Desired narratives - What is the story that you want to tell?

Once upon of time...

I'm going to take a break from my stories and reflect on the narrative behind the stories. I normally use this blog to tell my tales retrospectively. This exercise of finding a narrative on our past seems to be something that we all do to evaluate our lives and to find meaning in the randomness and chaos of waking life.

As Steve Jobs once said:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

This 'approach' of connecting the dots, as Steve Jobs described, is what brings meaning into our lives. We need to firmly believe that 'the dots' will connect because we need to find some meaning to alleviate the stress that the thought of randomness of events brings us. This desire of fitting our past events into a structured set of memories that narrate a story has been researched in social psychology. According to this research, we tend to fit a narrative that defines our identity and creates a sense of self and brings meaning into our life (McAdams, 2011).


And this is basically what I've been doing in this blog, fitting a narrative into my past 'failed attempts' to find love...

Moreover, we are not just driven to find a narrative into our past, but we also fit our future desires into a structured story. As a result, we unconsciously project into the future our inner and deeply embedded narratives and this shape the decisions that we make in the present. I'll give you an example...

A close friend of mine had a crush on a colleague at work and, despite the fact that it seemed to be a reciprocated feeling, she was convinced almost from the beginning that it would not work. This projected fear and visualization of possible pessimistic futures is what, in a way, might have precipitated the end of her story.

Just to clarify, the person from the example is not me, but her story has helped me to self-reflect on my own present and, as a result, I'm trying to identify my own inner desired narrative. What is the story that I want to create?

Our desires narratives are constructed out of our life expectations, desires and fears and they are often part of our own daydreams and thoughts... So, if these desires narratives drive our present decision-making... Can we identify them? Can we shape our desired narratives to our advantage?

Picture taken on the streets of Los Angeles (2014)

As this street billboard suggests, we should decide what story we want to create and go out and live it...