Become a Story Explorer and Write Your Wellness Story
Break down past 'get healthy' failures to create a new future where you use new sustain healthy change by rewriting your story instead of trying to muster willpower.
“Great stories happen to those who can tell them.”
—Ira Glas
Stories are a powerful thing. Stories capture our attention in ways few things can. Many of us have powerful memories of stories that impacted us when we were young and adults. There is one story that should captivate us more than most others, which is the story of our lives. Every person's life is a story being told on the screen in front of their own eyes. But unfortunately, as life unfolds, we can often feel restless and unsettled with our story.
These restless or unsettled feelings can signify that we have grown uninterested in the story of our life because there is nothing on the horizon--the plot line is on repeat. You might be sitting in the theater of your mind and wondering if you can fast-forward to something good. The desire to fast-forward implies that you don’t have the power in the here and now to create something good, but if you fast-forward, something good will happen to your storyline. In reality, the only way for our storyline to change is if we write a new narrative for ourselves.
When we were young, we had so much time to write a new plotline. Now we might think we don’t have enough time. But that is a lie because as long as you are alive, there is still ink left in the pen. You are not a zombie. You breathe, eat and excrete the stuff your body doesn’t need. Zombies don’t poop that I am aware of, and they can’t hold a pen to write. Your ability to hold a pen grants you permission to change the storyline.
We all want to create narrative traction in each of our stories. Narrative traction is the part of the story where we get hooked and have to see how this all plays out. It is when you discover that the phrase “As you wish” means true love, and you are committed to finding out who the six-fingered man is. We should want this traction for ourselves. Everyone should want an absorbing, captivating story of their own, not for the sake of fame, money, Facebook, or Instagram, but for the sake of living a fulfilling and intentional life.
In adulthood (the part of life where you have to figure out what is for dinner EVERY NIGHT), it often becomes difficult to keep pursuing growth. We have completed the script familiar to most people we know—graduate from high school, go to college or get a job, get a significant other, or maybe have kids. Where do you go from there? What is your storyline after that? Where is the six-pack we were hoping for without exercise?
If we are not intentionally living into our storyline, we instead revert to reliving patterns and routines because it is second nature now. They are comfortable, like the stretchy pants we wear after eating at Sonic or Applebee’s on a date night. Those repeating storylines get us through the day-to-day, but comfortable rhythms of nothingness drive our plot line into the ground. This is true regardless if we are wanting to write a storyline for a new job or improved health and wellness in our stories.
Writing Something New
As we seek to write new sections or chapters in our story, we need to understand why we might have storylines that keep repeating. There is complexity in how our story was written to this point and how our past can influence our future story. To write something new, we need to explore the stories that have shaped our relationship with why we don’t exercise or why we feel like eating a specific way doesn’t work for us, or why we pine after wearing a particular size of pants.
Memories are a very complex human ability. While there are things that we don’t know about memory, we do know that memory operates within two types, explicit and implicit. We remember learning how to ride a bike. That is an explicit event or memory we have stored. However, there might be an emotion attached to learning how to ride a bike. Maybe you remember your dad’s smile when you rode back towards him by yourself, and that made you happy down in your belly. Maybe you remember your grandpa told you how brave you were for riding without your training wheels, and you felt the swell of pride.
Our implicit memory is the part of memory words can’t always capture. Implicit memory is the emotion we felt during that event. It is what we remember feeling in our body and why we can feel that same gut-level emotional connection when we re-live that memory in our mind's eye.
The events that are stored and the emotions that are attached to those events are the first two layers of the stories we have lived. There is a third layer. It is the interpretation of what that event and associated emotions said about who we were then or could be in the future. If we want to change repeating patterns and plotlines to write a new story, it is our task to become story explorers and plumb the depths of all three layers. Far too often, we skim the surface of our stories like a rock skipping across the top of a lake. It is only when we sink down to the deeper levels of our stories that we truly discover the impact and can explore how that chapter shaped and molded our minds and souls.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou
Why Replay The Past?
Many people might think that the past is the past and that everyone should move on. I get it. When we lived through those memories, we found ways to navigate the narrative and survived. It may feel unhelpful to “dig up the past” because we can't go back and change anything anyway. However, many of our relationships with food, exercise, and our ability to maintain good habits are tangled up in past failures and the chapters where hope was crushed.
Although we can’t change the first two layers of the story, we can play back the tapes of that same experience and view it from an observer's point of view. Much as you can have very real sadness for a character in a movie, you can feel sadness for the part of you who lived through that chapter. However, you can choose to take a different interpretation of that event than you did at the time of the event. This choice to see things differently can empower you to write new chapters. Maybe you were mocked in gym class for being a slow runner and your interpretation at that time was that you were not good enough to play any sports that involved running, so you sat on the sidelines feeling left out. Maybe your interpretation was that you were bad at moving your body, unlike all the other girls in the class. Maybe you have carried that interpretation into your 30s.
If you were to look at that event and emotions now as an observer, you might be able to see that the kids in gym class were good at picking on anyone who was insecure with their body. The interpretation of the first two parts is where you can choose to have agency in the old story. The interpretation is where you can enter the narrative of the past and work to rewrite what that chapter said about who you are and what you can do.
In many ways, the interpretation shapes the lens through which we view the world. Our interpretation was a subconscious process when we are younger. It can continue to be subconscious as we age unless we take some agency in our own stories. Your willingness to revisit chapters of your life will allow for a conclusion to change into a transition to the next chapter we will live out.
The conclusions we made in the past about ourselves play a core part in the future stories we live out. Our conclusions and interpretations can continue to write us out of the stories we want. Our reactions and the patterns we repeat are wired in much as how we put on our pants or which side we start brushing our teeth on. This why we have to do the hard work of unearthing those chapters and building new pathways to a fresh narrative.
Our willingness to do this has a huge part to play in whether or not we can write new plotlines and gain narrative traction in our own stories. Once you start to wire in this ability to change your conclusions and interpretations, you will start to do this automatically because that is how our brains work. You will have started a habit that will give back to you in a dramatic way.
Strong emotions are very sharp, and when they poke at us, it is normal to shy away. Writing a story that gives us purpose when we get out of bed takes story exploration and imagination to reach for new chapters and new goals. Living a story worth retelling will require that you confront uncomfortable emotions, but they are worth it. You can’t have an extraordinary story if you live every day ordinary. The best is yet to come.
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:
Get Deliberate: Write down the following Event, Emotion, Original Interpretation, and Restored Interpretation.
Event: My husband asked if he could help with the 10 pm feeding for our 7-month-old child so I could sleep for longer before waking. He felt like I was having a hard time with work and was angry with him often because I wasn’t getting enough rest.
Emotion: Anger. Frustration
Original interpretation: I was handling having two kids under two years old like a beast, and I didn’t need him telling me how to improve my schedule. I was frustrated because he hadn’t helped before now, so where was his ‘I want to help out with the baby’ when she was born?
Restored interpretation: My husband cared about my well-being and ability to rest. I did need more sleep, and instead of being gracious and accepting help, I wanted to seek revenge for the fact he didn’t help earlier. I was really cranky often at home because I was averaging less than five hours of sleep a night.
Get Inspired: Who is someone you know that made a big change in their lives and kept it up? I don’t know her, but I often think of Elle Woods from Legally Blond. She made a huge change in her life and, in the end, didn’t need a boy to make her life better and had great cuticles. Rudy Reuttieger in the movie Rudy rewrites his story of who he is and who he can be despite being small, dyslexic and his family not supporting his rewrite in the beginning.
Get Going: I will be hosting a LIVE mini-workshop for Restoring Your Wellness Story. Register here if you are interested.