Tell Me Lies...The Stories We Tell Ourselves

You told yourself a story this morning:

You woke up, you stretched a little. Is that a pain in my back? Does it hurt, or is it just mildly uncomfortable? What did I do yesterday, did I tweak it? Maybe I’m just getting older. Does everybody have aches when they get older?

You got up and moved around a bit, the pain went away.

You glance at your clock. “I better get moving.”

I have that project due today. Sarah is going to be pissed if it’s late. She is such a b**** sometimes. I wish somebody would knock her down a peg or two. I wonder if she ever sat in my shoes. And don’t get me started with Chad. I don’t want to hear another story about his weekend conquests. I wish that guy would catch something and miss about two months of work. I know the office would be quieter.

In the car, driving through traffic, singing Vanessa Carlton…Makin’ my way downtown, Walkin’ fast, faces pass… “Jesus, am I going to hit EVERY red light today?”

That guy just cut me off. What an asshat! Does he think he’s more important than me? Doesn’t anyone have common courtesy anymore? “F you buddy!” Did he see me flip him off? Is he looking at me? Okay, good, he didn’t see me…”Assh***!”

We are all storytellers.

My wife and I went to purchase a car when my daughter was around 20 months old, not quite 2 years anyway. My wife is signing her part of the paperwork, I am sitting in the waiting area with my daughter, Sammi.

Sammi decided she wanted to drink my Diet Pepsi and I told her “No, drink your juice.” She waited until my head was turned, ninja grabbed the Pepsi can, and started running away. I caught her in two steps and took the can away. She started bawling immediately and yep, that’s the same time the wife showed up.

“What the hell just happened?”

My daughter, before I could respond, told my wife that I slapped her face and bit her ear! Demonstrating my cowardice by slapping her own face.

My jaw hit the floor like I’d just watched Frank the talking dog from Men in Black, and my wife choked on her laughter.

We sort of expect kids to tell stories. Not that we encourage outright lying, but we understand their perception of reality is not quite ours. They have make-believe friends, grand adventures, and vivid imaginations. I DID NOT bite her ear!

But you tell stories too, all day long.

Every interaction, every conversation, every stimulus you encounter, you tell yourself a story about it. 

How it made you feel. What the person “really” meant. Why do they act this way? Why do they treat you that way or the other? What do they think about you?

Every thought you have…you interpret and paint a picture, in your head. You make up a story. 

When you watch someone else act…you interpret and tell yourself a story about what they are thinking.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s how we’re wired. 

We take in an event, a feeling, an emotion, or a comment, and our brain processes it, telling us how to react to the event. Pretty simple, right?

That’s not the problem.

This is…

Problem #1 - Somewhere between the age of two, like Sammi, and whatever age you are now, you lose your imagination. 

Not only do you have no imagination, you don’t even report the event accurately!

You report it according to your biases, your past experiences, and your opinion of it all.

It’s like you’re watching a news report of the events instead of experiencing them, and then taking whatever the commentator tells you as the 100% facts of what just occurred.

Problem #2 - YOUR brain is the news anchor and he is a lying little SH**! The very epitome of “Fake News”.

It’s not that he’s trying to lie to you. It’s just that he can only tell you what is TRUE to HIM.

And THAT is the biggest problem of all.

Because he doesn’t know everything that can be known about everything. He only knows what HE has experienced.

There are worlds of information you have never been exposed to, very likely what you are reading right now falls into that category…and you have no other way to interpret that information than to compare it to something you have experienced before.

It Tastes Like Chicken

Did you ever notice that everything tastes like chicken?

I was asking a friend about eating fried alligator tail.

“It tastes like if a chicken lived in the water. You know there’s something fishy, but not “really” fishy, like fish.”, he said.

“So like a not-fishy fish?”

“No, it’s milder, like if a chicken met a fish one time and hung out for a while.”

I tried it, he was right.

And I had the exact same conversation about fried frog legs. Listen, don’t judge me. I have relatives from Louisiana and I LOVED both the alligator and the frog legs. You can play the banjo music now…

I went to a fancy restaurant that served pheasant one time. So I asked what it tasted like…

I was at a festival celebrating “Rocky Mountain Oysters” which are actually bull testicles…

Both times I was told they tasted like some form of chicken. 

I DID NOT eat a Rocky Mountain Oyster, I’ll just take their word for it! The pheasant was great though.

So what’s the point?

Your brain can ONLY report to you what it has a reference for. It can only categorize and store something that is related to something else.

If I say, “The stove burner is red.”, your brain thinks what?

If I say, “The big vehicle was yellow.”, what do you see in your head?

This is one of the most incredible tools that the brain has for organizing, categorizing, and processing information efficiently.

But, it is absolute CRAP at processing “new” information even when the new info is backed up by facts.

This is a real P.I.A. when it comes to personal development, self-improvement, self-help, whatever you want to call all of this when someone is trying to improve their lives.

For one simple reason.

We’re creating a better version of ourselves, YOU 2.0, but the ONLY reference you have for you is your PAST.

So, when you think about YOU, your brain is referencing something that already happened!

You tell yourself stories, about YOU, all day long referencing your past experiences, and most of those weren’t great.

It takes a virtual act of Congress to change what we think about ourselves.

My wife, or Dr. Phil as we’ve started calling her, is one of the most compassionate, intelligent, considerate people on the planet. I have met almost no one who doesn’t like her once they spend time with her.

And, true to her feminine nature, she is riddled with self-doubt, insecurity, and negative self-talk. 

