“I Am My Own Story”
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice.”
-Steve jobs
A friend of mine from high school poses
thought-provoking questions on Facebook from time-to-time. A few of weeks ago he asked, “Perhaps my
greatest lesson has been ___________.” I
saw the post and sat and stared at it for a while and thought there have been
so many life lessons I have learned and a lot of them have not come so
easily. I kept coming back to one and
decided to comment with this, “Don’t listen to other people’s narratives about
you… you are your own story.” Why did I
pick that out of all that I could have chosen?
Last night at my twelve-step meeting,
the speaker was talking about his experience with the fourth step – the moral
inventory. He talked about the
resentments and fears he had listed in his inventory and he stressed that he
had written down all of them “real or imagined”.
I think it underpins so much of what
held me back for so long. I chose to
live in fear and self-pity for the majority of my life. I listened to either what other people said
about me or, more accurately and more often, what I perceived they said or
thought about me. I made up entire
scenarios about what was going on in other people’s heads about me as soon as I
walked into a room. I decided that they
did not like me and why. I was sure they
were judging me and I was sure I knew their thoughts and intentions. I then turned these imagined scenarios into
dialogues that ran on loops inside my head, repeating vile and negative
untruths about myself.
When the occasional person came along
and actually did judge me or make some off-color comment, I saw this as proof
of what the whole world was saying or thinking.
I let all this rule me. I took in
these perceptions and what I thought I “should’ be according to others or
according to societal norms and saw it as the rule of law.
I love the quote above from Steve jobs,
I always have since the first time I read it.
I always silently amend it for myself though and add that I should not
allow my inner voice to drown in the noise of my own negativity. I have always been my own harshest critic and
I get mired in a swamp of self-criticism which quickly weighs me down with
self-pity and fear. I become immobilized
before I can even take action and then start to shrink in the face of the
smallest obstacles or outside critiques.
I have learned over the years to quiet
the inner negativity and bolster up my inner voice, the good one. The inner voice that tells me I can and that
I am allowed, that I even deserve. The
inner voice that says I can write a book for children or start a blog about
recovery or change careers at mid-life or find sustained and joyous recovery. The same voice that connected with a higher
power and saw me as a beautiful soul for the first time in my forties and
became someone my children and others can count on.
So yes, there are always going to be
detractors in life. Sometimes they will
look like enemies and sometimes they will come in the form of family and
friends who will say something that is just not supportive in the way you need
at the moment. The enemies are just
enemies, broken people like the rest of us.
The family and friends may just not know how to help you at that moment. The person you have to watch for the most is
yourself. If you tell yourself you can’t
do something; you won’t. If you tell
yourself you can, most of the time you will.
I am my own story and my ending is not
written.
