Your story is supposed to be yours to tell, but are you allowed to know it, or tell it?
Do you have to tell the story others want you to tell first, before you can write your own? It's helpful to be aware of whose point of view is writing your story. Is it even supposed to be about you?
Other people's narratives can take up a lot of space, and it’s hard at times to see or know that you have your own ideas of what to tell and how to tell it. The expectations coming from friends, family, group, culture, might impress upon you that you are only allowed to tell your story through a set of filters or pictures defined by others. There's a fine line in some groups about what you are allowed to say, and to whom. How real can you be?
Can you say, sing, and write what is true for you if others from your group don't want you to do so?
Imagine you are a poet, born into a family that has decided that life is supposed to be about business and making money. As a clairvoyant would say, these are the pictures the family is working. If everyone in your family thinks poetry is a waste of time and will never pay the bills, the story you tell is going to be affected by this.
If you decide to forge ahead and tell your own story regardless of what others around you think, you’ll become the poet you want to be. If you need the group to validate and understand your desire to be a poet before you’ll allow it to be real for you, you'll get stuck. If you allow others to tell your story for you, they will be happy to do so. Some may even demand to be your ghost writer.
You could also imagine being born into a family of poets, and you want to be a scientist. You're working a different set of pictures from some of your family members, but that doesn't mean you have to let them tell your story for you.
What if you want to have your psychic abilities working for you this lifetime, and others in your group don't?
Many people experience something odd when writing about their own life.
Their friends and family want to know what they are writing about, and try to control what they’re allowed to say. Don’t spill the family secrets, wait until so-and-so is dead and gone before telling that story, and don’t expose the rest of us to blame, shame, truth, your feelings about growing up as a poet in a family of business people.
What happens at home stays at home, don’t go spilling your guts about anyone here. So what if it’s your story you’re not allowed to tell as a result, and you have to work around the pictures, emotions, controls, and all of that energy? What about the demands to say nothing if you can’t say something nice? What if the not-nice thing you want to sing or speak or write is your truth?
Some of this is conscious on the part of those trying to control which stories are being told. We all know about this - whose stories are being told in the culture? What's the narrative? Who wrote the history books, and from whose viewpoint are the rest of us being directed to look?
It is a truly powerful thing to consciously reclaim and write your own story.
It begins within you, this ability to write what's true for you. Clear communication with yourself helps you find that expression from within. Your growing consciousness is what allows you to move aside those narratives that are out of date and no longer serve you. It takes courage to say no to the group stories and write your own. None of this is about making anyone else wrong = it's simply about finding what's true for you.