I know you’ve never met another female who battles this so I’ll explain. She is ridiculously hard and critical about herself. Despite all the evidence stacked in front of her on numerous occasions. I feel bad sometimes.

I have to drag her to events with new people, who end up loving her after it’s over. Then we go home and discuss if she said or did anything inappropriate.

She’s a storyteller too. She constantly tells herself stories about her, and her newswoman is brutal, playing the Beck song Loser on a loop. 

The reason this entire process is so difficult is because we, meaning me too, don’t accept the fact that of all the creatures on earth, we are the only ones who can consciously decide to change.

Yeah, I know, don’t get all biological on me. I know other animals adopt change, evolve, and all that other stuff…that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m telling you that we, as a species, can CHOOSE to change, not have it driven on us by our environments.

If I want to eat healthier, I can choose what foods to buy.

If I want to gain a new skill, I can choose what I read and study.

If I want to pursue a mate, I can choose to alter my appearance, my actions, my smell…pretty much everything about me except my dancing skills, that is a lost cause. Picture Elaine on that episode of Seinfeld. But, in reality, even that. I could take dance lessons and get better. I choose NOT to. I told my wife that Lee Brice wrote the song I Don’t Dance about me.

Finding Your Imagination

 We can CHOOSE to tell different stories about ourselves, it just takes some practice. So I’m gonna help you.

I’m going to revive that imagination you lost somewhere between crayons and paying taxes for the first time.

See, kids don’t know any better. They have no history to distort their perceptions. You do. You have nothing but history.

Kids stop believing in Santa Claus somewhere around age eight. You probably stopped believing in yourself around the same age.

That’s when we start noticing what other kids wear, or how they treat us. We start hearing them talk about us, and wonder if it’s true. Maybe you had a teacher who called you “stupid” or a bully that made you feel inferior. Maybe you failed at a sport or sucked at band camp. And you absorbed it, packed it away in a box, only to pull it out and tell yourself a story about you when you feel “less than”.

The worst ones are those put on us by people we think love us or are supposed to love us. Pain, regret, rejection… these are brutal histories to overcome. But it’s been done.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a crap-ton of examples of people who overcame hardship and struggle to build a new life, that’s been done before.

I’m going to tell you about me. I wrote about it in my book Dear Sam. The chapter is titled “Making Friends with a Fat Kid.” I know, get over it.

I was a fat kid, I can use the word. I was almost as wide as I was tall. I have a picture of me standing in a baseball uniform with my belly stretched over the belt buckle.

When I closed my eyes, or looked in the mirror, no matter what I had accomplished in my life, no matter that my wife is smokin’ hot, that’s the picture I saw. 

Whenever I looked at myself, I didn’t see a smart, funny, better-than-average guy. I saw a short, fat 12-year-old in a Cubs uniform.

And that’s the story I told myself about ME almost every day.

Until one day I didn’t.

I won’t go into great details here, you can read the book if you want.

I met a guy named Mike, who taught me to accept that the kid in that picture is a “part” of me, but not the whole of me. He taught me how to make friends with that kid and tell him “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you anymore.”

He also taught me how to start telling a better story. He wrote about it in his book Unreasonable Possibilities, click this link. (here)

Mike got me to believe that I am not just living my story. I get to write it every day. I am the author, the director, and the producer, so I get to pick the plot lines and develop the characters.

Right now, your story is a product of your history. Your good times and your bad times. All of your past experiences. 

I’m telling you today, that if you only ever believe this story, you will never know what it’s like to unleash the best version of what you have in store.

You have the ability, the choice to begin a new story and write a different ending for yourself.

C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe said, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

I’m telling you the same thing!

Here’s where the imagination comes in.

1. Close your eyes and see that picture in your head that looks like me in the baseball uniform. I don’t know what your picture is but I guarantee you do.

2. Write out the story about that picture. What’s going on? What are you wearing or doing? What happened to you that this is the picture you see?

3. Now here’s the part Mike taught me: Walk up to that kid and hug him. Tell him you love him and you’re not mad at him anymore.

4. Accept once and for all that “This is a piece of me, but NOT all of me.”

5. Close your eyes again and picture the life you WANT. The person you want to be, literally whatever you can imagine. You are writing this script.

   1. Be real with yourself. I’m not saying tone it down, I’m saying be honest. If you’re 45 years old and never held an office, don’t make plans to be the President!

6. Dream!!! Create a picture that will inspire and push you to work toward it.

   1. Start small, this is a work in progress and a tool you can use for the rest of your life. You don’t have to have the complete picture today.

   2. When I started, I knew I needed more info. So I decided I would start reading and studying material to make me better. I planned to read one book per month. Mine said, “I am a reader. I read one book a month and practice those things every day.” (I read 23 books last year!)

   3. Then build off of your new picture. Look at it often. Tweak it as needed. But this is key:

      1. Don’t STOP. Don’t let life and struggle keep you down. If one day sucks, start over tomorrow, that’s okay…just don’t quit.

      2. I saw a TikTok the other day that’s a little risqué but appropriate: “Life can be like a penis. Sometimes it gets hard for no reason, but it won’t stay hard forever!” 

7. Start telling yourself NEW stories about yourself and your life. Stop living in the past and beating yourself up about it. If you don’t like the current story, write a new one.

8. And the next time your internal Ron Burgandy anchorman starts telling you his opinion, just remember that he’s full of sh**!

   

“Your HISTORY is not your DESTINY!” 

We’ll see Y'all next time,

Dewey