Trust your story

Why I keep telling people this

Examining my own life, I would like to show you how our “failures” or the worst things that have happened to us end up becoming the phone booths that turn Clark Kent into Superman.

I spent nearly a decade in coffee shops writing stories about other people. I created protagonists and cheered them on their hero’s journey as they stayed their dragons and made the return changed. Forever. I gave them capes.

Meanwhile, I was pushing a mail cart in my own life. I was unhappy and just going through the motions. I was running a restaurant bar / club. It was flashy and scenic and people thought I was “successful”. But I was living a false version of myself, seeking approval and validation and didn’t have any real sense of who I was. Deep inside I was unhappy and lost. Or more accurately, hurting.

It wasn’t until my divorce, when I started from scratch that I embarked on the road to rebirth. Sometimes you can’t remodel. There are too many rooms that are fucked up. The house needs to be torn down and built again. And that’s what happened to me. I changed careers. I reconnected with my body through fitness. I made new friends. I bought a motorcycle. Got some tattoos. But my healing didn’t come from those things.

It was embracing my story that created soil for healing.

Most of us want to rip out our chapters. There are things that have happened that are lined with shame, guilt, and regret, things that were beyond our control. And we don’t want anyone to know. We want to forget, ignore, and push away. Because if people knew these things about our story, that would mean we are defective in some way. Less than. But the truth is by not embracing our story fully, everything that has happened to us, “good” or “bad”, we are denying ourselves. This is a form of self rejection.

Whenever we are rejecting ourselves, we are preventing the healing process.

So if you want to start to heal, you have to start accepting your story. As you accept your story and begin to embrace it by sharing it with others, your story becomes powerful, bigger than you because you can now use it to help others. I believe this is the process that heals.