I’ve shared repeatedly that people’s stories are important.  We all have something to share in this world and we wouldn’t have been given the gifts of insight and communication if we weren’t meant to use and share them with each other.  The fact that we are taught to feel any sort of shame in our stories is absurd yet it is protection so we continue to perpetuate the cycles of creating masks for every scenario we are in.  I’ve never been good at wearing masks because it’s so much easier to just let the truth out.  Sometimes we wear so many masks and tell so many stories in different scenarios that we forget what that truth is.  We learn to really believe what we tell people whether it’s the truth or not. I’m guilty of that as well because no matter what I do, my experience is my experience so that is my version of the story.  What happens when we think we are doing the right thing?  In the scenario I talked about yesterday regarding relationships, I know with all of my heart the people involved truly believe that they are doing the right thing, they believe they are right.  There comes a time when your truth needs to become THE truth and that can be painful to accept.

So when we tell stories, there are lessons to learn on all sides.  There may be a lesson in the story itself like some moral parable.  There may be a lesson on how we tell the story and what it means to tell the truth even in difficult circumstances.  And there are lessons in life when we share stories, like when we see the true side of people.  None of this means to stop sharing stories.  Stories are the foundation of who we are and they can last forever.  With time, any story is subject to the telephone game and the message might get a little convoluted or shifted a tad, some details exaggerated or forgotten, but even that adaptation has meaning.  The question becomes what story do we want to tell?  Do we need to be the person who changes the story depending on the room they’re in or do we share who we are?  My hope in being raw, in my inability to wear a mask, is that people learn to become more comfortable with who they are so they understand the mess we’ve made and that we can clean it up.  We don’t have to keep telling the same story.  We can make our own and we are supposed to share the one from the core of our being. 

We can’t make ourselves right at the expense of someone else or at the expense of the truth and that is the difference between the stories I’m talking about and an outright lie.  We can convince ourselves of anything and sometimes we can convince others as well.  I wrote about being convincible last week. Sometimes it isn’t people trying to convince us, they’re trying to convince themselves and they plant their feet and whole heartedly believe that they are in the right.  I’ve witnessed people destroy relationships over it, over pride, over ego, over what they wanted to be right rather than working with someone they claim to care about to find what is right rather than who is right.  So, I guess there is a need to make sure we take care of our stories, that we do our best to tell the story we want without diluting the truth of what is.  It makes life so much easier in the long run.