Telling ourselves loving stories helps build a loving world

Life is a collection of stories. Our stories. I believe life looks an awful lot like the intersection of the stories we each tell ourselves about ourselves, and about each other.

Seth Godin says, "The same life story can be told in many ways, and the way we tell it changes who we are and who we become."

I would take that a step further and say, it changes what the world is and what the world becomes.

I've had many experiences in my life. Some pleasant. Some not. But the one thing all of those experiences have in common? They are all over now. Long gone.

All that remains of those experiences are the stories I tell myself about them.

Something I've noticed, however, the stories I tell myself about many of those experiences - they have changed over time. The experiences themselves are the same; not one minute detail of them has been altered as life has moved on from them. But the stories have changed.

It's interesting, isn't it? That our experiences don't shape life as much as life shapes the stories we tell ourselves about the things we've experienced. Which in turn draws the shapes and sizes and colors of life.

Our lives and each other's lives.

The thing about the shapes of those stories, they are most influenced by the people we share our stories with.

If we share our stories with people who allow us to share them in their most authentic form, where the story looks as close as possible to the actual experience, no matter how much the stories may be filled with fear or guilt or shame or hurt or remorse or longing or on and on, then our stories start to look like life.

Real. Life.

But if we share our stories with people who make us feel fear or shame or guilt, then we start telling ourselves and each other stories that help protect us from the experiences of our lives and not connect us to them.

We start telling ourselves stories that help protect us FROM one another and not connect us TO one another.

I think too often we go into the world thinking life is writing the story. Life has a big say in the story, for sure. But I think we spend too many days anxiously editing the story life is trying to write so we can feel safer and more needed and more loved in a story that doesn't always leave us feeling those things.

I think we're supposed to provide those things for one another: safety, belonging and love. That's the story life is trying to write. But if it doesn't, we will edit the story.

We will make up a life story that makes us feel better in the world while we wait for a world to tell us a better story.

The world is never going to do that - tell a better story. But we can.

The world is never going to make us feel safe enough to tell each other who we really are. But we can.

The world is never going to unconditionally embrace the real stories of our lives. But we can do that for one another.

And when we do - when we do that for and with one another - the stories we live will start to look a lot more like the story life is trying to write.

We can then all go about living life in love - true love - instead of feeling constantly pressured to edit our stories to make it feel like we are.

Because the stories we are supposed to tell ourselves are stories of love.

Stories that are supposed to look an awful lot like life.