It’s funny how sometimes writing advice can translate into life advice without intention. “Trust the story” is a mantra I devised to work through my writer’s block (a topic I plan to explore in a later post). And it is something I said to myself dozens of times in the course of writing The Dreamborn Trilogy whenever I was hesitant about which path to take. But lately, I’ve found myself uttering this little affirmation on a regular basis in my day-to-day life. Why?
I would like to say creative writing has been a lifelong ambition and pursuit. That I knew at a young age I wanted to be a storyteller. A famous novelist, a poet, a wordsmith. But that would be a lie. I always loved to read, and (thanks, in part, to being a triplet) I always had a wild imagination. Story-consuming, story-creating… those were huge parts of my young life. But for whatever reason, these passions never translated into storytelling until my mid-twenties. I excelled in academic writing during my undergraduate studies and law school. And yet, these two worlds—creativity and writing—never crossed paths in the pretzeled twists of my neural pathways. To my mind, these two pursuits remained separate. Creative power belonged to the realms of dreams, imagination, innocence, and play, while writing power belonged to the realms of reality, realism, adulthood, and work.
And yet, one day during law school, while riding the New York subway on my way to my first legal internship, those neural pathways in my brain finally happened to collide. I was listening to Imagine, by John Lennon, on my headphones. The lyrics compelled me to actually look up and observe the people around me in that crowded subway car. And as I did, something miraculous happened. Stories sprang to life in my mind. They played out, one by one, as I scanned the faces surrounding me. A young man who was struggling with whether to end the relationship with his girlfriend of five years or propose. An older woman who was worrying about her daughter’s diagnosis. A boy struggling with his faith. A teenager who was only just starting to figure out how to define themselves. A married couple trying to figure out how to put food on the table for their four kids.
I doubt that any of the stories I imagined that day were accurate. But who knows? Maybe they all were. The point of it, for me at least, was to see all these people as stories. And when you get down to it, that’s all we really are. Stories that we are telling ourselves and the world about who we are and who we want to be.
We are defining our own realities. We are, at the risk of sounding cliché (but where do clichés come from if not truths), the authors of our own lives. If I ask you who you are, do you not begin to tell me a story? I am the daughter of X, the mother of Y, the employee of Z. I am a survivor of A, a champion of B, a defender of C. If you begin to look, really closely, can you find something that is “I” without the story to define it?
Anyway, that night after my subway ride, I started writing a book. Not The Dreamborn Trilogy, but something else I have recently picked back up and hope to one day publish. It’s a sci-fi novel, but it is ultimately a story about humanity. A story of stories, then, I suppose. And that night was the first time I realized creative writing and storytelling don’t belong to some discrete realm of thought. They don’t belong to some discrete segment of the population. And just because I was an academic mind studying to become a lawyer, I could not be denied the right to create. The right to express and expose, love and mourn, celebrate and condemn, all the bittersweet stories of humanity. Because storytelling is what makes us human, and it lives in every realm that human thought can touch. Including the creation of our own lives.
In my (other) professional life, I am currently embarking on a new path. A new job. And I’m sure I don’t need to explain the trepidation and doubt that accompanies such a major life change. And so, I keep telling myself to “trust the story.” Because, ultimately, what does that mean? Whether in writing or in life, it means to trust yourself. If you too are facing a life change or challenge (and who isn’t these days?), trust the journey you’ve taken to get exactly where you are at this moment. Trust the decisions you’ve made and the steps you’ve taken and the support you’ve had along the way. And know that, while it may feel scary and sudden in this instant, every single word you’ve written to your own story has led you here. You would not be here if here is not where you were meant to be.
Trust the story, and it will all work out exactly as it should.
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