Owning Your Story

And my journey to being able to do so...

Again, I’ve heard it said many times, but again, through Brene Brown’s Netflix talk the other day, what is more important than owning our stories, our many stories?

I am a Cultural Rhetorician. I was a student of Literature. I was a thespian/theatre major and actor. I was taught to value stories—fiction and nonfiction. I was taught that stories are how we express our collective and individual humanity. I was taught that stories are all that we are (Thomas King).

Owning your story—all the parts of it—especially when it’s filled with pain and trauma and heartache and—in my case—suicides, is…challenging… is not a strong enough word. It’s heart-wrenching. It’s pain like none other. To know that this is forever part of my story that will always be true and that I cannot change.

But it is also—I’ve learned—the only way forward.

Otherwise, the alternative is that I do not own my own story. I do not embrace who I am and what made me who I am. To deny my story is to deny my experiences, to deny so much of what has shaped me. To deny large parts of me and who I am, what I have become, what I now value and how I move forward and exist in this world.

And even amidst this hard, these experiences/my stories, have made and shaped me. Because I have taken this deep hurt and pain and allowed them to turn me into a more compassionate, empathetic, caring person. To be able to hold space for others pain.

I embrace survivorship because it means that I have endured so much. I take solace in that this status/position means, for me, that I can take whatever else life throws my way. Even the most unimaginable pain.

It’s been a journey. It will continue to be. But the more I own what happened to me, with the stories of my family, the more I come into myself and my own body and lived, embodied experiences.

Before therapy, I used to think that to own my story was to be stuck in the trenches of my past and my family’s dysfunction and tragedies. I struggled very much with how much of my story I had no control over and how they wrote too much of what shaped me. Without my consent. How much their choices impacted me, negatively.

But I am released from that now. They are gone, at peace.

And I now realize that to own my story is the only key to moving forward, to own who I am, what has made me, ME. To own these stories is the only way to being able to truly embrace my own power to author the rest of my story.

I think this is the truth—the hard truth—for us all. No matter what our stories are.

We have to own them, embrace them for what they are and what we can and should learn from them, to grow, to evolve.