Each of us is like no other.....

My  Personal Life Story

We all have a life story. My life story is my personal account of all the important events and experiences that have contributed to my becoming who I am today. Because my life story explains how I became who I am it plays a significant role in shaping the way I define and perceive myself.

Throughout my life journey, I have accumulated an endless number of experiences, positive and negative, the majority of which I will later have no memory or recollection. My brain cannot possibly store a detailed account of every waking minute of every day that I am alive - it must filter and prioritize in order to decide which experiences to preserve and which to discard. For this reason, my personal life story - my self narrative - consists of events that I deem important and to which I ascribe a particular meaning and that meaning is therefore highly subjective - if someone else was asked to select the most significant events from my life, they would possibly create a narrative that differs significantly from the ones I have written about.

When I compose my personal narratives (be they fiction or fact) I get to decide which events are important enough to write about. There are many ways to tell a story - even the same story. I can add anecdotes that reveal strength, I can highlight my successes and accomplishments and/or I can convey my setbacks in terms of what I learned from them.  I get to connect the dots and draw my own conclusions and, in this way, I am empowered to determine how I want to define myself, which in turn shapes my hopes and expectations for my future. 

But it is not just all about me. My hope is that each reader of my personal story (stories) - which is always a work in progress - will find a little of themselves in my words, and that in seeking to better understand myself through relating my journey, I will have given others the opportunity to better understand themselves as well.