UNSTORY
Two truths of life
You have a limited amount of time
and the funny thing is you have no idea how long that time is.
Given these two variables, I’d say your enjoyment of life is paramount, and living to your fullest is essential.
These ideas I cannot shake from my daily thoughts. Every year I spend on this planet inevitably leads me to seek meaning in my/our existence and what, if anything, can be done to improve my quality of life.
Life is like a love story,
where you must learn to love the ugly beast existing within, and in doing, you can truly flourish and shine like a star.
In my endeavors to uncover the secrets of life, I have stumbled across many promising concepts which I want to share, in trust, to ye.
And perhaps something will land for you to feel a joyful, internal love for yourself and your own life.
The first of these concepts is what I proudly claim to be my own phrase, 'Unstory', which is the art of unwinding & untethering from the predominant and largely unconscious story you have been living most of your life.
An unconscious story
is woven by several factors: your reactions to life, your experiences, your family cultures & traditions, your parents’ beliefs, schooling, and the society you live in.
Left un-checked, the unconscious story dictates your daily experience through your belief structures and how you believe life just-is.
Illustration: Life for many growing up in the 2000s - smartphones and smart babies (the ones who know how to take selfies) are the norm.
Smartphones to these babies are part of how life just is.
To anyone born in my era and before, smartphones were once just a crazy idea we saw in a film while we wrote our homework using now ancient technology on display in museums, named paper & pen.
Unstory is like stripping back all the this-is-just-how-it-is bits to our life story to discover what we made-up about who we are (i.e. how we defined ourselves) and do we really need to keep holding on to that version of reality, or is there a better way to live? (there is!)
Why? Because our current & unconscious tale, is not one of our own choosing but one we devised in reaction to our environment & nurturing (or lack thereof) and served as a tale that reads like this:
“Oh, life is tough, it is harsh, cold, and lonely here, and therefore I must be and act cautiously to ride this out to the very end without getting too badly bruised along the way"
It may all seem like a woeful job to uncover a bleak tale of misery, but I can assure you it is not.
Being able to dive deep within the oceans of our psyche to discover your detailed (unconscious) story and dislodge it from its place of permanence from your reality is not to obsess over a miserable tale but to find a treasure yet unrealised.
Like an old watch, you find in your attic and sell for a few shekels at a yard sale, only to see it pop up on the antique roadshow a week later being valued at a trillion dollars - Your bleak and miserable tale of woe is a treasure, a gift, wrapped in a turd.
It contains a world of new possibilities and joy if only you dare to stare at it long enough to see its beauty.
But what if you do, look at it, and explore what hides inside this terribly wrapped gift? What will you find?
You will discover that the predominant story you hold about yourself and life points to moments and situations where you got stuck emotionally, mentally, and spiritually stuck.
And, instead of letting these experiences go like passing clouds, you closed your fist tightly around your hurt, anger, pain and carried it with you long into adulthood. You created context and beliefs around why you must never forget nor let these experiences go.
As if, by holding on, you were protecting yourself from such experiences and feelings ever happening again. But that is precisely how the story goes. You do keep experiencing the same things again.
That is the nature of being stuck.
I don’t claim to understand the cryptic ways in which the universe works.
Perhaps it is all an elaborate game to test our mettle in life and see who is willing, no, crazy enough, to venture beyond reason and logic and wonder if all the bad things about themselves that they believe, are not somehow connected to self-love.
It’s wild, but I can tell you, I am crazy enough - I went down and looked, and wow, do I feel much better, having accepted the negative ideas that I discovered I held about myself..
I didn’t just look at it. I studied it. I prodded around and discussed it at length with the type of people who were experts in helping me untangle the mess I manifested since birth.
I studied it to the point that I accepted it.
Not begrudgingly, but I accepted that I had created all this crap, and I had been swanning around pretending it was not my fault/responsibility to resolve. I had been pointing the finger of blame at my parents (my Dad mostly), the world, even god.
I accepted it so vehemently till I found myself chuckling at my own folly.
And I laughed.
I laughed with love in my heart at the nature of the human experience.
Because I understood we are all living in this way. No one skips this. We all begin at this level.
We have all created stories that we live by that are simply false. We keep them to protect ourselves from the pain of existence, but they only make us relive the emotions again and again. And it keeps us isolated when we cling to these stories.
Now I feel less separate from the world. I have compassion for all because I can see we are all sharing similar experiences.
I feel more human for having negativity. Not less.
To conclude this exploration of Unstory, I will give you a simple exercise that you may use to begin your expedition on your own Unstory journey.
Completing this exercise will open your eyes to the gift in all of life’s experiences, where perhaps before, you were damn well sure it was totally wrong & bad. This exercise will allow you to experience the power of Unstory and enable you to live with more energy and joy.
Completely refresh your perspective in 3 steps:
Pick a negative life event and write 3 emotions it made you feel.
Write 3 ways your life improved because of it.
Can you see that sometimes you may feel bad, and good things can still happen?
Seems simple, but try it and see what happens. And if you have any questions, hit the contact button or find me on Instagram (link).
Have a great day!
Ahmad