Episode 33: What's Your Story?

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I find that sometimes the person I think I am and the world I feel I live in are not the same as how I find myself in the world I am actually in.

Stick with me for just a little bit longer. 

We all have different hats that we wear. We are daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles,  lovers, spouses, girlfriends and boyfriends. We see ourselves as teenagers, young adults, middle aged, seniors. We have lots of ways to label ourselves…

Gen X

Gen Z

Doctors

Lawyers

Teachers

Caregivers

Because of the way we find ourselves connected to people either through birth or by choice the way we live can very much be framed by who other people in our life think we are. The story they have created for us frames how we believe we are seen by the world. You know, there is the nervous aunt or the crazy uncle. No matter what they do, you expect certain things of them. The same holds true for us. If you were the “responsible” child then that could be why you are the one taking care of your mom instead of your sister. 

Maybe you weren’t really responsible but you were the oldest and you were made to be responsible for your younger siblings. You were thrust into that role out of circumstance and when you grew older and left the house maybe you tried rebelling against that.

Maybe you made decisions just to show you WEREN’T responsible.  

You formed your identity of yourself as a child by the way people saw you. That might not have necessarily aligned with who you felt you really are. 

We have choices in life. We can continue to play the role we were placed in by the people around us. That could be multiple different things based on how we acted as kids, who we married, what we do for jobs and the things we do for fun.

We are a part of a story that everyone has of us. Each story with a little bit of truth and little bit of how that person interprets who we are.

On top of that we have the story of who we believe we are. The person we believe we are affects the decisions we make throughout the day. Right? If, for instance, you feel you don’t deserve nice things then you aren’t going to buy yourself nice things. If you feel you can’t leave your loved one for 5 minutes because you have to be by their side all the time then you aren’t going to step outside for a quick walk. If you feel that you should be able to handle everything on your own you most likely won’t ask for help when you need it. 

We bind ourselves to who we believe ourselves to be and make choices in life based on that.

So let me ask you two things.

Have you checked your story lately to see if it needs to be changed and how hard would it be for you to change it? 

I personally don’t see myself as just a caregiver. I am a mother, a wife, I am a yoga teacher and an educator. I am creative, goofy, intense, extremely loyal and love to laugh.  

However, I do notice that I can hide in that story of mine. It’s very easy for me to be a person who has their shit together all the time to hide the fact that I need help sometimes. I can be the caregiver to escape the difficulties of being a wife. I can be goofy to hide the pressure to be a good mother. I am creative when I feel my world is out of control and I use my extreme sense of loyalty to my loved ones to mask fear. I just laugh all the time. Maybe that’s the only really thing about the story. 

Hiding in that story shields me from seeing that things shift. Lately I have been in full caregiver mode. When your loved one has thyroid cancer you are afforded the luxury of having a rollercoaster ride where some months/years can be partially uneventful and then you get to the top of that hill and it slows for just a second until you hear that click and you get pulled down kicking and screaming.  

So, where in my personal story I am sure and on top of things, I’m not exactly that person right now. I’m 60% of everything. Of being a good mom, a loving wife, a relentless caregiver. Add on to the qualities of creative, goofy, intense, extremely loyal and love to laugh - Exhausted, stressed out and sometimes overwhelmed with worry.  

It’s almost like watching that intense movie where you thought you got it all figured out and then at the end you are shown that everything you thought you knew was untrue. The victim was actually the killer, the old timey town was actually in the present time and the main characters were actually dead the whole entire movie.  

When you watch those types of movies it take a minute for you to process the reality versus what you believed to be true and I think not just caregivers but everyone hates to come to the realization that the lives they believe to be living are not real.  

As a caregiver this can happen slowly or all at once. Maybe you thought you were caring for your husband who was thought to just have a bad cough for half a year and then found out he has a lung disease. Or maybe your wife drove off to work one day and was paralyzed in a car accident. 

We have no control over when things happen and often we find ourselves thrust into the role of  caregivers living there for a long time before even understanding that is part of who we have become.  

Here’s why I think this is important.  

If we don’t allow our stories to change then we will find ourselves living in conflict with who we really are. If we don’t work to accept the situations that have presented themselves in life then we aren’t able to course correct or become ok with what we are really doing. 

If you were a lawyer when you found out your wife has breast cancer you most likely stepped into the role of being her caregiver simply because you love her and stayed in the relationship to help her get through surgery and treatment.  

If, you tried to continue to be 100% lawyer because you didn’t realize you were now both a lawyer and a caregiver then you have a problem. You don’t allow yourself to make room for being a caregiver and try to do it almost as a side job when it is something that consumes all of you, all the time. If you refuse to accept yourself as a caregiver in this situation then your performance at your job suffers, you become resentful, angry and scared and you find yourself not able to deal with it all. This person can not fully accept how his life has changed so he will have a hard time feeling happiness and fulfillment in his life and enjoy the time he has with his wife because he sees it as pulling him away from work. Instead of taking a smaller work load so he can both work and be present for his wife. 

We also use our stories to lie to ourselves about the life we are living. If a woman lives in a story as being a loving wife who will do anything for her husband and sees herself as someone who is selfless, very caring and giving, is always even tempered and always seems to be on top of things. Then she will have a hard time coping when she is thrust into the role of caregiver as she finds out her husband has cancer. She’ll have a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that she is overwhelmed, resentful and angry that this has happened to her family. If she doesn’t change who she believes herself she won’t allow herself to ask for help or learn that it is normal for her to feel those emotions. She will become overwhelmed with guilt and anxiety in the end. 

If either of those two people realized that they were caregivers  they had to revise their personal story they would then be able to make decisions based on that and not how they decided on things before becoming a caregiver.  

In the movie where at the end you find out that the main characters have been dead all along and they bring you back to pivotal parts of the movie to show you how it should all make sense to you now as you watch them realize they aren’t really alive. You can see if they knew they were already dead they wouldn’t have suffered as much as they had and there literally would not have been a purpose for that movie. Once they realized what was to be true they began to accept it.  

What I’m trying to say is sit back and look at who you believe yourself to be and see if that still fits in with who you actually are. Are there tweaks you need to make to your identity or do you see things that you are doing that are not aligned with who you believe you are?  

Once you see that then you can decide if you should change your personal story to reflect changes in your life or change the way you interact with your world. 

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