Excited to share this bit from my upcoming book!
Storytelling has long been a way of connecting people, cultivating deeper understandings of culture and experiences, entertaining, warning, and teaching. Since ancient times, humans have used stories to communicate and process their world. If you think about it, we don’t often relate our experiences in bullet points. That would be absurd, right? Instead, we tell each other stories about our day, and whether consciously or unconsciously, we adjust based on audience and intended outcome.
And this doesn’t only apply to the stories we tell other people, we also craft the stories we tell ourselves. We alter and adjust those based on our beliefs about ourselves and the world. How do we see ourselves? How do we see that other person or situation? These questions help us to construct our inner stories. And that, can make every difference in how you experience your life. You have been telling yourself stories your entire life. And now, here I am suggesting you Unstory yourself. What does that even mean? It doesn’t mean to live without any stories. The human mind is hardwired to storify everything. To Unstory is to be able to see your stories; really see and understand your stories and where they came from, so you can know what stories are real and what are simply crafted through false beliefs and understandings you’ve carried your whole life. The mind is like an organic supercomputer; it pulls in sensory experiences and makes sense of them, often using past memories and situations to determine how you feel about them. Which, in turn, is often based in old experiences you had as a young child. Those memories remain lodged in the psyche, charged with the original emotions you carried when you felt that core story for the first time. The situations and participants of the present-day story may have changed, but the mind doesn’t really know that. It still thinks it’s that two or five or seven-year-old version of you… unless you bring more awareness to it.
As I write this introduction, I can hear the soft sound of the rain pitter-patting onto the river out my window. The sun is out, but the gray rain clouds are here too. It’s a play of light and dark co-existing, inspiring me to open my story and offer it to the page. It’s the sound of water flowing horizontally and falling vertically at the same time. It’s the anticipation of waiting to see how my story unfolds, and the urge to run and do something… anything… else to continue the well-oiled procrastination machine that I’ve honed so well. All these seeming opposites can exist together in the wonderful paradox of being. The patchwork quilt of all the pieces of our life that make us who we are; the brightly colored ones and the gray, hazy ones, and the ones that have seen unknown trials, covered in wayward threads, burnt cigarette holes, and the scat of unknown animals. And that… is where this story will begin.
Minding the Story 