Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any relation to real life is purely coincidental.
The trouble is, so is your life. Or at least, everything you know about it.
The premise is that you don’t see things as they are. That, to some extent despite you, there is a tape playing inside your head. A story you tell about the world, about yourself, about your role in it. Who you are, the things you like, the things you do, the choices you make…it’s all just a story. No. That’s not true. It’s not just a story. It’s a mighty one. It directs your life and shapes things around you. It lays the assumptions and draws the conclusions. And it interprets everything in-between.
The story is a lens that lives and breathes: at every turn, it depicts and constructs, it gives color and shape, it enhances or blurs, dims or shines light, brings forth or degrades, it makes links and relationships, categorizes and filters. It strings things together, makes leaps and justifications. And it goes on and on and on. Unshuttable. The story is always unfolding, giving us a sense of continuity and coherence. The story bends reality to fit.
Your story has a shape unique to you. It is a master of disguise, usually hiding in plain sight. You HAVE to have a story – cannot opt out. And I’m sorry, but your story sucks.
Of course not everything is changeable. Some ways of looking at the world are the product of thousands, others millions of years of evolution. They’re deep in our roots, your ancestry, their stories and customs, their rites and sacrifices.
And of course they weren’t always right. (Neither are you.) But they had something you forget: deep common ground that tied them to each other, and to something bigger. That ground has been fraying, as it inevitably does. More and more, we find ourselves on tiny rocks that used to hold thousands, now broken apart, drifting at sea. Your little piece of rock became your whole world. It is ruled by only your story, inhabited by only your story, the one you made up yesterday. There is no room, on that island, for anyone. Not even for you. Your now bloated ego and its decrepit kingdom have become inhospitable. Between it and the world, a tumultuous sea to cross. Between you and the world, an infinite abyss.
It is absolutely necessary for us to recognize that our life is mostly ruled by this story, and that the narrator has crowned itself king and suppressed all the dissident voices. You must reclaim and rebuild your kingdom into the large, bountiful, welcoming place it once was. The imposter king must be dethroned and put back in its place. It is time to take back what’s rightfully yours.
