Your Story Shapes You
Your Story Shapes You
How we see the world is an expression: It’s art.
There are many perspectives within our perspective, and things that influence how we see things.
An artist sets up an easel with basic colors and mixes them to create new ones. A sculptor works with clay, stone or any other material and shapes it into a new form.
Our perspectives can shape who we are at this moment.
Our power is in accepting who we are as our future self. Everything is a story and an expression based on a perspective, but there are still facts that cannot be wished away: The location where we were born, the people we grew up with, the foods we ate, and the culture we were raised in; are some examples.
But a moment we experience today is a work of art that has not solidified like a statue at St. Peter’s in Rome. It is pliable and can be reshaped.
We express ourselves in a way we hope others understand. It’s how we communicate. And how we communicate helps us connect to each other. Humans have a natural desire to fit in, to find common ground, and to feel accepted. If your community is a small group or if it’s an entire nation does not matter.
Some of us prefer to fit in with a giant community. But some of us rebel against the direction of the grain. We find value in self expression, as opposed to collective expression. We see being different as a virtue, not a curse. Some of the most famous inventors did not share the collective perspective and that had a direct correlation to what they invented, or created. Some even changed the world.
It’s okay to go through life waking up each morning and go about the day in the same way you always do, almost as a ritual. Filling your day with a scheduled task and moving to the next one without any deep awareness of who you are in between.
You feel that you have scheduled a weekend to break the tension from the week. But you’ve scheduled your weekend as well.
There is something to be said for finding space to schedule nothing during your weekdays and on the weekends. That’s because doing what you feel like doing at a moment’s notice can free your mind to your subconscious perspective.
It’s the one you don’t think about but it is always thinking about you.
Finding yourself in the myriad of things to do each day is not easy. It’s not a matter of being conscious about it. You are who you are based on your own perspective. But you’re also, in part, the perspective of the people you care about most. Your interactions with them will be depend on who they see you as.
We express ourselves everyday as we experience our day without thinking about it.
Realizing your consciousness.
Last night I was trying to go to sleep and realized something that did not sit well with me. A commentary I made to a stranger made me sound rude. It alarmed me because I am pretty conscious about my interactions with people, usually. So I felt pretty bad about it. I began to think about why I was not myself in that moment and realized that I am personally dealing with a stressful situation that is outside of the norm for me.
While it’s not an excuse, I felt like I needed to figure out how I became that rude person so I could avoid being that way again. I had awakened very early and had spent many hours awake working. My mind was in a different space late last night, around 2:45am, when I realized my rude commentary.
Even though I woke up very early yesterday, I was feeling creative. Feeling expressive. But I could not “create” in the way I wanted to because I had many obligations. I’ve spent a couple weeks preoccupied and not able to be creative. Just could not go there, as much as I yearned for it.
If you’re a creative person, write, produce content, create art…these are things you are passionate about and they are necessary for your mental well being.
Creative people gotta create!
It’s like a doctor’s prescription that you find a way to release your creativity.
Expression, as an act, is important for us to continue our lives without over expressing our emotions. The reason that’s important is because in society we must be capable of coexisting, or we fail each other as a whole. Society itself breaks and falls apart. A lot of things in our civilization, society—our communities, were built around us coexisting.
Being creative, art, is a form of expression. Everyone has a bit of an artist inside. Some more than others.
Going about the day with a scheduled mandate is extremely difficult for a lot of artists. Art is spontaneous, unscheduled. It’s a bit of insanity releasing from us much like a pressure cooker. It keeps us from exploding internally—and externally.
While expression is not the same as communication, they are a couple. They are married and have a relationship inside our humanity.
Stories are a way to release our expression through communication. Whether you tell a story through writing, drawing, painting, photography, sculpting, music, performing like dance, or through filmmaking, you are expressing your perspective. And your perspective has shaped you into who you are by your experiences in the past.
Today is your day.
If you are able to un-schedule your plans, you can plan your future self. It begins at this moment with how the story of you, and who you are, is perceived by your inner self and those around you.
It’s never too late to start the story of your future self.
My podcast is one way I express myself. Listen to the SBP Podcast and be inspired.