Owning Your Life Story: The Power and Responsibility
There is a chasm that’s been growing over the past few years. It is the gap between our ability to broadcast and communicate our stories across myriad platforms and our willingness to accept responsibility for the tales we tell.
The internet has made us brave and emboldened, and gotten people in a lot of hot water lately.
CS Monitor staff writer, Harry Bruinius, noted in his article, “Are You What You Post?”:
“People should be held accountable for what they’ve posted when it reflects who they are,” says Adrienne McNally, director of an experiential education and civic engagement program at New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury. “However, for many people, these posts represent momentary lapses in judgment that remain forever on the internet. This is especially true for people that were posting while in their tweens and teens, when they didn’t necessarily know who they were and what they stood for.”
The idea that what we say is contextual and based upon our mood, mindset, or circumstance is a very sticky wicket. At some level, our stories are always a reflection of who we are, even when we make an odd, rude remark or misplaced comment. In storytelling terms, we all have chapters in our lives we’d love to leave out, but that doesn’t make them less ours, or preclude them from the entire narrative of the novel we’re writing.
Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try to edit out the bad bits, what is written in our book of life is permanent. However, the great thing about human beings is that we can learn, grow and adapt over time. The story we write today, may not be the story we write tomorrow. Every day is another new line of text on the pages of our lives.
This is why controlling our own narrative is so critical. Too many people are willing to give up control of their story or simply refuse to accept responsibility that comes with it.
In her article, “Acceptance and Rewriting Your Life Story,” Psychologist Samantha Rodman points out:
“Allowing yourself to rewrite your life story can be liberating. You can finally be objective about what is and is not working for you, without shame or judgment. You can work on coming up with solutions to your problems rather than pretending they don’t exist or that they will magically resolve themselves. And most important, you can rewrite your life story into one that makes you feel proud.”
It’s one thing to refuse ownership of your story, it’s quite another to give it away freely or unknowingly. As societies and cultures shift, stories have the power to bring peace, wage war and sway the hearts and minds of the masses.
This fact is never lost on those who seek to control and manipulate the broader narrative, leveraging your story as a means to their end. A lot of people are willing to give up the power telling their own stories with the promise of safety, security, and being part of a larger group.
In his book, “Escape from Freedom,” Eric Fromm puts forth:
“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.”
What many fail to realize that is that these deep affiliations often lead to one group or person speaking for the many. When that happens, you’ve just lost your voice and control of your own life’s narrative.
As the Spiderman Comics told us many years ago, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And no power is greater than owning your own life’s story.
