When you’ve already written your story, it’s the only life that can happen.
I was eavesdropping at my local diner—my favorite laboratory for human behavior. At the next table, a couple in their mid-forties was chatting about a movie they’d just seen. As the waiter zoomed by without stopping, the man became visibly agitated. I heard him tell his partner that it was the third time the waiter had “ignored” him and that if he were “a star,” if he were “somebody who people had heard of,” if he were somebody people “respected,” then they would already be enjoying their burgers. When the server finally did arrive, sweat bubbling above his lip, I heard this man aggressively asserting that the young man should be less obvious about whom he deems important enough to serve.
My dining neighbor was just a normal person doing what normal people do, creating a story and crafting meaning. But the particular meaning he made and we all make—the specific story we tell ourselves—this is our personal narrative, and more than anything else, what determines our reality.
The story we tell ourselves about ourselves answers two important questions in every situation we encounter: what’s happening and why it’s happening. In this example, what was happening to the man sitting next to me was that he was being ignored, snubbed, and treated disrespectfully. Why it was happening, in his story, was because he wasn’t important or famous; he was just an irrelevant, invisible, nobody. The narratives in our head are continually connecting the dots of our life, making links and forming cause and effect relationships between facts, situations, and events that we carefully select and design. This happened because of that for every aspect of our experience—whether related or not.
In this case, the insanely busy and overwhelmed waiter was passing him by, purposefully not taking his order, because he wasn’t publicly known or someone who mattered in the grand scheme. His story succeeded at making sense of what was happening and inventing a reason for it, but through an incredibly specific and narrow lens. He chose (or crafted) one of a thousand different explanations for the wait-time on taking his order and related to that one explanation as if it were the truth, sulking with his companion and erupting at the waiter in anger.
In accepting his self-designed narrative as fact, he validated a version of himself, a self-experience that was clearly frustrating, upsetting, and painful. He designed a reality that supported and strengthened a pre-existing storyline. His mind, like a heat-seeking missile, went searching for evidence that he could use, either on its own without alteration, or in this case, with his self-made bridges and personalized flavoring, to confirm his already written self-narrative.
The result of our story-making habit and basic nature is that we lock ourselves into being someone who can’t grow or change and into a life that can’t grow or change. We assume that the movie playing in our head is what’s actually happening outside the private cinema of our own mind, and that our explanation for why it’s happening is the accurate explanation. We take it as given that the intentions we’ve invented for everyone else in the world (and why they’re doing what they’re doing to us) are in fact their true intentions. And finally, we don’t question that the universe is behaving the way it’s behaving because of what we’ve determined the universe thinks of us. All of it is true, which then means that it must always be true, because we effectively make it the only thing that can be true.
The problem is, we all do this in one form or another, from the cradle to the grave, and few of us are even aware that we’re doing it. The most important thing, how we’re writing the story of our life, in the micro moments, in each situation, is what defines how we feel, see ourselves and experience our life. That said, we’re constantly limiting ourselves to a kind of Groundhog Day life, the same thing over and over again, day after day. We feel stuck because we’re keeping ourselves stuck with our stories. So many people say they want to change, and even more people say they want their lives to change. But neither can happen as long as we’re using the same writer to craft the story—of who we are and the possibilities that exist for our life. Nothing can change if the script and meaning are already written and we’re just filling in the details to make it all work—again.
We tell ourselves that our story makes sense and is justified, we have that story because it’s not a story; it’s reality—what always happens to us, and we have the track record to back it up. But we don’t see that we’re the ones making that reality a reality in the way that we’re writing the story. We are right because we make ourselves right. It is indeed what happens to us because we are the authors of what happens to us.
What allows you to break free from your stories (and resulting stuckness) is to become aware of yourself weaving your narratives, to notice when you’re telling yourself and everyone else the story of what’s happening to you and why. Freedom happens when you can see the leaps you’re making, and what you’re adding to reality. The way out of a life that doesn’t change, a you who always feels the same way and has the same kinds of things happen to her, is to become aware of where you’re inventing the narrative, constructing meaning, building bridges, and connecting self-selected dots between stand-alone events. Ask yourself, where am I making assumptions, and adding to the bones of reality where it doesn’t actually exist? Again and again, notice when you’re making self-constructed interpretations and generating meaning, writing the story of the situation through your own corrupted lens, accepting (and reacting) to your personal narrative as if it were the Truth. Notice and stop—pull the lens back; step out of the cinema of your mind. Return to the present moment, drop into your senses and the bare bones of what’s actually happening, without any spin and with nothing added. Simply put… let the thing be the thing.
