I’m coming face to face with stories in my life — things I’ve been repeating about myself and the world — that I’m discovering aren’t true.
Some of them are mild shifts, like discovering that, despite the fact that I’ve been saying for years “I hate to cook and have no confidence in the kitchen”, I actually can cook. Recently, I’ve had a number of occasions on which I realised I’d just cooked something good. I really enjoyed what I’d made, and so said several other people, like my parents and Patrick. (And my parents were still relating to me through the filter of “he eats pasta every day”, which used to be true about ten years ago.)
Then today, Chris invited me to the theatre. My first instinct about theatre is “Don’t go. It will be disappointing and make me angry.” This was my experience of it for a long time: people overacted in completely soulless, disconnected ways, the staging was bad, the play was obvious, and so on. I trained and worked for years as an actor, and had very high standards for myself and what I thought it meant to do justice to the possibilities of theatre — rules which I’d seen violated too many times.
But when Chris asked today, I thought, “What the hell” and said yes. He provided me with a totally different experience. The play was incredibly clever, and each of the four actors was wonderfully subtle as well as fully able to make their character’s emotional journey in a believable way. And we were even sitting close enough for me to get splattered with stage blood! (Okay, just a drop.) So the story “I don’t like theatre”? Not true.
Then there are other, more deeply-rooted stories, and with the help of friends and other important people, I’m learning that they’re also total rubbish that brings me no good.
So, as I finalise the outline of my novel, I see that it’s time to take responsibility for the authorship of my life, too, and be more careful with the stories I tell myself about the way things are. Some of the old ones are closed-minded, angry, and not very interesting.
