Step Out of Your Story. Kim Schneiderman
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our biggest decisions: why we got divorced, or never had children, or changed careers, or never pursued our dreams. Our perspective can change from day to day, and even moment to moment, depending on our mood and where exactly we are situated in the timeline of a problematic chapter. For example, the bitter tale we tell a month after ending a failed romance is probably not the sentimental story we will tell twenty years later after we are happily married to someone else. And neither of these stories will be the same as our former romantic partner’s, even though it’s the story of the same relationship.
You can see this for yourself. Think of something funny, touching, interesting, or meaningful that has happened to you in the past few months. Now imagine telling this story to your spouse or your best friend. When you’re done, imagine describing the same story to a parent or a boss. What about to a stranger in a café? What about five years from now, or twenty years? How might it be different?
While some details might remain the same, you might, depending on your audience, emphasize certain aspects of the story over others, or omit certain details that seem irrelevant, inappropriate, or too complicated to explain. As you tell it over and over, you might remember certain parts you had forgotten initially, or new insights might lead you to spin the story in a totally different direction. Over time, your values might change, and so you would revise your story accordingly, or hindsight might connect once-disparate episodes of your life.
Following a loss or a tragedy, many people engage in a prolonged period of story-wrestling in an attempt to make meaning of events that are hard to digest or that seem to defy explanation. Whether you consider yourself a heroic figure overcoming obstacles or a tragic victim of destiny often depends on how you choose to read the text of your life and the way that you tell your story. Take Milo’s story, for instance.
Milo’s story: superstar or Glorified Hack?
Milo, a thirty-one-year-old political reporter, had recently begun working at a fledgling online news magazine when an editor from another major newspaper invited him for coffee. He met the editor in her office, where she peppered him with questions about his new employer and complimented him on his increasingly visible body of work. On the way out, Milo shared an elevator with his hero and mentor, who had helped him break into the industry ten years earlier. Milo, who often second-guessed his abilities, felt reassured. This seemed like a sign that he was on a right path.
However, following the meeting, Milo attended a press conference with a local politician, who scoffed at one of his questions. Suddenly, all the good feelings from the morning evaporated, and he felt like a glorified hack.
Later that evening during our psychotherapy session together, Milo recounted the chain of events. He said he regretted his choice of questions at the press conference; they were an embarrassing error. Consequently, he wondered if the positive meaning he had read into the morning meeting at the daily newspaper had been “a lie.”
As a psychotherapist with a background in journalism, I gave the matter some thought and framed my answer as a metaphor: “It’s like writing an inspirational chapter of a story and erasing it because of a typo.”
Reclaiming and Reframing Your Personal Narrative
Milo’s story raises an important question. If there are a variety of ways to view our story, how do we choose the best version of our narrative so that the telling leaves us feeling inspired and hopeful? How do we find the redemptive storyline without whitewashing over unpleasant circumstances, repressing feelings, or discounting important life lessons?
For starters, you need a framework for understanding your story so you can explore what’s positive, redemptive, and possibly inspirational about it. Ideally, this framework would be something simple and relatively familiar that would help you take charge of the narration of your story adventure. Additionally, it would place importance on character development, reframing any disappointments or losses as stepping-stones to a more open-hearted or broad-minded experience of life and a richer understanding of yourself. It would measure your worth — not based on the number of zeros in your salary, on your job title, or on your marital status — but rather, on the extent to which you, in the starring role, could grow in compassion, wisdom, depth, and responsibility regardless of circumstances. Finally, when you stepped outside your story to look at the full picture of your life, you would discover that no matter what was happening in your plotline, you held the power to be cocreator of your story by reframing how you perceived and shared it.
Next, you need a new lens on life, one that elevates your perspective, frees your imagination, and overrides your inner critic. This new and improved prescription, so to speak, would help you view “the same old story” from new vistas and through kinder, more empathetic eyes.
Thankfully, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel — both the lens and the frames already exist. And you’re probably familiar with both of them — it just never occurred to apply these lessons to your own life. The lens I’m referring to is the third-person voice and the framework, the elements of a story. Not what you were expecting? Let me explain.
Putting On Your Story Glasses
Perhaps you recall learning the elements of a story in school. I can still picture my grade-school teacher drawing the curve on the chalkboard as she explained that every story has a hero who is working toward a goal or a dream, an antagonist who gets in the way, and a conflict between two forces that builds to a climax and leads to a resolution, transforming the protagonist for better or worse.
Even if you slept through this particular class, the format should seem familiar. For all of us, the narrative arc is imprinted into our developing brains from the moment we hear our first bedtime story and watch our first cartoon on television, following a favorite character through some madcap or fearsome adventure while hoping for a happy outcome. We become conditioned to this simple story arc, which emerges whenever we, ourselves, tell a story. We might tell slightly different versions of the same story — whether we are speaking to our friends, our shrink, or the passenger sitting next to us on an overseas flight. But whether we are explaining how we overcame shyness to become a newscaster, or found love again after a horrible divorce, we typically cast ourselves as a protagonist who has overcome obstacles and grown through challenges.
These plot elements are like the architecture of a story. Just as architects need to know structural design, we need to understand the specific ways that each of these elements directs and supports our growth as an ever-evolving protagonist so that we can reconstruct a strong and powerful new narrative from the raw materials of our one precious life.
Chances are you’ve had a graduation, a wedding, or maybe even a kid or two since your last English class. If you need to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with the elements of storytelling, don’t worry; the next chapter will teach you all about them. The diagram below gives you some of the key elements you’ll be working with. For now, keep these general descriptions in mind:
EXPOSITION: Introduces characters, setting, and background information, usually at the beginning of a story.
PROTAGONIST: The main character of the story. In most storylines, the protagonist is trying to accomplish something, win something, find something, or defeat something.2
SETTING: The time and place where a story is situated.
PLOT: The sequence of events that make up a story. This includes the outer story, or what actually happened, and the inner story, or how the character experienced it.
ANTAGONIST: Usually the protagonist’s nemesis. The antagonist might be a person (boss, parent, ex-spouse) or an obstacle that must be overcome or reconciled with (prejudice, poverty, aging, addiction).
CONFLICT: The central problem in a story, usually between the protagonist and antagonist. Stories can have multiple conflicts (and multiple antagonists), but one typically plays itself out through rising action that leads to the story’s climax.
CLIMAX: The turning point of the story, when suspense over how the conflict will be resolved reaches its peak.
FALLING ACTION: