So in the last post, I picked up the gauntlet that Eric threw down, talking a bit more about self-stories by reprising my first post from this blog. It ended asking how powerful it would be to ask the question “Is it still true?”
And I spent some time thinking about the power in a different question that we could also ask: Was it ever true?
Alyssa wrote on facebook that a simple and different rendering of the stories could be made that opens up space, transforming the stories from “I am” and “I am not” statements , to “I have” and “I have not…” I love how that makes things feel possible, changeable, less set in stone.
Eric asked how our self stories change based on who is surrounding us, including our families and friends.
I’ve always had a particularly permeable inter-personal membrane. I’ve always felt the weight and pull of expectations and disappointments. I think it takes a very strong person to hold onto their sense of self, their own identity, in face of conflicting desires of folks they care about or who are influential in some other way. For me, my identity was always very wrapped up in what other people thought, or what I thought they thought, or what I feared they might think.
I think I’ll end with this: I think it is critical to most of us to have a tribe, a posse of people who know us well and differently from one another, who can reflect back to us our highest and best, pieces of our essential person-ness, when the going gets rough. In this way, perhaps we are asking them and entrusting them to hold our stories for us, and to remind us, so when we get lost, we can find our way back to ourselves, or forward, supported, into whomever we are becoming. When life gets loud and messy, I think one of the hardest things is to keep a hold on and truly cherish what makes us us.
