You Are the Narrator of Your Life

You get to choose how to tell your story

I’m sharing a bit more personally in this essay, so I’ve limited it to paid subscribers. It’s a small but very friendly group, if you’d like to join - right now only £5/ month. Upcoming topics include: shifting how we think about vocation; responding to a reader’s question about taking advice; and what “making a good decision” actually means (it’s not what you think). If you’d like to read more, I’d love for you to upgrade your subscription.

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Overcoming Bad Advice

When I was younger, I got a lot of bad advice.

People assured me that high school offered “the best years of your life!” I was told to “sleep when you’re dead!” on my semester abroad, because I would never have a chance to visit Europe again. And they insisted that I would never, ever have as much free time as I did during university.

They were wrong. Thank God, they were so very wrong. I’ve had many wonderful years since high school; I’ve lived in Europe for a decade; and I’ve had seasons of so much free time that I actually wished for less of it.

Another popular piece of advice that I still see being circulated amongst the young is, “you are the author of your life!” It’s meant to encourage someone to take responsibility, have an adventure, do something meaningful – all well and fine, but hardly realistic.

Because if I’m the author of my life, what do I do with all those plot points I didn’t choose? The circumstances of childhood, the illnesses, the loss – I didn’t author any of them and if I was writing my own story, I wouldn’t choose to include them.

And let’s be honest: I didn’t author my own successes, either. People everywhere have helped me to get where I am today: professionally, financially, even in relationships – I’m not (thank God) my only friend.

“You are the author of your life!” fails to account for things beyond our control.

But there’s a saying that I’ve now adopted that brings me a lot of hope: we are not the authors of our lives. We are the narrators.

Being the narrator means that you may not control all the plot points – the things that happen – but you do get to decide how to tell the story of your life: what to emphasize, what to minimize, what to expound on and what to let pass by.

I know that, especially if you aren’t a regular writer, the idea of being the narrator can sound a bit vague.

So, I want to share an example of what that looks like for me, personally. My life may look nothing like yours, but I hope by pulling back the curtain a little you might get a glimpse of how the general principle of “being the narrator” applies in practice.

Being the Narrator

Today as I walked around a beautiful little costal town, I thought about how I might write about my own summer so far – or rather, this one little portion of it. I thought about how “instagrammable” my scenery was, but how sharing one snapshot would be limiting. I thought about how I struggle to both delight in beauty that others have and not jealously want it for myself. I thought about how if I did share a snapshot, some stranger on the internet would be sure to be jealous – and this made me both more grateful for experiencing something so nice, and more frustrated that snapshots can never capture the complexity of life.

Because life is complex: the fog brings welcomed cooler temperatures but simultaneously excludes the summer sunshine; the beautiful, safe, homes sit just down the road from poverty and violence; being with people in one country means that I can’t be with people in another. It’s just not simple.

Last week we played “high / low” at the dinner table with friends, each person sharing the best and worst parts of their day. When I said that my low was being faced with the inevitable existential limitations of time and space, the empathetic 7-year old asked with wide, teary eyes, “are you going to cry?”

I’m naturally prone to philosophical angst, which means that I sometimes have to work harder than others to keep my narrative from veering into Kafka-eqsue what-are-we-even-doing-on-this-planet-is-it-all-absurd territory. You’ll have your own natural inclinations to overcome as you narrate your life.

My Narration

Here’s my narration of the last few weeks: