I Can Rewrite The Story Quotes

Because I believe we all deserve the chance to be seen for who we are in our present, not for who we’ve been in our past. Because I believe that while you can’t rewrite life’s previous chapters, you have every present moment to do something new, something better, and I hold on to hope that anyone who wants to can shape their life into a story they’re proud of.

I love you, and it's driving me crazy to see you so upset. I want to fix it, and I know I can't. But what I want to do is rewrite this whole world so you can fix it. I want to come up with a story that all the world will choose to celebrate, and in it, the people we love will never get sick, and the people we love will never be sad for long, and there would be unlimited frozen hot chocolate. Maybe if it were up to me I wouldn't have the whole world collectively believe in Santa Claus, but I would definitely have them collectively believe in something, because there is a messed-up kind of beauty in the way we can bend over backward to make life seem magical when we want to. In other words, after giving it some thought , I think that reality has the distinct potential to complete suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy. In my life, that's you. And if it takes dressing up like Santa to get that across to you, then so be it.

You can’t take away the past; you can only add to the narrative. There is a narrative about Muslims that already exists. I’m not here to undo or rewrite history. That is propaganda or an impossibility. What I, and others, can do is expand on the notion of what it means to be Muslim, continue the story line that survives alongside us.

I want to hold her, to tell her how deep down I hate to see her cry. But right now I can’t see through the anger—the hurt—of her pretending that for one summer, she and I weren’t each other’s world. For me, she stayed my world every day after.

All I want is you. With me. Wherever you want, Goldie. I can’t be without you.

I haven’t fallen in love with anyone since you left. I’m not able to. You can’t fall in love with someone if your heart still belongs to someone else.

It hurts too much. All I can think about in the end is how bad I hurt her. She spent all those years idolizing me, loving me, only for me to break her with a few words at the airport.

Science doesn’t operate in a political vacuum,” she explains. “I think there are some sciences which can be more objective than others. But we are dealing with people, we’re not the Large Hadron Collider.

I’ve spent all these years trying to forget Cade but feeling him claim me all over again only proves one thing. I can pretend all I want, but nothing has changed. He still owns me—every fucking part of me.

After I left, I cried myself to sleep so many times, wondering where things went wrong. I obsessed over the idea of you being my world and I was nothing to you. You can’t tell me years later that you loved me.

You don’t stop loving someone even after they break your heart. You can’t stop loving them, no matter what damage was done. I can only hope the same can be said for her. I know I broke her heart, I’m ready to plead with her and hope I kept her love.

I can’t keep it a secret any longer.” I grab her arms, pulling her closer to my body. “I fell for you so hard and fast, it was almost like that love had always been there. I loved you, Goldie. I loved you so fucking much that it killed me to watch you leave.

The experiment changed Sally’s life. In the following days she realised she has been through a ‘near-spiritual experience…what defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up…My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head…I hope you can sympathise with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes. I also started to have a lot of questions. Who was I apart from the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I’m too scared to try? And where did those voices come from?’7 Some of those voices repeat society’s prejudices, some echo our personal history, and some articulate our genetic legacy. All of them together, says Sally, create an invisible story that shapes our conscious decisions in ways we seldom grasp. What would happen if we could rewrite our inner monologues, or even silence them completely on occasion? 8

You'll be interested to know that the rewriting of history is still being attempted, especially in the United States. I'm not surprised. The way they tried to paper over slavery, and then the Jim Crow laws... you can't have those kinds of inequities in a democracy. If indeed that country is one, or ever was.

I’m a child? I am?” Luke laughs sharply, and Varya recoils. “You’re the one trying to convince yourself the world is rational, like there’s anything you can do to put a dent in death. You’re telling yourself that they died because of x, and you lived because of y, and that those things are mutually exclusive. That way you can believe you’re smarter; that way you can believe you’re different. But you’re just as irrational as the rest of them. You call yourself a scientist, you use words like longevity and healthful aging, but you know the most basic story of existence—everything that lives must die—and you want to rewrite it.

I have a lot of dreams, Cade Jennings. But none of them compare to the best dream come true of all. Loving you. Being loved by you. It’s the most special and real feeling I’ve ever experienced. I think I’m in a place now where the whole author thing can be done from anywhere—from Sutten—as long as it’s somewhere with you.

