Does Your Life Feels Like Groundhog's Day? |
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I was eavesdropping at my local diner—my favorite laboratory for human behavior. At the next table, a couple in their mid-forties was chatting about a movie they’d just seen. As the waiter zoomed by without stopping, the man became visibly agitated. I heard him tell his partner that it was the third time the waiter had “ignored” him and that if he were “a star,” if he were “somebody who people had heard of,” if he were somebody people “respected,” then they would already be enjoying their burgers. When the server finally did arrive, sweat bubbling above his lip, I heard this man aggressively asserting that the young man should be less obvious about whom he deems important enough to serve.
My dining neighbor was just a normal person doing what normal people do, creating a story and crafting meaning. But the particular meaning he made and we all make—the specific story we tell ourselves—this is our personal narrative, and more than anything else, what determines our reality.
The story we tell ourselves about ourselves answers two important questions in every situation we encounter: what’s happening and why it’s happening. In this example, what was happening to the man sitting next to me was that he was being ignored, snubbed, and treated disrespectfully. Why it was happening, in his story, was because he wasn’t important or famous; he was just an irrelevant, invisible, nobody. The narratives in our head are continually connecting the dots of our life, making links and forming cause and effect relationships between........