Hi friends,
The biggest mistake I ever made in my life and career is that I allowed some of the shitty things that happened to me become my story, the sole narrative of my life.
The smartest thing I ever did in my life and career (eventually) is that I took some of the more gruesome parts of that story and gave them to her. The protagonist of my novel. Natasha Suri.
(Yes, the protagonist of my novel shares my first name. Here’s how that came about.)
I wrote this book not because I needed healing but because I thought it was a good, timely story. Yet, an unanticipated benefit ended up being that I was able to get closure around the subject.
By the simple act of taking the story I had lived and making it someone else’s, I stopped identifying with it.
I stopped talking about it.
I stopped thinking of it as my story.
It stopped being relevant in my life, and it no longer felt like a big deal.
It no longer defined my life experiences or choices. It stopped being the reason why I did things, and why I didn’t.
Now, when I think of that part of my life, I no longer see the images of what I experienced. I see, in vivid detail, the scenes I wrote. It feels like a movie I watched rather than an experience I lived. The emotions that follow are not those of anger, depression, or fear, but of pride, of joy, and of love.
I’m no longer triggered by it, by other people’s reactions to it, or by other people’s experiences of similar things.
I am truly done with it.
I am healed.
So many of us hold on to our stories because we want to honor them.
We don’t want to forget them, dismiss them, and possibly heal from them, because we don’t want to casually toss them away as though they were nothing. Our experience meant something.
Sharing it means something.
But when I tell it as my story, when I hold on to it tightly, I do psychic damage to myself, my self confidence, my belief, and my worthiness.
So how do you honor the story but still let go of the feelings around it?
It wasn’t through an act of ignorance or removing it from my consciousness. The story, the experience, and the lessons live on. I have honored the version of me that lived that experience by writing about it, by giving myself a voice in a narrative that was stolen from me, and by making sure that it’s not forgotten by me or others.
But I don’t have to actively live in the vibration of it.
We all have our different ways of healing, but the truth is, I didn’t really want to heal from some parts of this (as much as I yelled and screamed and said I did) because I wanted to hold on to it tightly, make it mean something, make it be for some higher purpose.
In order to make my readers feel the pain, I had to writhe around in the pain.
Now, having written the novel, I understand that I can hold it in my heart as an important story that needs to—and will be—told.
It just no longer has to be mine.
Cheers,
Natasha