Your story: who do you want to be?
“Your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
— James Joyce
Identity is a narrative we use to tell our story.
And like a story, if our sense of identity is weak or lacks conviction, we lose purpose and focus.
A simple example of this is how we get to know people we like. When we share ourselves with someone new, we tend to share with caution, a chapter at a time. Always hoping that we will generate enough interest to encourage that person to stay.
As a species, we are unique in that our identity grows out of what we give away. The more we share the story of ourselves, the taller we become, the braver we are, and the lighter we feel. More interesting still, is the fact that our lives are frequently a flurried chaos of events, and not the product of a clean narrative arc. Yet, we still extract our life’s story as a chain of calculated, chronological movements that lead to the manifest existence of present-day us.
So why do we do it?
Because the craft of storytelling is still the most effective way to share, engage and give meaning to the world around us. We shed ourselves in words, and this ties people to us. It creates bonds, loyalties, empathy, and trust. And that is why our story is so vitally important to our strength of identity.
This fragile and personal self-published novel that is continuously buffering updates to our friends and lovers is our primary source of emotional currency. Our ego, our fear, our desire, dreams, anger, and sadness, all played out on two serious levels:
1.Out loud — on the sound of the reactions we get.
2.Silently — within the secret rooms of other people’s minds.
For better or worse, the purpose of sharing is that we want to move others to action, and move people out of their indifference to us. Ultimately, we are driven by the impact we make as human beings, and part of this, is a deep-rooted need to be remembered.
Social media is our most powerful modern day example of our human need to share our identity through narrative. Snapchat and Instagram are examples of media that thrive on this foundational understanding of the human psyche. You share, therefore you are. Hearts and comments affirm us; we are acknowledged by the world.
We exist in a place where our story is publicly recorded, and in the future, we may die, but the last post we upload will become our epitaph, and the full-stop at the end of our story.
Some people tell me they cannot write or convey themselves out loud, but we are all, every last one of us, authors of at least ONE book in our life time; the story we tell others about ourselves. And whenever or however we choose to show up in the world, we have 2 choices for how we want to be perceived:
- As a victim of circumstance
- As a hero
The only thing left to decide, is which story you will tell.
