Own your story relentlessly
More often than I am ready to admit, I have polished my story to fit expectations. I smoothed edges, used abundant concealer, make-up, and glitter to cover years of stagnation, soul deprivation, solitude, and sheer anger. Just because we puff up our chests and crop out any unwanted nuisance from our story, it does not make it less ours, quite the opposite — what we think we can not share haunt us and becomes ours even more.
Very low self-esteem, lack of self-worth, self-acceptance and self-love, and fear, lots of fear, were in the driver seat for most of my life. There has been very little of who I am that I have not been ashamed of at one point or another. This struggle has been the hardest to learn from, confess, and share. Amen.
The burden of untold stories
We tend to be very poor judges of our own stories. At the daily vernissage that is our life, we become compulsive curators helplessly trying to balance light and darkness.
We want matching frames, pictures, and captions fitting perfectly into a meaningful sequence, the perfect hero story with calculated set-backs and rebirths, enough conflicts and passions to build tension, and a phoenix-like happy ending.
We want our story to be contemporary and to fit the scripts of those we look up to, stories often purged of the daily shared human experience, carved around precise intentions, and curated down to the bone.
The chronic need to strike a pose and over-document our lives with stories that only ever existed between the camera lenses are just an expression of how much we are forcing fiction into our lives, trying to fit the story-telling imperatives of others, while casually forgetting or intentionally sweeping under the rug the stories we are really made of.
As raw as it gets
Once I abandoned the race for attention and approval, removed the make-up, relaxed my belly, turned off the camera, and silenced the noise, I found myself in the wholeness and rawness of my own story and the unique blend of what makes my life, mine.
At first, this place is not pretty, you would not want to take a selfie there, but if you stay long enough you can open the door and slowly become the host — rather than the hostage — and welcome in what already belongs to you. You might need a few grenades to knock down a couple of walls — who doesn’t — , but what you need the most to connect all the pieces together is stories.
Your story, my story: shy beginnings, starts-and-stops, unique life turns, crossings and roundabouts, dead-ends, extremes, one day you go full down on the accelerator screaming “bring it on”, another you try to melt into the wallpaper and even your own shadow is just too much to bear.
No filters, no cropping, no captions, no slow-mo, no time-lapse, you get to pick neither the backdrop nor the soundtrack, out of focus, caught unprepared, no time to strike a pose, this is God-sent life, and it is already perfect.
What I have learned is that there is nothing ugly, ridiculous, shameful, or worthless about your story unless you decide it to be so. Yet, the temptation to tell a different story is always there waiting for a moment of fear to steal the show.
“ You have to own every square inch of your story” Robert Bell
Shame
With the wisdom of hindsight, of course I could have done better, and who knows where it would have taken me. So yes, maybe in the past you did not always opt for the wisest choice (welcome to the club), maybe you were a victim of something over which you had no control, maybe the scars are still too fresh, maybe they are too faded, maybe I simply never learn and I will keep making the same mistakes again and again. Whatever is part of your past and present, wear it and embrace it, after all, it took us right here, right now.
There is a difference between feeling shameful about parts of our past and being ashamed of sharing those parts. The first is your personal assessment and does not stop you from sharing, the latter implies that you do not trust that people around you will be able to accept it, and therefore you prefer to censor it.
Generally speaking, we tend to underestimate the ability of people to “cope” with our shortcomings, and more importantly, your assessment of them not being “ready” to love and accept you in your entirety, is often just a reflection of your own inability to accept and embrace those parts. In any case, you don’t want to be surrounded by someone who can not embrace you and your story as a whole, do you?
Rejection
On the other side of our chronic cravings for acceptance is our primordial fear of rejection. We end up cropping, hiding or over-curating parts of our story, re-visioning the present and the past, fearing that if they find out who we really are, and what our life really looks like, they will leave us or opt for someone better.
Been there, done that, still doing that, and it may well be that rather than overcoming the fear of rejection, I will live with it happily-ever-after in some shared workspace.
More often than we are ready to admit, fear of rejection and the lack of trust towards others is a mere reflection of the lack of trust and self-worthiness we have towards our own selves. The story of your journey into self-acceptance and self-love, that one-way solo roller-coaster ride, is what makes you, you, and is worth embracing and sharing all the way.
Life vs performance
Wisława Szymborska said it beautifully “Life While-You-Wait. Performance without rehearsal. Body without alterations. Head without premeditation. I know nothing of the role I play. I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it. I have to guess on the spot just what this play’s all about.”
Yes, you can equate life to a stage, but make sure the one in front of the stage and the one behind the curtain are the same people, we can not puff up our chests forever, nor can our lipstick shine unconditionally. There is only one way to thrive under continued exposure, the only way is authenticity.
Accept, be grateful and show every single piece of the puzzle that makes your life and your story truly yours.
Whatever it is, don’t swipe the s*ite left, don’t over-manicure your biography or your image, whether you have been a cocaine-addict or stuffed your face with sugar for your entire life, accept that it is what it is, it does not necessarily belong to your future, but it is a part of you.
I have done all sorts of jobs in my life, served coffees, swept floors, overate, overexercised, worked inhuman hours, neglected myself, neglected the people who love me, said things I did not mean, and swallowed words I should have vomited out, I allowed criticism and self-criticism to erode me, that is also part of my story.
Whatever it is for you, honor that, because every piece of the puzzle that makes you story, completes the entire picture or movie that is your life.
“All stories are worth telling, there is value and learning at every turn”
One of the most important things I have learned is that I and I alone am the author and editor of my story, a great opportunity but also a huge responsibility.
Before telling your story make sure you know where you stand and where you are going. Andrew Carnegie said it eloquently “Men are developed the same way gold is mined. Several tons of dirt must be moved to get an ounce of gold. But you don’t go into the mine looking for dirt, […] you go in looking for gold.”
Are you digging for gold or for dirt? Because you are responsible for the meaning and value of your story, you are in charge of the final picture you are painting, regardless of the amount of dirt under your nails.
Share your story without judging, without fear or shame, drop expectations, stop comparing. Our human existence depends on the shared understanding of how much we are all going through, and how much we can all be a resource to one another. Nothing else matters, nothing. Period.
By owning and sharing our stories we find redemption and ultimately freedom. By exercising the freedom of telling our stories and being ourselves, we connect with others and demand of them and for them the same freedom.
Our stories propel our lives into the shared human galaxy we all are part of
Own the bright side, the dark side, and anything in between. Our lives, our stories, our failures, and success, they all are worthy and deserving of being told and heard, they are all worthy of love and acceptance, starting with ourselves.
