Letting go of the story

We all have a story we tell ourselves.

Everyday, there’s a narrative that we follow so that the world around us makes sense.

It all seems too big, too incomprehensible otherwise.

And we’re part of that world. We’re part of what seems too much, too vast to grasp.

I remember laying in bed as a child and trying to figure out what my consciousness was. I’d think myself into a fervour and drive my parents crazy with the questions of, “Who am I? Okay, but where did I really come from? Why do I get to feel anything at all? Why me? How did I come into this body?” And these questions were quickly banished because what 3 year old gets their mind bent out of shape this way?

As we grow into adolescence and then adulthood, the need for belonging seems to ever enlarge. The sense of danger of straying too far. The need to answer our own questions seems to be less important than those of others.

So we let a story get told. First by the people around us who need to make sense of us. And then by ourselves, so that we can make sense to them. So that everything fits nicely. Comfortably.

And this is why change is so hard. Once we’ve created a comfortable mold that seems to fit nicely, it seems not only cumbersome but exhausting to have to change it. (Like having to get out of a bean bag chair when you’ve really sunken in and arranged the blankets just right and there’s two 60-pound dogs on you).

Yesterday I was going through a lot of anxiety. It felt like I had taken too much time off around the holidays. I felt behind. And then I caught myself and asked, where is this story coming from?

I realized I’m still wanting. That it’s hard for me to celebrate what I’ve achieved without immediately going after the next thing.

What keeps us shackled to chasing is the story that things need to be achieved at all. What if we saw all events as neutral? Neither gains nor losses, but just another transient part of life that happens to move into our vicinity right now? To stop taking things so personally, like it has some huge effect on us.

Because what’s outside of us only affects us if we include it in our story. And our story only has an effect on us if we continue to tell it the same way.

Things I ask myself now in these moments of self-judgment: You always know in your heart when something isn’t working. What story are you telling yourself that it needs to be this way? Which part of you are you not willing to set free because of what it might threaten? What are you willing to lose by hanging onto it?

The more distance I create between these things that I used to let have such a hold on me, the less tight my chest feels.

When I think back to 3 year old me, having these existential thoughts, I think she had it right, all along. What is this consciousness? Who am I, really? How did I land in this body? Who is really experiencing these thoughts, feelings, sensations?

I think I’m learning to let go of thinking things need to be a certain way for me to feel happy. Learning to let go of thinking I could have done things differently to control the outcome. Letting go of the illusion that it could have happened any other way. These could-have’s, should-have’s, would-have’s. And just witnessing. Being as ecstatic as I dare to be to get to witness this at all. That of all the possible lives in this universe I got to land in, I got this one.