There are so many facets to each of us – so many life events that inform and influence who we are. Over the years we each develop “our story” – the version of our many facets and experiences we decide are our truth – the bits we tell to others as we reveal who we are.

I didn’t realize how much our choices go into the stories we tell – the “truth” we live – until I took a class called Spiritual Autobiographies at Antioch University. Our job was to write our own spiritual biography – to tell the story of how our spirituality came to be.

I was amazed at how different my spiritual story/development was from my life story. The parts of my life that so profoundly influenced my spiritual development were profoundly absent from the parts I shared about my upbringing.

My spiritual development was full of stories of transcendence and magic and nature. My childhood, on the other hand, was full of stories of hardship and conflict. But both happened at the same time! Then it hit me:

What story did I want to tell? What truth was I going to live from?

In that moment I decided to try on the truth “I had a great childhood”. I had NEVER said this before. But it felt right and real because I could see that some parts of it were great. And those parts saved me from being swallowed by the darker parts.

When we don’t realize we have a choice about what our story means and what our story is, we often wind-up telling stories that drain us and make us small.

As I look back on life experiences I see the various truths I could tell about these experiences laid out in front of me like many paths to choose from.

The recent break-up I went through could be told as an experience of betrayal or liberation. The birth and adoption of my daughter could be told as a story of loss or of divine intervention and love.

There are many gifts in our life experiences. So many that even the hardest of times bring something beautiful to us, even if it’s just that these things increase our humanity and empathy.

Until we see that we make choices about what is true and what things mean to us, we will be victims of life happening.

But when we decide what something means and what aspect of it we will share we are truly free to create the life we want and to become the person we want to be.

What beauty has come from your life trials? What would happen if you shared this beauty instead of the hardship? They are both true. So which brings you the most energy and the most freedom? What if, for 1 week, you told the beautiful side of the story – how much stronger you are or how supportive your community is or how much wisdom you had that you never realized until X event gave you the chance to discover it and how blessed you are that X happened?

We can spread beauty by owning the beauty in our own stories. We can spread love by finding the love in our own stories. We can bring light to places that sometimes feel dark and in this way become the powerful and beautiful human beings we truly are.

The fact is that life happens. And things are multi-faceted with many truths. And we do emphasize some more than others. We do make some things big and some things small. There are things that do really hurt and that are really bad. But there is so much beauty and love and, yes, magic. It seems to me that most of us walk around in a disproportionate story of hardship and we forget to tell the story of life’s beauty or the stories of our strength or the stories of how loved we are.

The stories we tell have such a profound influence on ourselves and those around us and, yes, ripple out into the world and affect everything. So how can we be bigger and tell better stories and emphasize the facets of our lives that do not deny the trials and tribulations but choose the blessings and beauty? The choice, truly, is ours.