Random Thoughts Of A Part Time Lost Soul

While only a small minority of humans are published authors, most of us do have experience crafting narratives.  So experienced are we that we can typically fashion a tale in our sleep, or waking slumber.  Rich tapestries featuring majestic story arcs, high drama, heroism, wickedness, love, betrayal, and righteousness likely have been put to metaphorical paper by our mental pens before we could imagine the existence of ink.

A narrative tells a story.  To be more precise,  a narrative tells a version of a story, penned in a specific voice, at a specific time, from a specific perspective.  The story has a purpose, which is to support the author’s point of view or position on a topic or circumstance. In some narratives, those firmly entrenched in the behavior of playing the victim are able to cast themselves as heroes.  In others, an innocent soul may recast themself as “bad”, undeserving, or unworthy of love, with little hope for redemption.  

As young authors, we may have been influenced by older writers who seemed omniscient.  Once we had gained command of the language though, the stories became ours to craft, polish, and store in the basement libraries of our minds.  These stories may become templates to which we force the whole of our lives to conform, then wonder why some things never change. To put it another way, it may be described as the act of unwittingly inserting predetermined outcomes into as-yet-unfolded experiences.  Reactivity v.s. proactivity.  

How interesting would a life story be if the whole of its, let’s say, twenty-one chapters was created by randomly repeating the first three chapters to make up the last eighteen?   Not only would it be repetitive, confusing, and uninteresting, it would be a waste of eighteen chapters of life that can never be reclaimed.  If one’s story repeats, trapped in a seemingly endless loop of eerily similar, less-than-optimal outcomes, it may be time to question the writer.

We don’t just think the things we think, or do the things we do.  Things aren’t just “what they are”, they are what our narratives tell us they are.  The ghostwriter, long since retired, watches from the library of the psyche as their works are checked out and returned over and over, day in and day out.  Emotional triggers from long ago send the errand clerk of our unconscious to the checkout counter and just like that we have a reactive response ready to be issued to whomever needs to hear it verbatim from those timeworn pages.  Typically the reader doesn’t even know they hold a library card.  In fact, as readers, we typically find these narratives so familiar and therefore comfortable that we don’t realize we are reading.  This is how reactivity surreptitiously replaces mentally present choice-making.  This is how the first three chapters of a book can inadvertently be reshuffled and repeated throughout a life.  This is how potentially unhappy endings are written.

If our stories appear to repeat in an unpleasing way, leaving us to snag our emotional fabric on the same thorns of life again and again, it may be time to turn attention from the thorns to the cloth to see what it’s made of.  More than likely it is woven of old narrative threads that were created to cloak us, protect us, hide us from trauma.  Those threads were spun in the heat of the moment by a valiant ghostwriter long ago.  The ghost is our former selves.  We owe them thanks for the heroic word-smithing they undertook to help us make sense of, and cope with the issues at hand in those early days.  However, the past is the past and we are grown now.  Fresh chapters are waiting to be written.  All we have to do to escape the cycle is visit the ghostwriter, and politely, but firmly ask for the pen.