I’m My Own Book: I’m The One Who Writes, Edits And Adds New Chapters

Each of us is like our own book. We have the ability to shape ourselves, to shape our identities, and we also have the power to tear off pages we don’t like. We can tear away pages that hurt us or pull the story of our lives down.

Let’s leave one blank page left. Order to start a new chapter…

Author Jorge Luis Borge once said that there are people who cannot imagine a world without birds. People who can’t imagine a world without water. And people who, once and for all, can’t imagine a world without books.

Every book we read tells us that we are all kind of stories. Existence is a magical thing; we can transform ourselves into story writers, a story that is written daily.

But here we face one of our biggest problems: we begin to think that we have only one way of narrating, which is the classic and predictive structure of the introduction, the culmination, and the end result.

No one has told us that the story of our lives does not have to be in a logical order. There are numbers that run out in the middle. There are songs that should be erased and rewritten. And there are a lot of pages that would be easy to tear off to make the plot work better.

But on the other hand, we should keep one thing in mind, namely that the story of our lives should only make sense to one person: ourselves.

Every experience, every interaction, every decision made, every emotion, caress, tremor – everything we experience has a personal meaning for us that no one else wants to fully understand.

There is logic in our chaos, there are figures in our personal story that are in disarray. Starting over and over again, we end up writing the best novel of all time: our own.

When we have no choice but to rewrite the story of our lives

Joan Didion is a well-known author who many call “the white whale of an American essay.” He’s now 82 years old, and he used writing to come up with something really interesting.

He tried by writing to get the deceased loved ones back to life. In December 2003, Didion and her husband returned to see their sick daughter in the hospital. Then, all of a sudden, Didion’s man, author John Gregory Dunne, died in the living room of their home.

And just a few months later, their daughter followed in the footsteps of their father. Pneumonia had crushed him.  After all this, Didion wrote for a total of 88 days. He wrote non-stop, and this book became his best work: A  Time of Magical Thinking. 

Both psychiatrists and anthropologists define “magical thinking” as a mental attitude in which people begin to believe that their thoughts have the power to influence the course of events. Joan Didion hoped his family would come back to him, he hoped they would come back to life…

None of his wishes came true. But after publishing the book, he realized it was time to start a new chapter in life. The real figure. Writing had acted as a kind of catharsis, a way of dealing with pain. 

And life continued to move forward, though his absent loved ones made the course of life slow. In his words,  “I was able to find the rhythm of existence in the same way I found it in the worlds and sentences I wrote.”

Three ways to rewrite our lives and embrace the future

At the beginning, we said how important it is that there are blank pages in our book. Those spotless, complete, blank pages are an opportunity to create a future full of new opportunities. Blank pages are space for new chapters – new, exciting, and happier chapters.

However, it is easy to ignore this valuable opportunity. About the opportunity to rewrite ourselves. Traumatic childhood, family crisis, infidelity or loss. One of those might make us think that our story has ended in that fatal chapter.

Next, we look at three strategies that can help us change our perspective.

Reinterpretation of numbers, rewriting

The first step is to go through and check some figures. Make a proper, objective assessment of the narrative of your life. From childhood to the present day.

During this first phase, you should not fall into the trap of blaming everyone else for what happened to you. Let’s not play indictments. We should focus only on ourselves, as well as on how we see ourselves in every part of life.

Purification. In the second stage, we assume that changing the past is impossible. But what we can do is shape our attitude towards our past. 

It is time to accept and forgive. And most of all, the burden of past pain sheds from our shoulders so that we can be present with ourselves.

The third step in this process is special. Adding blank pages to the book of our lives. You can do this in many different ways. It’s exciting because we’re talking about new areas now, to change experiences, and to allow ourselves new things. New friends, new projects, new places, new hobbies…

As we grow older and more mature, we learn something really important. We learn that new beginnings are a part of life. We learn to embrace much more real, concrete, happiness that is also in line with our needs. So let’s be bold and write the story we want. Write your own story.

Photos by  SIUM and Soizick Meister.