So, what's your story?

Ever feel like you are just watching your life spiral, without any real sense of agency? Every bad decision or unhelpful thought seems to precede from the last, leaving the conscious part of your brain wondering how the hell you got here?

Me too.

Our brains love creating stories about us and our lives - not just where we've been, but where we are going as well. Stories that try to make sense of our lives, in a context we can understand, probably based off of the other stories we've read, or seen portrayed in the media. Maybe your story is that you're nothing without the veneer of confidence and a sense of humour, so you build up hundreds of shallow relationships in order to feel like you fit in.. Or perhaps you’re the A+ overachiever, destined for success (read: doctor or lawyer), and for whom mistakes are a capital offence. Or maybe you're the one who could never quite hack it, the scapegoat who was never given the chance to shine, or the rebel without a cause.

I'm speculating a bit here, but it seems like the stories we tell ourselves reflect the attachments we have, the things and people we base our identity and happiness on. Do you identify as a successful mogul, or a victim of the system? An effortless lover, or a doomed loner? What things and people in your life do you feel you couldn't live without, at least without undergoing some major restructuring of your self-perception?

The point of the story is to make sense, to find meaning in it all, to see our life pointed straight at the thing we want, or feel destined for, instead of the messy, disorganized groping about it's always been. We want to simplify, to see a clear purpose, to feel we are leaving some kind of legacy behind.

This can be helpful, IF you like the story your mind is telling about you. If you don't however, that's a problem. Take me, for example.

My story is definitely around the self-perception of myself as a victim, from being misunderstood and unable to express and connect with others as a child, to struggling to find work I felt qualified for that kept me out of debt, to present day, searching for some way to make a meaningful contribution to the world. It's all centred around the perception of not enough, broken, cursed, not meant for this world, fatally flawed, and so on. No matter what I accomplish, what successes I have, the "destiny" mapped out by my mind for me is that of a broken and used-up old man, looking back on his years and seeing nothing but regret and missed opportunities - if I make it that far.

Such beliefs are trained, ground into us as children, practiced and developed and mastered to the point of autonomy by the time we have access to mature consciousness. And like all habitual patterns, it has no intention of going anywhere. It's always looking for evidence to validate itself and it's reasons for being there, brushing aside the narratives that don't fit it's script, and shining a spotlight on the experiences that seem to match, saying "see?? I told you I was right!" In so doing, it encourages you to continue thinking about the story, reinforcing and refining it, adding more details. The broken old man trope didn't come to me as a child - it was added, as this part of myself continued pointing at the failures and the dropped connections and the countless other places where I perceived myself as falling short.

Remember, the story was there for a good reason at one point: To create sense and meaning, to create a sense of purpose in life. And through that purpose, the individual feels safe, protected from the actual, chaotic nature of the world. For me, the sense of being a victim provides a kind of insulation from responsibility - I'm not good enough, so if I mess up, what did you expect? To paraphrase Don Miquel Ruiz, our beliefs don't have to be right or good for us. Their purpose is to make us feel safe. That's it.

Such safety, even when twisted into the self-image of a failure, a cheater, a liar, and so, implies that when we go against that story, act contrary to it, this will feel dangerous. It requires leaving the comfort zone, stepping away from the automated patterns and behaviours and thoughts that say hey, what are you going to do? This is all you can manage right now. And it fights back, with anxiety, with avoidance patterns, with self-sabotage in a thousand ways. It fights back against you as though it were a cornered animal, then reassures you when you capitulate and fall back into it saying "it's okay, that's just not who you are".

The ability to tear the story down, and build a new one from scratch, begins with a simple truth: The story doesn't know who the ***** you are. It was there to keep you safe as a child, and has no concept of what you are now capable of as an adult. This is called learned helplessness; the self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling belief that this is all we can be, because we were taught, brainwashed, gaslit into believing it was so.

I'll be honest - I'm not sure how to break out of a deeply entrenched story. I do think many people can't do it without help, from a trained professional and/or without a community of people who can show and demonstrate to them they are more than they perceive themselves to be. I know there has to be other stories we learn to tell ourselves, ones based on love and self-affirmation, not fear and scarcity.

If we practice telling ourselves that we are still growing, still learning, that we don't have to define our reality through what others think of us, or even what we currently think of ourselves, that we have full agency over how we handle our lives, regardless of what the world throws at us; and then we practice those beliefs, develop those beliefs, master those beliefs, until we turn to them more often than we do the old ones that no longer serve us, then… Who knows?