My Story Is Your Story

Every story deserves to be told. Every person has something worth sharing about themselves.

After all, that’s how our world has been built: story after story, slowly adding to a living tapestry. Each smile, tear, and hope are all there, growing along an infinite variety of events and emotions.

We can really see ourselves in our vicissitudes and believe that they make us who we are. In sharing them over again, we look for recognition.

We want to be recognized for our courage to be in a world that, too often, feels foreign to us.

We may feel it is too late to start a new chapter because so much of us has been invested in the process.

So much heartache and hope. Dreams and disappointments.

This year I have been blessed to see how “my story” had turned into a golden cage.

Beautifully built around me, it had become the only life I knew.

When it started to feel real small and almost crashed me, I had to choose to fly out of it.

It is a work in progress, with very expansive moments and definitely quite a few tears.

As I watch my past slowly backing away from me, something has become very clear.

My story is also my mother’s story. And my father’s.

It is your story, same as all those who came before our time.

This story is the story of the world.

Our struggle is the struggle of everybody else’s because it is intrinsic to our humanness.

The details of our lives are unique to each one of us. And yet, as we tell of them, we discover a common thread running through them all.

Since time began, we have been living in the grip of guilt and shame.

We have been victims and perpetrators, lost in the vast ocean of our own mind. While looking for safe shores, we simply forgot where we come from.

Some say this is the biggest cosmic joke ever:

we are fallen angels landed here on earth to remember ourselves.

Every little piece of our never ending story is none other than an attempt to remember that. As we do so, we remind everybody else of what has been long forgotten.

Like a beautiful dance, we move from guilt into redemption, despair into hope, shame into acceptance. Our lives simply happen as we slide through all these seemingly very different feelings and emotions.

Only when we bring our experiences into wisdom, we can add them to the ever growing tapestry our world is.

We nurture our stories long enough to distil their essence.

Only then, we do offer a valuable gift to everybody else through our sharing.