Our lives are built out of the stories we tell. The stories we tell each other, the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones our souls whisper to us late at night when they can get a word in edgewise. Our dreams are just the stories our soul and our guides and our inner wisdom are telling us so we can grow and become. But what happens when the stories we’re telling aren’t ours? What is life-like when we know the stories of everyone else in our lives, our spouses, children, sweetheart, family of origin, better than ourselves? Who are we when we don’t know our own story but can tell our parent’s narrative from the time they were born forward?
We can be swallowed up in everyone else’s stories. People think of it as caring for others, but caring so much that all of the self is sucked out until we are hollow isn’t caring, it’s abuse. We become our own abusers as adults when we see our worth as defined by others and how they treat us. It is not love if we are attempting to buy love through our actions. Being an Aztec sacrifice for others doesn’t make you worthy of much of anything. It pretty much makes you nothing, because that’s how you see yourself. As worth nothing, as something to give up and in the giving you will somehow receive…something. Approval, love, value, worth….
The reality is that if there isn’t a you, then there is nothing to give to others. So the first thing to do is make sure you are taking care of you. If you take care of you, show others how to take care of you and that you are worth taking care of, then they will be encouraged to do so. And they are doing the same, then the caring keeps getting shared around, good boundaries abounding, and the community becomes healthy and possibly happy. 🙂 A good place to start with all this is to listen to what narrative you are using as the foundation of your life. If your narrative isn’t actually yours, if it’s about other people, time to start reevaluating things. Your narrative is inside you and only you have the right to tell it. What’s your real story?