When you reflect on your life, how many of the life stories you carry, did you author? When you think about your views on the world and life in general, were those taught formally, informally, subconsciously, or otherwise? What lessons did you learn without even trying. For a long time, many of the stories I told didn’t belong to me. However, it took me a really long time to realize. My latest personal growth endeavor is identifying and releasing all the stories that don’t belong to me.
Mid-life awakening
Esther Perel, renowned psychotherapist and relationship expert, talks extensively about the idea of a mid-life awakening, as opposed to a crisis. That really resonated for me in the context of the stories we carry. Perel talks about mid-life as a period when people confront the limitations of their choices and start questioning the paths they have taken. She describes it as an “opportunity for individuals to explore new possibilities and redefine their goals and priorities.” Perel emphasizes the importance of embracing this stage as a chance for personal growth and transformation.
I think the reason we call it a crisis is because confronting your life up to a certain point can lead someone to question everything. When I made the realization that many of the stories and beliefs I had didn’t start with me, I was shaken to my core. It made me question who I even was if these things weren’t mine. It took time to shake it off and begin to reshape my own story. I started to think about how I got to that place and came up with the empty room metaphor.
Born an Empty Room
When we are born, I imagine an empty room. We are babies sitting naked in a stark white room. The lighting is bright, harsh and there is no sound. It’s sterile and devoid of color, beyond ourselves. Then, our parents put clothes on us. Some kids get pink clothes, some yellow, some rags and some with fancy logos. The sounds arrive. Sometimes your room echoes with cacophonous yelling and sometimes lullabies and laughter. Some rooms immediately get crammed with junk our parents or caregivers mindlessly drop in there. Junk like “boys don’t cry – you gotta toughen up,” or “young ladies do as they’re told.” Boxes filled with anxiety and fear are tossed into the room without regard. Our caregivers furnish our rooms with whatever they know and choose. Some kids have race car beds and others share a pull-out couch with their little sister. Some parents decorate with violent imagery like confederate flags, while others adorn with Care Bears and family photos.
Eventually the dust of other people’s opinions collect on the furniture. The walls change to shades of blue with sadness or bright red with anger and resentment. As young humans, we don’t have much agency about what goes into our room. Yet, this is OUR room. This is the space where we live and create the adults we are now. But, the stories all the things tell, often don’t belong to us. Eventually, these objects, colors, icons, beliefs and opinions become ours. We can’t help but let these things become our story, because after all, they kind of are, right? Accustomed to living in this room, it becomes all we know. We have no idea what we decided to put into the room, versus what others left there for us to find.
Clean your room
Parents and caregivers don’t fill our rooms with terrible things, intentionally, but it’s up to us to sort through the mess. After all, someone else furnished and decorated their first rooms, too. Mid-life feels like a crisis when we wake up one day and look around the room and realize everything we thought we knew, isn’t really true. Or, if it’s true, maybe it still doesn’t belong to us and we no longer want those things. We look at the discarded and dumped stuff and wonder why we keep it. We see the dust accumulating and the literal trash stacked up in boxes, on bookshelves and in closets. In these moments, we can transmute these crises into awakenings. We can repaint, redecorate or even gut the rooms and eradicate the dust.
Allowing space for growth
Author M.H. Rakib said “sometimes life seems uncomfortable and that’s actually when life starts.” That’s where the delicious & juicy bits live. We learn about the stories that don’t belong to us in these moments of discomfort. If we are extra lucky, we learn them when we are young, but we are still lucky learning them at all. These are the lessons that allow us to push past limiting beliefs. These icky and uncomfortable moments are amazing and liberating, at the same time. We have to leave space for ick to move out, so the ahhs can move in.
Growth needs space. It’s like wearing shoes that are too small for too long, because we believed we didn’t have options. This is what we do as humans. We crowd ourselves into these rooms that no longer reflect our tastes, if they ever did, but they keep us small. Like a fish that won’t grow bigger than its’ aquarium, we need expansion and room to grow, or we suffer in a space that’s too small.
Following recognition, we need space to grieve the loss of what we used to believe. Blue Morpho butterflies don’t start beautiful and elegant. They emerge from their chrysalises, wet and fragile, before their emerald blue and owl-eyed wings carry them. They need time to dry out and rest before they ascend. We are no different, albeit we are usually less gooey. Sometimes we need to mourn the person we believe we were. We need time and space to dry our own wings before we can fly. This liminal space allows for clarity about what we thought we knew. Some discoveries can be celebratory and other times fraught.
“I hate shampoo bars” does not belong to me
My partner once asked if I wanted my own bar of his fave shampoo. I gave a snotty retort that real shampoo doesn’t come in bars and I would not use that on my hair. What I later realized is that then I was a kid, my Mom was very adamant that we didn’t use bar soap to wash our hair. It’s a longer story, but let’s just say Mom was pissed and I was in trouble for using the bar of Ivory to wash my knee length hair. The story I told myself was that bar soap was terrible, but the truth was that it wasn’t my story. My Mom’s story was that bar soap was not for hair (at least not Ivory), but I had the opportunity to write a new narrative. Incidentally, I wouldn’t have ever discovered that without the space for reflection. (For the record, I’m a total convert and bar shampoo is tops!)
Story sorting can be scary, exciting and any other host of adjectives. Occasionally, these very stories are responsible for our limiting beliefs and self-sabotage. However, the rewards for this type of reflection pays dividends. I imagine that if you started to think about it, you would find that some of the stories you tell yourself, don’t even belong to you. How many times have you repeated a belief or opinion on auto-pilot without even considering its’ origin? Chances are, there are more than one or two that didn’t start with you. Are you curious about exploring your own stories but don’t know where to begin? Book a complimentary breakthrough session and let’s tell some stories together. Check out the Wellspiration blog for more inspired content on topics from relationships to mental health, to nutrition.