What is your story?

seems a fairly straight foward question but how some people dont get it is mind boggling. i was recently at a funeral and the person's story of forty plus years was minimized to one page. it's sad when a loved one dies but its sadder that regardless of how interesting their life may have been, it isreduced to one page. a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who they are. A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next with the age of social media, we now judge people by 140 characters or the pictures they post. but do we really know them? do we know where they have come from and what they have done to get here? this has led people to wear masks to change the perception they give the world, which has led some to believe that they are actually the masks they wear and no longer know who they are. Our brain is quite tricky; what we believe does define us.we write our stories on a daily basis and as long as we are still alive, our story can change. Telling our stories holds the potential for political shift, spiritual recovery, and social healing, where we can start to create as opposed to react to narrow framings of the world; where expression of our truths and identities are able to emerge from a generative place. what is your story? what will your story be?

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