We are made of stories.

I love stories.

“Once upon a time…” are magic words to me - I find myself leaning in, eyes wide, ready to suspend my disbelief and enter a place where the normal rules don’t apply.

In stories, there’s so much possibility. Anything might happen at any moment. Talking rabbits. Magic carpets. Star crossed lovers finding and losing and finding each other again. Ordinary people overcoming extraordinary odds and discovering they’re not so ordinary after all.

Stories make us feel things, stories teach us things, stories show us what else might be possible for us, they take us to all kinds of places that we otherwise wouldn’t get to go.

As humans, we’re also made of stories.

Stories of who we are, what we’ve done, how we see the world.

Some of the stories of who we are are dictated by our past - by the ways we’ve adapted to cope with the circumstances of our lives. Some of our stories we learned from other people, from our families and the society and culture we live in.

Some of our stories we share out loud, and some of them we hide away and feel shame for. Some of them are hidden stories that we don’t know we’re telling.

I’m good at art. I’m not creative. I’m a shy person. I’m high maintenance. I’m not enough. I’m practical and reliable. I’m adventurous and outgoing. I’m a cat person, a dog person, a bird person, an octopus person. I believe in love at first sight, I believe in miracles, I believe in life after death, I believe everyone I know is wrong.

Our identities are a collection of the stories we’ve been told and stories we’ve collected about ourselves and the world over the course of our lives.

And sometimes we forget, or maybe we never learned, that we are the storyteller.

And if we’re telling the story, we get to say how it goes.

We can write new stories for ourselves on purpose.

Who do we want to be? What do we want to experience? How do we want our world to feel? What stories are we ready to stop telling? What new chapter are we ready to begin?

Maybe it all starts with those magic words.

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time you clicked a button, and the rest, as they say, was history…