Are You the Hero of Your Own Story?

Are you the Hero of Your Own Story?

 
Seems like a strange question, right? Unless you write or read a lot of fiction, you may not even have heard of the Hero’s Journey, or thought of a story in terms of the hero at its core.
But when it comes to real life, way too many people, especially women, balk at the idea of being the hero of their own story. It’s selfish, some say. How can I be a good wife, mother, friend, employee, boss etc., if I put myself first? We’re all taught (we women anyway) that to be a good person, we need to put others first, to be selfless to the point of erasing our selves and elevating the needs of others above our own.
When you do this, what ends up happening is that your kids, partner, business, career, family, etc., becomes the hub around which your life revolves, and your life orbits this center, responding to its gravitational pull, but keeping you on the periphery of your own life. Being off-center in this way is highly stressful. This kind of stress can be invisible because it is wrapped up in learned values and good intentions.

The (False) Satisfaction (and Stress) of Selflessness

There can be a surface sense of relief or satisfaction at having something other than yourself at the center of your life, because when you have your focus on something other than you, you can easily justify ignoring your needs and issues, putting off your desires, denying your sense of self. Plus you are being such a good person, right?
Not so much. When the hub of your life is other than yourself, you lose you center, become ungrounded, and your life begins to wobble. It may feel satisfying, right and even self-righteous to focus first on others, but you can end up harried from pack of self-care, and feeling bitter or angry about being last in line in your life and missing out on the things that you denied yourself along the way. Eventually, that invisible stress eats away at you until it becomes unbearable. You can help relieve that stress and take back your life and reclaim your well-being by becoming the hero of your own story.

Become The Hero of Your Own Story

How do you know if you’ve slipped from being the hero of your story and, if so, how do you get it back? Grab a cup of tea and maybe a pad of paper, then step back from your life and read it as if you were reading a story or watching a movie. Just like in a story, there are many characters, but often there is one character around which the plot revolves. In this case, that’s you.
Look over the larger arc of your life and see if you have always (or never, or sometimes but not other times) made choices based on your own needs, interests and growth or if you made choices based on what others wanted you to do, or to keep the peace at your own expense, or denied yourself something you really wanted in order to accommodate the desires or emotional comfort zone of others. Because we live within communities at home, work and other places, we all accommodate others to a certain extent (or we reflexively do the opposite of what someone wants us to do, which is still not being your own hero because you are controlled by the desires of others.)
The growing up process in part is shifting from doing what we are trained to do by parents, teachers, caretakers, etc., to learning to meet our own needs and desires independent from those that make up someone else’s value system. What you are looking for here is a pattern, not isolated incidents, which are just part of life.
Then look over your current life and the big factors in it—partners, children, work, friends, religious/spiritual affiliations, etc., to see if you feel a responsibility to them and adjust your time and life to thoughtfully include those that are most important to you, or if you feel responsible for them, and put their needs and demands ahead of your own.

Get Past the Excuses and Justifications

Right away many people start justifying the need to put others first, especially partners and children, but often job, parents, other family and needy friends as well. We’ll look especially at children, because that is the biggest gray area.
Yes, you are responsible for your children’s well-being, but you are not responsible for them to have whatever they want, whenever they want, at your own physical, emotional or spiritual expense. You are responsible to your children to provide for their health and well-being, and also to teach them how to be responsible for themselves in an age-appropriate way so that they learn how to be the hero in their own story. That story will include heartache, hardship, betrayal, painful growth experiences, poor decisions, and so on, all stories do. To deny them these experiences by making yourself responsible for always smoothing the path before them actually denies them the opportunity to learn how to be responsible to others and for themselves—for their decisions, their emotions, their stumbles and falls—while they are young enough to have you as a daily support and guide. People who never learn how to do this blame others for the circumstances of their lives and never get all that far, because to make your life an inspiring epic, you need to be your own hero.

What Being the Hero of Your Own Story Means

When you are the hero in your own story, you “own” your emotions, and if you make decisions from reactive emotions that worsen the situations, you “own” that as well. You take into consideration the people you are responsible to, but you make decisions that impact your life with your needs, desires and such in mind, and you become responsible for those decisions and their outcomes as well. You understand that your actions affect other people, and you act in a way that is responsible for you and to you, while being mindful of the consequences and willing to live with them.
Think about a book or a movie that you have recently taken in—they are all about change and growth. Part of the growth that characters routinely make is to go from sitting on the sidelines of their lives to stepping into the center of it, to being the hero of their own story.

Tap Your Storytelling Expertise

                       
Just from reading or watching movies, you are already an expert on how stories unfold, how characters grow, grow up (even if they are 50), step into a truer and more complete version of themselves. With that expertise, revisit you the stories you viewed about yourself and imagine you are rewriting the scene, remaking the script, re-imagining your life until you are the hero of your story. You’ll know when you are because it will feel like all your cells are expanding and yet grounding at the same time.
And the next decision you make or the next action you take, do it as your own hero.