Why Your Story Matters To Us

Who would you be without your life’s story? What character would you have? What abilities would you be aware of? Which opportunities would you take?

Think about it for a minute. We all have stories that we would like to get rid of, in fact, I have never met a person who hasn’t been through some kind of trauma. It seems that almost everybody has some kind of childhood stuff going on that is haunting her and is holding her back from doing what she wants to do.

But who would she be if this hadn’t happened? A better person? More successful? How do we know?

I believe that our stories are like a college degree for us:

If you want to be a doctor, you have to go through medical school. If you want to be a high class artist, you have to go art school. Whatever you want to be, it’s gonna be hard. It will be. There is no two ways about it. You will have to study long hours, pay hideous amounts of money, fight for good grades and have endless sleepless nights living on some kind of caffeine and cookies, trying to get it all done. You will end up with student loans that you are paying off until you are 89 years old, and all of this because you had a dream and a goal that made it all worthwhile.

A dream to learn. A dream to know. A dream to do something special with your life and in order to do this, you had to put yourself through the ordeal first. 

In college, you sing up for this.

But what about life?

What if you developed or embraced the ability to see your lives experiences like going to college in order to learn something profound?

What if you were willing to let go of the tension and emotional upheaval in order to see clearly that which is hidden?

What if you simply decided that you were willing to let go of the pain but keep the message and the wisdom that could only be learned the way that you did in your stories?

Who would you be then?

And, almost more importantly: Who would you bless with your wisdom?

 

I’d love for you to think about this for a moment:

If everything truly happened for a reason, but you could determine what the reason would be: What would you choose to do?

We don’t have to like how we learn what we know. We can dislike the teacher, the curriculum, whatever life throws at us. But at the end of the day: Who says that the essence of what we learned cannot serve us and the world in the end?

Your uniqueness, the power of your story is relevant and important to at least one other person out there. Actually, I’d like to take that back and suggest that your story and your wisdom is important to hundreds, if not thousands of people. People who think they are alone. People who think that nobody understands them. People who have yet to see that others have overcome the trauma that they are struggling with.

The wisdom you have learned through your story can be a beacon of light to others who are in the dark.

So instead of hoping for a different past (as if that was possible…):

How can you make your story matter?

2 Comments

  1. Catherine on March 24, 2013 at 6:46 am

    Ingrid, your thoughts are perfectly expressed. As Robin Robert’s mother told her and she shared: “It is up to us to find the message in the mess.” It’s also up to us to decide what to do with that message. Thank you for your insightful reminder. Blessings, Catherine


    • Ingrid Dinter on March 24, 2013 at 2:04 pm

      Thanks Catherine. Yes, your story matters, and the world needs to hear it. Love Ingrid


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