The stories we craft determine our present self
why we craft stories to make sense of the world and events around us
how these stories help us in navigating life’s challenges
what we can do to untangle these stories and recognize their power over our life, while rewriting them where necessary
We are good at crafting stories about our past, present, and future. We craft stories that can contain the stains of cognitive distortions and self-sabotaging mechanisms. As author Meg Jay underlines in her book “The Defining Decade” when referring to twenty-something-year-olds, the stories we tell ourselves and the solutions we elaborate for those stories shape our identity over time, and that’s especially the case during our twenties, because of the novelty-inducing nature of those years, when we enter into the world of adulthood, with the seemingly scary commitments and choices that shape the rest of our life trajectory.
We craft personal stories to try to make sense of the chaos we may feel around us. The chaos we feel stems from the inherent unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) of life for human beings, who try to soothe themselves with stories that resonate. These stories help us navigate unsatisfactoriness and find reasons to continue forward despite the inherent ill-being we experience in life, whose intensity varies depending on personal factors such as personality and upbringing experiences.
The stories we tell ourselves can sometimes hinder our potential because of their restricted nature that blocks off negative thoughts and emotions instead of letting them arise and evaporate away through our consciousness, as spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer may put it. The experience of life and this next moment are impermanent. Our consciousness—the essence of each of us—is impermanent and indifferent. We make sense of each moment by processing inputs and feelings and turning them into an explainable signal that makes us feel momentarily relieved of the unsatisfactory nature of existence itself.
This is also at the core of why some human beings practice therapy—to untangle the contorted and unhelpful stories they tell themselves in the unconscious pursuit to block the flow of natural events in life as they arise and fade away in the neutral canvas that is consciousness. There is value in such practice because a third-party trained individual can help us shed an unbiased light into the distorted nature of our unconscious. Such light, the light of impermanent awareness, can unlock us, removing the disturbing burden of stories repressed within our lower selves, caged in the body and kicking in wanting to escape and let themselves dissolve in space.