Day 53: This Story Is Yours

How often have you sought after closure in some area of your life? We have all been through situations that have ended either poorly or in a way that was not expected. Life is full of events that contradict our desires and plans. When things do not go our way we can be left searching for some sort of closure.

Life is a beautiful mess of incomplete stories. We have always been told that our life is a story and of course that is true. However, nothing is ever as simple and easy as that.

When told our life is a story, we often picture the kinds of stories we find in a library or book store. Beautifully bound books with detailed chapters inside. Everything has a neatly arranged storyline, there are hardly ever any plot holes, and the ending wraps up in a nice little bow. These are the kind of stories we picture when we think about how we are living our own story.

Yet this is not quite true.

The neatly put together story we see on a book shelf is often what we present to the world. We edit out what we don't want to show, we polish the edges, and we show the world the best seller of our life. However, so much more happens behind the scenes.

Have you ever seen the workspace, computer, or mind of an author? Nothing says unfinished and messy like an author. There are stories everywhere. Unfinished books lay around like dust bunnies and random characters exist on sticky notes. Nothing seems to connect and you can having the ending next to the beginning and plot holes a mile wide.

Life is more like the mind of the author than the finished novel. We see everything unedited. The raw version of life is happening all around us and it is the farthest thing from perfect. Our story has so many unfinished books, characters disappear mid sentence, and there's that one reoccurring theme that you just cannot get rid of. That is the beauty of life.

This can also be where we find our frustration over the fact that we do not have closure. We look at others around us and we see these beautiful stories that are well rounded and polished and we wonder why we're missing out on such a thing. When we look to the world, we see the bookcases of beautiful books with complete chapters. Looking then to our own messy storyline can feel disheartening. Why are we such a mess when they are not?

Let me be the first to tell you, no one has it together. Behind every beautifully written volume is a hundred different things we cannot see. Chapters left out, characters glazed over, plot twists that were simply too painful to include and all the bunny trails . . . that is what we miss when we look to someone else's life. We can clearly see the mess in ours and we wonder why we cannot find the closure.

There is no such thing as a perfect story in life. We hide complete books of our stories and decide to leave out characters. Some chapters will never be finished and that one sentence you keep going back to will never be completed. That's okay. Life does not need closure in order to be perfect. We can continue on with our lives without having finished, beautifully edited books.

Our story can be messy and it will be. The important part is knowing that it is all part of the process. You cannot rush the art of writing a story and the good thing is that you don't have to. You have your entire life ahead of you to work on new chapters, introduce new characters, and throw in a couple of plot twists. This story is yours, go write it.

Until Next Time,
Lillian Merritt