The story you tell yourself matters.
We tell ourselves stories. You know, stories that motivate us. Stories about how we see ourselves; stories about our journey. We know about our family history because members told it to us. We hear stories about others because they communicate them to us through storytelling.
Cave paintings were the first stories of people’s past; tales of courage, strength and experience. Storytelling is innate human behaviour. What is history? Stories told about people.
We design our own narrative. We exist in our own head and manufacture our understanding based around the information we receive about the world. While some of us have greater control over those parts of our brain than others, there is no doubt that our brain has great influence on the perceptions we hold about the world around us. What we tell ourselves has importance.
The current global pandemic has been difficult for many people, and I am certainly not immune to that. For this reason, I have hit a few roadblocks. The world changes as fast as the direction of the wind; I have had to pivot my life to adapt to these changes in ways I never would have imagined. The biggest area of my life that has happened is in the stories I told myself about me.
Since I was about 10 years old there has been one long string that connects the person who I am today with one vivid impression of a Shakespeare camp in Toronto I went to. Going into that experience I knew so little about Shakespeare and theatre since I was just a girl from the suburbs of the city. Sure I was quite creative, but I didn’t know much about the arts scene in Toronto, I was just as creative as my elementary school’s standards. The camp I attended was a place of many firsts for me, my first Starbucks’ drink, my first Radiohead album, I even met my first vegan there.
The camp showed me something monumental, I could have a budding independent creative life just as my peers and instructors did…I just needed to live in downtown Toronto to do it. The city life suddenly became a great idea. While I had only a taste I latched on and it became my first big life goal. Move downtown, become a wacky art kid, immersed yourself in the arts scene, live your best life.
“Stories need to change; everything comes to an end.”
Stories are great tools to create ideas and they certainly work for a variety of reasons, but they don’t carry universal time stamps. The stories I have told myself have brought me great adventures and I have learned a lot so far. Why not then craft another to keep myself going for the next 15 years ahead? I am not the person I was when I entered summer camp, why then would the story I told myself at 12 carry the same meaning at 27? I am a different person.
I think we all have a hard time letting go and certainly this moment has exacerbated that situation tenfold. Our world has rapidly changed largely without our consent. We woke up and suddenly Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had Covid-19 and the rest of the world was instructed to go into lockdown over the deadly virus. It all seemed to happen over a one-week period.
It takes a long time for humans to make decisions, it takes the United States over a year to federally elect a new leader. Humans take their time with difficult stuff. Many of the changes we have seen take place over the past four months have been decided not by us. For this reason, it is completely understandable to be averse to that change, it is beyond our control.
Yet stories need to change; everything comes to an end. Holding onto an idea out of fear only builds a false understanding of that idea. It limits our potential to better understand ourselves and the world around us. We must not be limited by ideas we tell ourselves.
For me, I found the lifestyle I created for myself to be very limiting. My belief system didn’t come from myself and my abilities, it relied heavily on an expectation I had about something else to be true. I could only be my full creative self, if I moved to this perceived arts utopia. I created a false expectation, I searched for a meaning outside of myself. I needed Toronto to exist in a certain way in order to feel justified in how I lived my life when in fact Toronto meant more than my pigeon-hole definition. Yes, Toronto does have an arts scene, but it is not a monolithic culture that permeates this northern concrete jungle. Toronto is home to many different communities, cultures, and creatives, I’ve even seen a suit on the street every now and then.
Don’t get me wrong, creating stories for ourselves can be a great thing. Oral history is one of my favourite methods of delivering history. When done effectively, this method of storytelling is great for families to communicate their journey to future generations, but what happens to that story when it is based off a falsehood?
Not everyone can tell a story like Ed Bloom in Big Fish and get away with it, so what difference does it make if those stories are the ones we tell ourselves? My best moments where I grew a deeper understanding of myself didn’t happen when I put substantial emotional stock into how I wanted a scenario to happen. They were the stories where I lived in the moment and acted based off the principles and commitments I keep for myself. I have learned the most when I simply just lived.
I cannot work toward an idea that I cannot prove on some level already exists. Yes, Toronto is a city with wonderful diverse thinkers and makers, but who says I can’t experience those ideas in another place? There are many different places people draw inspiration from. Some take it from urban settings, others venture off into nature to find that purpose.
My stories need to be able to come with me otherwise how good are they as stories? I need to be able to take my ideas, work with them, learn from them, and be a better person. If stories are to build ideas and people, then the stories I tell myself need to help build me up. Otherwise it would seem like they are just false advertisement, and who needs more of that on the internet.
The stories we tell ourselves are important. What stories do you tell yourself?
