The stories that once broke me are not me.
Often, I feel I am living them over and over again. That torment is absorbing me like a tornado, and it takes me back, like in „Groundhog Day,” in a timeless and endless freefall.
For many years, I considered it a punishment disguised in tales I encountered on my way. Now I know it was always the pain, taking different shapes, traveling by my side in other places, transcending my body and my time; it was the story of my suffering repeatedly told by many different voices and mimed by many different faces.
It was the agony hidden under different masks, embodied in people I loved or hated, people I gifted with my attention or ghosted. It was still the pain I watched in characters from the movies or imagined and heard in the books I read. I had no clue how many ways my wounds’ stories were told. I had no clue how many different forms and shapes, stories and fairy tales, in how many places and times the same wounds have been lived, and by how many other people.
The history of humankind was captured in metaphors through the novels and myths that are our legacy nowadays. This is how our minds and souls can cope with the sorrows, guilts, pains, and scars that still consume us slowly, like a lava river flowing through our bloodstream, burning all in its way and replacing it with the amorphous and senseless ash. Nothing remains, nothing survives, nothing but the marks of that pain sculpted deeply by the cold, dark ash trails.
For many, this is one day when they are ready to become their phoenix and rise from ash, reborn, reshaped, and healed.
It is the day the story changes.
It is the day they are no longer their old versions but an enhanced and upgraded self, different but keeping the core of what was burnt.
It is the day when the victim vs. villain game is taken to the next level.
It was the day when they had enough pain, enough of the old themselves.
They know that is the day when they save themselves from themselves.
For many, that day can be today!
When working with my clients, I use metaphors and tales to help them understand better what they believe, what filters they use to see the world, what limits them, and where their strengths reside.
I am offering you a challenge. A suite of questions to ask yourself, dear reader, that will help you know yourself and your stories better.
Do you think you don’t tell yourself stories? Think again!
What stories are you attracted to? What genre of movies and books are you attracted to?
What story do you tell yourself?
In which way, or what precisely of those stories impress you the most?
Who are you in those stories?
If you were the author or able to call them, in which other way would you ask them to end the story?
I’ll leave you with your thoughts.
Just remember: we are not our stories; we are not what happened to us. But we have the power to do magic and rewrite our stories every day.
And I am curious to know if you discovered anything interesting about you and your stories.
Stay safe.
M.
Photo credit: Pierrick VAN-TROOST on Unsplash
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