What if I told a new narrative for my life?
Last year in one of my graduate seminars, we read a book by Geraldine Pratt in which she discusses transit lane versus trapped narratives. Transit lane narratives are the dominant discourses of the most visible populations. The ones told and retold by the media, in our schools, by way of a constructed cultural consciousness. The trapped narratives are those of oppressed peoples, that get bypassed for the more "important" narratives--that stay hidden away because they contest our neatly-constructed cultural consciousness. They would upset the status quo.
And, when I shift the concept of these narratives from macro to micro, I realize that I have designed the same system in my own life--for my personal narrative. I have an idea of who I am or who I should be, informed by choices I've made over the years, words that people have spoken to me, beliefs I have been trained to believe about myself or have wrongly assumed about myself. I have been fixated on one narrative that is defined by the woulds and shoulds and supposed tos. A narrative that is neatly-constructed and deeply embedded in my self-consciousness.
Perhaps the real narrative for my life is trapped. Or, a narrative for what my like could be is trapped. All those beliefs I have believed and tales I have been told and assumptions I have assumed--but how many of them are part of His narrative, the meta narrative, and how many of them have become the story of my life simply because it is the same narrative repeated over and over...?
Can I frame a new narrative for myself?
Is there another narrative He wants me to tell?
My narrative for the past five years has been about disease and exhaustion and doctors' visits and medical bills. It has been isolation and rumination and depression. It has been giving up on a lot of maybes and possibilities. The admitting that compromise and sacrifice are necessary evils of living with chronic illnesses.
I cannot rewrite my story. I am who I am who I am. I will always have my past experiences and my chronic illnesses and my passions and likes. But my narrative doesn't need to be dictated by sickness or past experiences. Illness is my transit lane narrative, but that doesn't have to be my narrative at all.
I don't know how to ride the line between living with a chronic illness and not letting it control me. It affects a huge part of how I live my life. But I think that I've for so long wallowed (I'm not sure that's the appropriate word) in the knowledge of my diseases that my every experience and very reality has been shaped by that wallowing. I don't want to live life that way.
Additionally, before illness more or less came to control my life, I had certain ideas and ideals about what I wanted to do with myself--what I wanted to devote my time and talents to. Sometimes I wonder if being diagnosed with chronic illnesses wasn't a sort of get out of jail free card--an opportunity to start out on a pathway I had never given myself the room to consider, at least not since childhood.
I'm still figuring out who I am. What I like and what I'm good at and where my talents and passions will collide. I'm still learning what it means to be an introvert (more specifically, an INFJ) and a Highly Sensitive Person. What it means to be a cancer survivor and live each day battling autoimmune disease. How I can live a healthy and happy life, finding balance between recognizing my limitations and not giving up on dreams.
I want to make a difference in the world, but that dream seems like such an amorphous and ambiguous thing. I know I want to create, and organize, and contemplate, and help, and connect, and be independent, and embrace my values. I don't want my work to just be work. I want it to be my mission. But I also want to take care of myself while on that mission. No more grandiose dreams of high-stress overseas work with people. I just want peace, and beauty, and authenticity.
I don't want to feel constrained by my past experiences or limited by my degrees or jobs or what people have told me about myself or even what I have wrongly or rightly believed about myself. Can't there be a new narrative? An emerging trapped narrative? One that is true and good, but simply buried by more visible story lines? Or, by ones that are easier to believe or that fit together more neatly as an unfolding narrative "should"?
What if I was brave enough to tell a new story? To unearth a trapped narrative? What if my life became something that no one, not even I, ever predicted or envisioned for myself?
I don't know what it would mean to live a trapped rather than a transit lane narrative. Somehow it seems harder, scarier. But also richer. Better. More beautiful.
And that is what I want. Richer, better, more beautiful.
God, help me tell my story.
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