I’ve had a lot of “bad chapters” in my life. More than I want to think about, actually. I won’t try to tell you that I haven’t thought about ending the story early more than once.
I’ve struggled with addiction, had problems with the law, been abused, been abusive. I spent far too long inside of a family that was clueless about how to be a family, and then spent thousands of hours agonizing over cutting those toxic family members out of my life. All things considered, I’m glad I did.
Every person has a story, and not all of the stories are fairy tales. Of course, what really makes a fairy tale? Those are always rags to riches, right? Tragedy to triumph, horror to healing…
We’re hard-wired to resonate with stories. The part we have to work a little harder at sometimes is realizing that we have the power to write our own.
Our actions become the ink of the stories, and each of us holds an incredibly powerful pencil, so to speak, in the ability to choose what actions happen next.
In essence, we all get to write the middle of our stories – and we absolutely get at least a shot at writing the ending. When we’re young, it’s common that someone else is doing all the writing for us. But as we grow and mature, that pencil gets passed on to us.
What will you write with yours?
