Writing the story of our lives
The fateful moment when Little Red Riding Hood first encounters The Big Bad Wolf…
What would happen if you’d never heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood before and you began reading the scene where the Wolf had just eaten Grandma, dressed in her clothes and now Red is delivering her famous line, “But Grandmother, what big teeth you have!” And the Wolf replies, “All the better to eat you with my dear!”? What if we paused the story right there? What kind of story would you say you were reading? Most likely you’d say it was a tragedy, a gruesome horror story, and you’d be right. If someone then told you that it was actually a popular children’s fairy tale, you’d think the rest of the world must have gone mad! You’d think this because you’d be missing the key element of any story, context. It is only when we read the story in its entirety that we can understand and appreciate it fully. It’s only when we take the 30,000-foot view of all the events, characters and their decisions that things begin to make sense. This concept is true of all stories including the biggest story any of us will ever participate in, the story of our own lives. Today I want to look at some of the elements of story and how they can help us in our own journeys through life.
The lesson that Little Red Riding Hood learns by the end of the story is to not talk to strangers, but there are several key events that must all take place before she can fully learn this lesson. Her mother must tell her not to talk to strangers. She must then break her mother’s rule by talking to the Wolf, which ultimately leads to the Wolf eating Red’s grandmother and trying to eat Red herself. Fortunately for Red, the Woodsman comes in at the last minute and saves her and he even manages to save her Grandmother by cutting open the Wolf’s stomach. Now we see that this story we once thought was a tragedy, actually has a happy ending and even more importantly, Red Riding Hood has grown as a character. It was only by going through the various ordeals of her story that she learned the seriousness of her mistake and a valuable life lesson.
in some versions of the story, Red is much more resourceful and saves the day herself with no help from a Woodsman. I prefer these versions because they give Red much more agency in her own story. She helped create the problem and now she alone must fix it. I believe this is also truer to real life.
If we think about our own lives we can realize that this is the same kind of process we go through time and time again. We can tell a child that the stove is hot and that she shouldn’t touch it, but inevitably the child will touch the stove. It is only after getting her fingers burnt that it becomes unlikely she’ll ever make that mistake again. Another example would be that inevitable “bad” relationship and even worse breakup that we all seem to experience sooner or later in life. At the end of that relationship, we may think “How stupid was I to ever get involved with that person!” It’s only later that we realize, what seemed like a horrible experience at the time was really an invaluable lesson that will usually lead us to a much better relationship eventually. In essence, mistakes are invaluable to us because they’re how we learn.
If we can begin to look at the various mistakes and difficult experiences of our past as invaluable learning experiences, we can begin to reframe the narrative of our lives. I’ll use my own life as an example of this. I had a very difficult childhood. I believe that this experience helped to develop two things in me. One was a tendency toward depression and anxiety and the other was a deep sensitivity, a propensity towards creativity and empathy. I had these special talents that I realized others didn’t have. I could have used them to do good things, maybe even some great things, but instead, I let my darker traits take over. In my teen years, I began experimenting with drugs, a choice that would come to haunt me for many years and eventually lead me to my absolute rock bottom. I had made a series of truly stupid mistakes, I had gotten myself into a real hole and I was absolutely miserable. I didn’t have a job and I could barely force myself to get out of bed. I saw myself as a complete failure and my situation as totally hopeless. I was frozen in that moment of the story and couldn’t see the big picture. At that point, I was saying something like this to myself “I can’t believe it. You had so much potential, so many opportunities to really do something with your life and you wasted every single one of them. You might as well give up now since you’ve proven time and time again how much of a failure you are.” This negative thinking, this negative approach to my story was doing absolutely nothing for me but making me more miserable. It was only by changing my narrative that I found I was able to begin changing my life. I began to say something like this to myself, “It all makes a crazy kind of sense. This was your path all along. That whole time you thought you were making mistakes, you were actually doing exactly what you should have been doing. You had to go through all of that to gain the wisdom to be ready for your true calling, to help other people. Not as a doctor who’s read a lot of textbooks on these problems but as someone who’s actually lived them and come out the other side. You’ve been given this gift, this priceless insight on how to come out of the darkness and change your life for the better. You will be an inspiration. Now go out there and begin helping others!”
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all that easy. I had to work very hard at changing many aspects of my life and it’s a process I’m still going through, but reframing my story has been an immense help to me. I looked at my whole story and took real ownership of it. And then I asked myself what it all meant, what kind of story did I want my past, present and future to tell? To answer that I needed a goal to work toward. Where did I want this story to go? What kind of an ending to my story would make sense? What kind of ending could I be proud of? I decided that for me, using my skills and knowledge to help others was a great goal that really seemed to satisfy my story. After I knew the ending, it was easy to look back at all the experiences of my life and see how they were always leading me towards this future goal. I couldn’t go back and change the past or try to say that a mistake wasn’t a mistake or a traumatic experience wasn’t traumatic. Trauma is trauma, but I didn’t have to a victim of it. I didn’t have to think of it as a negative or something destined to doom my future. It was an event that ultimately helped make me stronger and uniquely qualified to reach my goal of helping others and in that way, it was actually an empowering experience. When you do this, when you create your own story it empowers you. It also gives you a compass, you know what direction to point towards. We wouldn’t expect to be able to build a fine house without a solid blueprint, so why do we go through our lives without a solid blueprint or narrative? If we don’t create our own narrative one will be created for us by other people and circumstances.
So create your own story and make it one you can be proud of. This can become an exciting process. We are all on our own grand adventure through this life complete with a beginning, middle and end, with exhilarating triumphs and devastating setbacks, there will be romance and heartbreak and calls to adventure. There will be villains and of course, there will be a hero, and that hero is you. Congratulations, you have landed the starring role in your own personal adventure. You are the main character, the co-writer and the reader of your own story. You can’t control everything, but you have much more agency than you might imagine. Do not wait for the Woodsman to save you, defeat the wolf yourself, learn your lessons and let them make you stronger and then decide what it all means. This is your story, make it the adventure of a lifetime.
