I remember sitting in a church pew one sweaty summer evening a few years ago. The church’s A/C had stopped working amid one of the worst heat waves to hit the area in years. The heat from the entire day was trapped inside the building, with very little chance for relief except for the occasional breeze from an old lady’s antique fan. And on top of all of this we were required to wear a mask, as it was also the height of the COVID pandemic. These facts together made for a pretty angry congregation.
To be completely honest, I zoned out for most of the service. I had already been to a different service earlier in the day, and I really just wanted to catch up with a few friends afterwards. But just as I was ready to leave to get some fresh air, the priest asked us a question during his message, one that still resonates with me five years later.
The question for all of us was, “Who is writing the story of your life?” It was a rare question to hear at church, something that immediately makes you take a step back and think about your life from a different angle. And, like Lazarus from the dead, I bolted up from the pew. The question was asked sincerely and from a place of love. And yet, I could not help but feel a little attacked, partly because the question implied that I didn’t have control over my own life.
The priest continued his message, claiming that most people allow the outside world to write the story of their life for them. This includes the important people in our lives: our friends, family members, spouses. But it also includes other things like our careers, or even things like the music we listen to or the entertainment we consume. Essentially, his claim was that we treat our lives far too passively, and that we give other people way too much power in how we create the story of our life.
If you’re reading up to this point, you’re probably thinking “Yeah, I get that. But this is the 21st century you’re talking about. That’s just what life is like!” And, well, I can’t disagree completely. Our society is a place where we are expected to cave to other people’s incessant demands for attention, and not doing so is viewed as rude or, worse, greedy. There’s absolutely no such thing anymore as a private thought, or a personal ambition, that is totally excluded from the world’s scrutiny. Basically, the idea that we can live our life free from obligations or expectation is a lie, and a goal that we can’t and even shouldn’t reach towards.
But at the same time, there has to be some agency in the decisions we’re making. The famous French Philosopher Jean Paul Sarte once said, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” In other words, we may not have much control over the hand that we’re dealt with, but what really matters is how we use and understand them.
Our journey begins with understanding that YOU are writing the story of your own life. And while there’s no way to control everything that goes on, you can try to understand how everything fits into your overall story. This attempt to ‘storify’ our lives helps us make sense of the worst, downright traumatic parts that we can’t or won’t accept. Think of these parts as puzzle pieces, and the job before each of us is to create a cohesive puzzle with the pieces we’ve got. And just like building a puzzle, the first thing we have to do is figure out what we’re building, the picture we have to go off of that will make fitting the pieces together worthwhile.
“Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories” said the author David Brooks in his book How to Know a Person. I think it’s fair to say that for many of us, the picture we have of how our lives will turn out has been a little off. At least for me, I grew up with this beautiful dream of marrying a pretty girl, starting a wonderful family, raising them the way I was raised. And now, looking back at those ideas, I can’t help but laugh a little. Many of those dreams were ones that were given to me, or actually expected of me. And now I’m having to really reexamine all aspects of my life in order to make sure that the picture I’m creating is something I’ll be proud of when I’m finished.
“Queer people don’t grow up as themselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimize humiliation and prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we’ve created to protect us.”
So now I ask you my friend. “Who is writing the story of your life?” If you believe your life story is solely in the hands of you and you alone, then I am happy for you. Truly! But if, like me, the experience of the closet has wounded your ability even figure out what your story even looks like. Well, you’re in the right place. And we can figure it out together.