Reclaiming our narratives
Why so many of the stories we tell are not of our own greatness but our own smallness, and how we start to change that.
Well hello, and welcome to November.
If you’re getting a raft of posts from me this season, that’s because somewhere, in amongst the thinning veils leading up to Samhain, the dam that had been holding me back from writing seemed to shift and the words started flowing again in a way they hadn’t for a long time. The result? A lot of posts waiting to be shared.
This one in particular, came a few days after returning from Glastonbury where, as I’ve shared, I spent the weekend running a workshop with two of my dearest friends, Yolandi and Charlie
As friends have a tendency to do, we spent a lot of time complimenting one another in our three days together, and those conversations led me to some really interesting thoughts about just how much I miss in the stories I tell myself.
Calling out the narrators
Back during my A-Level English days, I remember being told that Holden Caulfield, the lead character of Catcher in the Rye, was an “unreliable narrator”. What did that mean? That, although we were all reading the story through his eyes, Holden’s perspective was one we couldn’t necessarily trust because, quite frankly, he wasn’t speaking truth.
Of course Holden isn’t alone in that; to name but a few, Gone Girl, Life of Pi and Atonement are books and movies I’ve taken in over recent years where the narrators just can’t be trusted. And in all three of those stories and many more besides, what a twist it is when you find out you've been led in the wrong direction and sold a mistruth from the very beginning!
That trope of the unreliable narrator is something I find quite frustrating in TV shows, books and movies. Yet what I’m realising more and more is that when it comes to the stories within our own heads, there is no other type of narrator.
Our own unreliable narration
That’s not because we set out to lie or to cover up some heinous crime (well, not most of the time anyway!); nor is it because we're trying to twist our stories to make ourselves look better.
Often it’s actually quite the opposite. Often we’re telling our own stories not from a place of our own truth, but from a place of what other people have told us.
We tell those stories from the labels others have given us, the beliefs we've inherited, the conditions we’ve been told we must live against, and so on.
And that means the stories we tell are, so often, not of our own greatness but our own smallness.
Embracing the dislike
Recently I read The Courage to be Disliked, a book that talks a lot about how Western societies are so deeply rooted in ideas of punishment and reward. From being very small, we are celebrated anytime we do something “right” and punished or criticised each time we do something “wrong”.
Yet here’s the thing with those rights and wrongs: they were never defined by us. In truth, they were rarely even defined by the people who are punishing and rewarding us. Instead, they were defined by systems and authorities that were built – you guessed it – to keep us small.
Of course we don’t recognise that – not as children, and often even as adults. And so we do everything we can to avoid punishment; either by aligning ourselves with what’s expected of us, or by cutting ourselves off from anyone and anything that could possibly lead us to be punished. In doing so we shape ourselves not into who we were always meant to be, but simply into someone who fits everything we’ve been told we should be.
That shape doesn’t just influence who and how we are out in the world every day, it also defines our stories – even those that we narrate to ourselves.
We tell stories of the times we’ve been honoured and respected; of the burdens that have been heaped upon us, and of the villainies that have been attributed to us. And in doing so, we just keep repeating - over and over - other people’s narratives rather than the truth of all that we are.
I've lost track of how many times over the years I've heard perfectly competent, absolutely brilliant women sit in a therapy session and tell me that they are nothing. That they deserve so little and are somehow failures not because they truly are, but because they don't live by the expectations that have been ascribed to them.
Expectations that were never built for or by them in the first place.
What I've learned through journeying with my own story, and the stories of women right across the world is that when it comes to feeling wise or powerful in our lives, nothing could be less damaging.
Looking at our stories differently
As I’ve said before, if some of the stories that I've worked with over the last decade or so were to be told from the perspective of what is actually good and right, Lilith would be deemed a heroine for standing up a force that imprisoned her and a man that felt he had some sort of divinely granted access to her body.
Medusa would have been carried forward through time not as a monster who deserved to be slain, but as a tragic figure whose life not one but two men felt they owned.
And Mary would be seen as the epoch-spanning, shapeshifting personification of divinity that she has always been, rather than as the mother of a powerful man gifted to her by a masculine entity that felt she should be grateful for his choice to impregnate her.
The list could go on and on and on because every story we read is told through a defined lens. And in almost every case, that lens has nothing to do with the person at the centre of the story. Particularly if that person is a woman, a person of colour, an LGBTQIA+ person, or from any number of other marginalised communities.
That’s why I’m so passionate about the Herstories I’ve been inviting you to rekindle over the past couple of years.
It’s also why I’m so passionate about the invitation to re-weave YOUR story.
Because when I ask you to do that, I'm not only suggesting that you look back over what's been. I’m not only suggesting that you create a foundation for what's to come. And I’m definitely not only suggesting you craft something that might be “acceptable to share with the world.
Instead, I’m inviting you to step into the role that was always waiting to be claimed by you; that of prophetess, seer, narrator of your own story.
The voice who gets to define the storyline, the characters, the truths. When it comes to your story, that role is yours to take on, which means the story itself is yours to re-weave. And I can’t wait to see what you do with it.
This year’s Re-Weaving Your Story course gets underway on 17th November. To learn more and see if it feels like the next right step for you, visit my website.
I’ll be back in your inbox with another of those ready and waiting blogs soon. But for now, take care, and thank you as always for being here.
Ceryn xx