One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned in life is that we hold the pen with which our stories are written. Or maybe I should say we hold the pencil with which our stories are written…because here’s the thing… stories CAN be changed. We can erase and rewrite the parts that don’t support our highest and greatest intentions for the stories we CHOOSE to believe.

In my life, I’ve spent more years than I wish to admit stuck in a story that perpetuated a life that felt like it was not worth living. That story was the barricade that kept me from joy, self-love and inner peace, it represented the shackles that chained me to self-loathing, depression and despair. The story was that I was not worthy of being loved, most of all by myself. And, I collected evidence like layers of rock around my heart that supported that story. It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I clung to that story for dear life because without it, I had nothing. It became my identity.

It’s hard to explain the dichotomous thinking that presents this conundrum in life of needing something so much that is so toxic to your well-being, but not knowing how to shake it or even being able to name the very thing that is throttling your happiness.

And, then one day a seed gets planted, a seed that embodies the possibility of change, the possibility of a new story. And that seed burrows down into the layers of rock and starts to grow. It beckons new pieces of evidence. Evidence that supports possibility. And, like begets like. Just as the fear and self-loathing created more fear and self-loathing and it goes on and on, the opening to possibilities opens a new door and another new one and another and so on and so on as long as we choose to keep opening those doors to new possibilities. To get what’s on the other side of that door, you just have to choose to open it and walk through it. Tangible change requires tangible choice.

I wonder how many lives could be different if we all knew that we held the pencils of our own life stories? How many tragic stories could be rewritten? They say you can’t change the past. Well, I’m not on board with that determinate life sentence. I’ve found that by rewriting the perceptions of my life story, by stepping out of the idea that my experiences were what life dealt me and adopting the idea that my experience of life was 99% what I decided to think about it, I was liberated. I was able to take a hammer to that geode around my heart and access the crystals inside that are each and every person’s divine right.

That’s the power of stories.