I love stories. I love to sit and listen to people talk about their lives, share funny family pranks, tell me about their children, their happiness, their struggles. I love the laughter, connectedness and empathy that comes from opening up to one another.

There is power in storytelling. Humans have been using storytelling for thousands of years to pass on belief systems, survival strategies, rituals and traditions as well as doubts and concerns about who we are as a people and a family.

I have been passing on my family stories and my beliefs and rituals to my daughters. I know that it is powerful stuff for when I talked to the girls about something a little different for Thanksgiving, they were adamantly opposed. “That’s not our tradition!”

We hang on to stories as truth. As the actual way that things are. Period. And, yet we know that stories come from people who hear the story through their lens and pass it along to us. Stories shift and change with each passing and at the same time they become part of our belief system, part of our truth

We also tell ourselves stories. And, we believe our self-told stories. They might come from snippets of our childhood, a misunderstanding, hurtful words flung at us from a lover-no matter where-we collect this information and make it our own and tell the story.

I have a story about myself. I play it over and over again. It isn’t kind. It’s an amped up version of several micro-hurts. This story only recently came to my awareness as a story-different from truth. Now that I am aware of this, now that I can look at the story differently-I want to put it to rest. Let that story be done. Write a new story. I want to use the power of story to support my dreams. Write a dream into being. I want to write the stories I tell myself.