What if . . .

We switched out our narrator?

Don’t confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.                                   Jackson Browne, “These Days”

When I am entering the cellar of my past, the oddest thing happens. Bad stuff, failures, mistakes, all the dark cobwebs seem to hold my attention. I’m not at the level of PTSD or intense trauma here. Simply the vanished relationships, bad decisions, low test scores, not-living-up-to-expectations, and the list goes on.

There are explanations from research, like positive/negative asymmetry and survival value of negative memories. Yet I am not much interested in explanations or data. How about an antidote?

I was reading my good friend Roger Martin’s Substack post, https://hqcl.substack.com/p/14-can-you-make-christmas-happier?utm_campaign=reaction&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=post, and I came up hard against . . .

Why do I do this to myself (and it seems we all have the habit)?

Does it make me happy?

Better?

More compassionate?

Does this fix anything?

I felt a gentle No to all these and realized the problem was not the story but the narrator, the point of view—my self is too close to my dark judgmental memory twin, voices of crappy programming stacked up on each other.

Instead, I imagined the narrator to be a compassionate, happy third party, looking at my story as the story of someone else. Suddenly, that person was just another stranger on the bus trying to find his way home. No more flawed, no less wonderful than anyone, from this new outside perspective someone worthy of understanding, acceptance, and compassion. No serial killer, no saint, just the steps and missteps of a ME I had never seen without the blinders of faults and flaws.

It seems to be working. Try it. Practice seeing your story from outside, from the point of view of an understanding narrator of acceptance.