STP 128 | Rewriting Your Story, Using Loss as a Place to Start Over
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James Marland: [00:00:00] I was taking a walk yesterday and I was feeling really good because on this walk I was going to think about my goals and I was going to do my, my Daily Journal. I do a daily, I do a daily journal from Hero on a Mission Mission, and in this journal I read my eulogy and I look at my 10 year goals and my five year goals and my one year goals.
And then I talk about, I do, I do a daily journal, like what is the top three goals that I need to work on for the day? And so I was really excited to be taking a walk and doing my DA Daily Journal activities. Uh, I brought, and, um, I brought the paper version with me because I, I hadn't memorized it yet. Uh, my eulogy and my goals, and so I was like walking and [00:01:00] doing some brainstorming and, uh, recording things on my phone and I'm just really excited because when I do these daily journal activities, I feel grounded.
I feel. Like, my day is gonna be worthwhile. Instead of just working on stuff and things, I get to work on things that are really important to me. And I, it's an anchor, it's a foundation for my day. So as I was walking and, uh, preparing for this, I had a water bottle and at one point I put my paper eulogy and my water bottle in my sa in the same hand, and that's all it took.
The water transferred to the paper, my eulogy, and when I, when I turned it over to Reed, about two minutes later, half the eulogy, half, half the, the important statement of my life was gone. It was just disintegrated by the [00:02:00] water. And the other bad part about it is I wrote this in not ballpoint ink, but like that gel ink that sort of.
Uh, fades and, um, distorts when water touches it. So, so I had, uh, essentially destroyed my eulogy and I looked at it and the, the top half of the eulogy was gone, and the bottom half was relatively untouched. And at that moment my heart sank. Uh, my heart sank because I had worked a long time on that and I was like, how am I ever gonna recover these vital words for my life?
How am I ever going to get back what I had lost? And it was a real moment of loss for me that the story I wanted to write for my life, the story I'd worked so hard on. [00:03:00] It was gone and I didn't think I had a, a backup copy for it.
And when, when you think about the story of your life, sometimes you want the bad stuff to be gone. Sometimes you want the, uh, the, the, the, the negative stories that you tell yourself you want the, the. The limiting belief stories to be erased. I've talked about this before. One of my limiting belief stories was getting out on stage and putting yourself out there is risky, scary, dangerous.
Don't do it because you'll be called on, picked on, you'll be graded and you're gonna come up lacking. And so being an entrepreneur, that's a very difficult story to have in your life. And I'm, I'm working on rewriting it. But I'm not talking [00:04:00] about that. Like I'm talking about my future goals that I really wanted to accomplish.
And now they were, they're, they were erased, they were gone. And it was the part about my family and my son and my extended family, my mom and dad, and my brothers, and like how I wanted to interact with them. And that story was erased. So when I got back to the home, I, I laid out the pieces of paper. And looked at, looked at it and tried to start recreating what I had put down there.
And I got to thinking
sometimes recreation is not bad. Sometimes choosing a new path for your life, a new story, rewriting some of that is not a bad thing. In the case of me and my, my hangup over. Putting myself out there and being seen [00:05:00] and the fear of being judged. That story needed to be rewritten. It served a purpose for a time.
It protected me when I moved to nine different schools before, before ninth grade, that, that, that, uh, that story protected me from some ridicule. But it didn't, it didn't help me later. So I get to rewrite that. And with my, with my goals, I found for my family, you know, they were already in my heart. They were already there, and when it came time for me to rerecord or rewrite them down, they were, they were mostly there in my heart.
And I could just say them. Same meaning different words. So maybe you're in a, in a moment of your life where some things are going wrong and some of your goals have been [00:06:00] destroyed and you're not sure how, if you can ever recover them,
just know you can rewrite your story. You can start over with new goals. You can start over with a new ending and you can write the story that you really want to have for your life. That was my moment of meaning for this week. I hope that, uh, that you take comfort in the fact that your life and your story can be written and rewritten and falling down.
Doesn't mean your story's over. It just means you get to rewrite a new chapter. This is James Marland. I'll see you next time.
