You and I (all people) are relatively malleable in our thinking and behaviours. It’s human nature. We are influenced by how others experience life. Which means it’s through sharing our own experiences that we also influence others.
We all learn from each other. We learn from society. The people we spend time with unconsciously teach us to how to feel about different life experiences.
Our response to life experiences is taught to us. It's the culmination of cultural beliefs and learned “appropriate” ways to express ourselves. Said another way, we unconsciously internalise cultural expectations then express them as our own views, feelings, and symptoms.
Knowing how malleable humans are means it’s important that we share real life stories which empower people to ascribe valuable meaning to their distressing experiences. As Dr Ken Miller said*,
“The meaning matters as much as the event itself.”
The meaning you ascribe to an experience will dictate how you move through that experience.
One of the reasons I so enthusiastically shared my first book, On Path, is because it tells a real and personal story that offers an alternate way of moving through emotional struggle.
As On Path turns two this month, I am grateful that it continues to touch people’s lives with a new, positive twist on an old, sad story; perhaps influencing a different response to emotional pain.
May we all share the stories that empower each other. It’s storytelling which supports, or else starts to change, culture. And we can all be a part of that change by sharing real life stories.
So, on behalf of the global audience whom have had a seed planted about how to move through their own challenges by vicariously working through mine,
Happy 2nd Birthday, On Path!
The On Path story
If you haven’t read On Path yet, let me share a summary of the first topic broached in the book. The summary is this blog post that I wrote before conceiving the idea to publish it as a memoir.
In this memoir, I use myself as a case study and share all the detail of my challenge, so you can feel like you’re there with me. Then I bring us both through it, out of the challenge and into a state of gratitude.
The major topic raised in the second half of the book is existentialism. I use a metaphor to share how I experienced the truth that we are each whole, as we are. Nothing is missing in us, or in our lives. I found it to be true that all of the twists and turns of our life, even if they felt like mistakes and life detours at the time, were exactly as they were meant to be. I found that we are, in fact, always on path.
The birthday cake is on me :)
xx
*quoted in Crazy Like Us, by Ethan Watters