New Stories Come AFter We Say No To Old Stories

​One thing I know about the stories people will share here on Facebook today: some of the stories will be stories about their lives, and some of them will be stories they will tell to protect them from the grief of facing the stories of their lives.

Dr. Curt Thompson says, "part of the ways we tell our stories the way that we do is to enable us to cope with our grief."

Sometimes we will see the things people share and think, they are pretending. Maybe that judgment is too simple. Maybe it's more on point to say they are coping.

There are parts of my childhood that were certainly good, that were healthy. And there are parts of it that were really unhealthy. For most of my life I protected myself from the unhealthy parts by simply telling myself the childhood story that it was ALL healthy.

I wrote hero stories about people who didn't always show up in heroic ways. I hid from my grief stories by telling myself stories that looked and felt much better than grief.

It's our nature. We are all story tellers. That can be a curse and that can ultimately be a cure.

When I got divorced a lot of people expressed disbelief. Some even said they were shocked. This was based on the stories they saw of my marriage online. The stories they saw of my marriage as it carried out in many offline gatherings. It turns out when at a young age you learn to tell made up stories that feel better than your real story, you use that skill - or coping mechanism - all of your life.

One can get really good at telling false stories. One can even get addicted to telling them. You never have to face the pain of the real world when you can tell stories of a world where pain doesn't exist. You don't have to reveal ugly stories when you can tell stories that are much more beautiful.

In that way, your false stories can become your alcohol or your drug.

Until the day when you become overwhelmed by the desire, the craving, for just one chance to live out your life as you. The non-fiction you. The unedited autobiography you.

YOU!

I have discovered the hardest part of living out my real story is saying no to the old stories. Saying no to the old stories means coming face to face with the stories those old stories were hiding, protecting me from.

It's like being sober and suddenly having to face the world drunkenness hides me from. Part of the challenge of being sober is giving up a substance, the other part, maybe the more difficult part, is facing the stories alcohol so kindly protects me from.

But on the other side of saying no, that's where reality lives.

Authenticity.

And even though living out my real life doesn't always look and feel as magical as the stories I have told myself and others at times to protect me from - hide me from - the challenges of my real life, there is a freedom in authenticity, in reality, that maybe in some ways is better than magic.

Magic requires people to buy into stories that aren't there; there's a lot of pressure that can in an instant become unbearable keeping up with those stories.

Freedom, on the other hand, comes when there are no expectations that anyone buy anything.

Freedom comes when the only expectation is I tell the story of me just as I am.

That's been a difficult place for me to get to, for sure. But writing the story of me has been infinitely easier than writing the stories of who I wished I was.

Or wasn't.

If you're struggling to tell yourself a new story about your life, the REAL story, maybe part of the struggle is not being able to say no to the old ones.