[Author Your Life: 1: Good Story, Good Life]
Telling someone, “Good Story, Good Life,” is a bold claim. Telling someone to become the hero of their own story needs proof and justification. The Internet is much like Congress; believing without proof is dangerous. So, what is the justification, the evidence that a better story makes a better life?
This used to be my life story: I was born with a mental disorder called Asperger’s Syndrome. My family struggled financially. School was just as much an exercise of humiliation and boredom. I was the useless extra in most of my extracurriculars. What I couldn’t control hurt me, and it will never stop hurting.
I told the story of a plant fated to die before its time, an egg that would never hatch, and a boy who would never become a man. This mindset provokes the dangerous question, “What’s the point of it all?”
One part of the answer is inattentional blindness.
Look up inattentional blindness in journal articles, and they will talk about how your perception of reality shapes it. The Journal Article, INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS: PERCEPTION WITHOUT ATTENTION, discusses this very well. As a side note, this journal article, like many others, is free, so you can check my sources that I caps lock and underline the titles of. This is for your benefit. But back to the article.
To summarize the article in a sentence, you can look at something without seeing it. Perhaps more shockingly, if you are looking for something, you might see it—even if it’s not there. Reality is a fixed construct, but your perception of reality is not.
Let me ask you, where did your mind focus when you started reading that previous paragraph? Some will focus on how we will find things that are not real. Others will debate my claim that reality is a fixed construct or that perception is not fixed. Many will skim over it, not giving it too much thought, and a few will think about it for the rest of the day.
Your perception of reality changes your experience with reality.
How you perceive that fact will change how you forget or use it.
Another part of the answer is subconscious stress.
The wrong story wounds the mind, body, and heart. It truly is “Bad Story, Bad Life.”
The story I told myself from a young age for over a decade was incomplete. It was accurate, which made it more damaging. When my past started with my diagnosis at 7, it colored much of my life. Was I struggling to make friends in middle school and high school because I am awkward or because of Asperger’s? Were my family’s financial struggles coming from the fact that my brain is broken? Why does school have to be more complicated for me than everyone else? Why put in so much effort to overcome my problems for a fraction of the reward that everyone else will get? My personal story matches the research.
The article EXPRESSIVE WRITING, EMOTIONAL UPHEAVALS, AND HEALTH (Chung, 2006) discusses that when people are disturbed by minor disruptions or significant traumas, it can also occur as physical pain and emotional strain. In ancient times, having a rush of cortisol and adrenaline in the face of an animal attack or a disease outbreak helped get oneself out of a dangerous situation. In the modern age, our phones can activate our cortisol anytime, anywhere, with a flick and tap of the finger. All those encounters can live in your body for days, weeks after, because we are getting more than ever. It is common knowledge that significant disruptive events can cause shell shock and PTSD. What is less commonly known is that we can learn so much more evil stuff than our ancient human brains were meant to process. So much time was spent chopping down cedar trees, harvesting chicken eggs, and weeding the fields, and we had time for most of human history to process horrible stuff that we infrequently encountered. Modern humans are so strained by excessive exposure to tragedy and evil that smaller events can cause severe trauma. Your story makes you more or less vulnerable to these problems.
So, between inattentional blindness and subconscious stress, they help form “Bad Story, Bad Life”.
So, how do we form a “Good Story, Good Life”?
This is where I bring up the other main point of the article, EXPRESSIVE WRITING, EMOTIONAL UPHEAVALS, AND HEALTH (Chung, 2006). The act of writing down your story, in part or in whole, was found to make people not only feel better but also to cause lifestyle changes. In this article, when people were asked to write down something in their lives that was stressful or traumatic, like an assault, robbery, a significant betrayal, or death, many participants, female and male, were crying as they were writing. Most participants noted to the researchers that it felt like a positive experience. Many reported weeks later how their sleep improved; their general mood improved. People who live with acute pain for an extended time are unaware of when it grows slowly. Many don’t realize how much pain they have gotten used to until they are free of it in part or whole.
A big part of the reason writing experiences down helps is that it allows you to become a hero. The journal article, NARRATIVE IDENTITY AND EUDAIMONIC WELL-BEING (Bauer 2008), covers the final part, which helps bring it all together. I like my large words more than governments love money, so we need to know what eudamonic means. It refers to living a life filled with higher purpose and meaning, like having a family, being a good friend, contributing to the betterment of your community, or country. It is a direct conflict with a hedonic lifestyle, which focuses on how much pleasure I can get out of my body, my experiences, my friends, and accursed be the consequences.
The journal article has three key aspects to an eudaimonic life: personal growth, transformative experiences, and redemption. Growth is more self-explanatory, where you become more skilled than before. Birch trees struggle doing this because they are wonderful just the way they are. People can improve hour to hour, day to day, year to year, decade to decade. Transformation experiences are where you change into something different. When monarch caterpillars chrysalis and then emerge into a butterfly, that is two biological transformational experiences. If we change religions or life stories, we transform internally. The third one is redemption. This one can get complicated, as cultures influence some of its nuances. Some cultures value traits like trickery, efficiency, brutality, and generosity differently. Redemption is where something is said or done that was wrong, and then something is said or done to, in part or in whole, to repair what was broken. If you are a fool, unable to trick your enemies, the redemption may be to become wise enough to trick your enemies. It could also get so strong that no one dares to fool you anymore. The phrase, ‘mercy to the enemy is brutality to my family,’ and its many variations exist for a reason.
Let’s bring this all together.
By writing your story down, in part or in full, what happens is that you get to be a hero, or at the very least, in some form of control. As you start to write, it forces you to personally grow up and confront a problem, like a hero. As you write, your brain has time to process the event and sort the abstract dread from the facts of the event, which allows you to transform into someone who can overcome the event, like a hero. When you finish writing the story down, you go from someone enslaved to the event to a redeemed person.
Like a hero.
A slightly older pregnant wife and husband entered a hospital. The nurse and doctor told her that she was older. The kid would probably have disorders. It would be best to have an abortion. She ended up rejecting two doctors and three nurses to save her child and give birth to a baby boy.
Me.
The real start to my story is not that I was diagnosed at 7, it’s that even before I was born, I was overcoming the odds, and not just surviving but thriving!
I want to help you change your story. You should be the main protagonist of your own life. For honesty’s sake, this change won’t be easy or overnight. It won’t fix all of your problems—taxes still suck—and not every trauma can be easily erased with a simple story. My day-to-day and future have improved from “Bad Story, Bad Life” to “Good Story, Good Life”. Even the things I can’t control are far less miserable than ever before.
This is the first of several articles I will use to help you. The second article will be about you writing the story. The plan is that the third through the fifth will help people focus on refining their work and stories. The sixth one is currently planned to be about fleshing out the story for assistance in love, employment, hobbies, and other things, although they may be split into their own thing. The final one is about the future and forward planning.
Please stick around; the following article in this section will be released before June 30th. Editing, researching, getting feedback from test subjects, and polishing my terrible grammar takes time.
Thank you for being patient.
(Bauer 2008) Bauer, Jack J., Dan P. McAdams, and Jennifer L. Pals. “Narrative identity and eudaimonic well-being.” Journal of happiness studies 9 (2008): 81-104.
(Chung, 2006) Chung, Cindy K., and J. W. Pennebaker. “Expressive writing, emotional upheavals, and health.” Foundations of Health Psychology (2006): 263-281.
(Mack, 1998) Mack, Arien, and Irvin Rock. “Inattentional blindness: Perception without attention.” (1998).