What Is Your Story?

We all tell a “story” about ourselves. Sometimes it is a happy story; other times, not so much… With the aim of making sense of our lives and pacifying inner conflicts, we are continually telling and retelling the story of our life.

What we were in the past is continually interacting with what we are today, in this moment. Today is sculpting who we will be in the future. In this tapestry of past, present and future, we can be continually and perpetually weaving a personal story that does not always help us, that is not always useful to us.

At the level of the brain, the same areas are recruited when we recall a past or when we dream of a future. When we imagine future events, we activate centres that process past memories. It is on the basis of the past that we conceive and imagine a future. That is why people with amnesia are unable to imagine the future. To look forward, we have to look back. Neuroimaging studies are very clear: we use the past to design the future.

The stories we tell of our life make up the narrative that gives identity to the character we call I. In a subtle interweaving, the narrative becomes the identity, and the identity, in turn, determines the possible narrative. Prisoners of our own story, we often become incapable of change.

For many of us, the uncertainty that comes with age brings with it an inclination to solidify the story. In an effort to control the anxiety that comes from change, we form a solid crust which, with time, hardens more and more. We crystallise the past, seeing it in the light of a single perspective and assuming it to be the only one that exists. “This is what happened, these are my regrets and these my triumphs — what is done is done!”

On the basis of this crystallised perspective, we create our expectations of the future with restricted degrees of freedom, given the rigidity of our past. We create a future without great turns, developments or changes. The plot of our story, unlike the adventure our childhood foretold, becomes a monotonous and predictable soap opera in which the episodes repeat themselves, albeit in different settings and with different actors.

Although this strategy calms our anxiety in the moment, it strips us of the faculty of creative engagement with existence. We stop allowing who we might be to reveal itself free of preconceptions, and become automatons repeating the past. “More of the same!” Pacified, we come to believe that life is only what we have lived; there is no longer room for surprises, life ceases to surprise us, the flame of innocence goes out.

We forget that it is the twists in the plot that make a great story — that is what makes a story surprising. We need to become creative with our own story.

Yes, this is frightening, both in times when life is peacefully routine, but especially in times when life events run us over and knock our stability to the ground, and we lose our footing, navigating uncertainty. Life can be frightening, but equally exciting. Who would want to read a story whose ending they already knew? Would you keep reading a book whose outcome you already know?

Even though we cannot predict the turns our life will take, we can choose how to interpret and respond to difficulties and challenges. The unsettling secret is that each of us is the protagonist and the narrator of a story whose ending we do not know.

Rewriting our narrative is a creative act. And creativity requires that we welcome the unexpected with openness, with simplicity, learning to deal with ambiguity and favouring complexity over the simplicity of the predictable. Life is a process of discovery in time, an expedition into the unknown. The story of our life awaits our creative innovation.

In what way might you look at your past life from a new perspective? What would it be like to imagine a future different from the one you have been anticipating?

Until the day of our death we are living the story of our lives, in which the plot is continually changing and evolving, being edited and rewritten, embellished or defaced by an intrepid narrator — you! You are the leading actor of your story, the protagonist, the director, the writer of your narrative. Perhaps it is time to rewrite your story from the perspective of the hero that you are?!