stories we’re telling ourselves are just that – stories, not reality. We need to try and recognize when we are turning tiny problems into insurmountable obstacles, and then we need to do some serious rewriting.