You told me to leave!” she shouts, her hands angrily thrashing through the air. “You told me to leave and that you wanted nothing to do with me once I did. So that’s what I did, Cade. I left. Even though it broke my heart to leave things how we did.” She gasps for air as she tries to keep a grip on her emotions. “You can’t pretend like we know anything about each other now. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.

Labels can serve goals, but goals should never serve labels. When a goal serves a label, you've made the label your ultimate reality, and you've created a life to prove or support that label. You see this when someone says, "I'm pursuing this because I'm an extrovert." This form of goal-setting occurs when you base your goals on your current persona rather than setting goals that expand upon and change who you are.

write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky (this is my idea, not John Gould’s, but I believe he would have subscribed to the notion), more will want to do the former than the latter.

Why the fuck would I want you to stay away when I was in love with you?” Her mouth falls open. “What?” she asks, her voice breaking. I let out a dejected sigh, anger and sadness coursing through my veins. I shake my head. “You knew that.” “No.” She shakes her head back and forth, her eyes misting over. “I didn’t know. I hoped. God, I wanted that more than anything. But I asked you if you loved me and you told me no. How can I trust you now?

Within a week, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” an essay that had appeared in the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News, had been read by more than a million people. “We’re so young. We’re so young,” Marina had written. “We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.” When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done. But Marina left what she had already done: an entire body of writing, far more than could fit between these covers. As her parents and friends and I gathered her work, trying to find the most recent version of every story and essay, we knew that none of it was in exactly the form she would have wanted to publish. She was a demon reviser, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting even when everyone else thought something was done. (THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING.) We knew we couldn’t rewrite her work; only she could have done that.

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk. Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary form. One thinks again of the Bible: of a beginning and an end (denied by the physicist Aristotle to the world) but humanly acceptable (and allowed by him to plots). Revelation, which epitomizes the Bible, puts our fate into a book, and calls it the book of life, which is the holy city. Revelation answers the command, 'write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter'--'what is past and passing and to come'--and the command to make these things interdependent. Our novels do likewise. Biology and cultural adaptation require it; the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination, working out from the middle, the human crisis. As the theologians say, we 'live from the End,' even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive; Ulysses, for example, may be said to unite the irreducible chronos of Dublin with the irreducible kairoi of Homer. In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord. For concord or consonance really is the root of the matter, even in a world which thinks it can only be a fiction. The theologians revive typology, and are followed by the literary critics. We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.

It means neither one of us can hide the fact that we know every single fucking thing there is to know about the other person. Time, miles, nothing will change that I know you, Goldie. I know you almost better than I know myself. And I know for a fucking fact that you’re lying.” “How?” “Because I know how much it fucking hurts my soul to see another man look at you the way I look at you. To see him touch you the way I want to touch you. And I know that after every fucking thing between us, even after you leaving me, that you feel the same.

DW: Some critics have written that they don’t admire your so-called simple style. You have contended that your writing is a result of much rewriting and much revision and is deliberate. CP: The style is simplicity for the sake of complexity. Whoever feels that it is a “simple style” has to look into it and find the right way. Of course the style has become over the years much more complex and much more simple. Two fundamental things about the novel continue to intrigue me and I think this is our gift to ourselves as far as this form is concerned. One is the handling of character, people. No other form can handle people in significant depth over long periods of time. No other form can move back and forth, in and out, nothing can move the way the novel can in terms of the dimension of time. People and time are what I think the novel is really all about and I think they are limitless.

Like Willow, we all can honor our pain and then move toward something more joyful. We can focus on our resilience and remember our joys or sorrows. We can craft stories that tell us we are loved, strong, resilient, respected, worthy, generous, forgiven, and happy. We all have such stories if only we can uncover them.... To rewrite our story, we need effort and imagination. We can access imagination by journaling, painting, music, or art. One of my favorite things about writing is that I get to tell a second story about whatever happens to me. And, in this second story I can shape events in ways that are more beautiful and happiness-producing. Indeed, what is all art if not an attempt to tell a better story? Some of our stories bring out the best in us, whereas others induce despair, fear or anger. We can ask ourselves questions that remind us of our kindness, hard work, and strength over the years. We can explore our uncelebrated virtues and our survival skills.

I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: “I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You’re going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we’ll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.” This is how I’ve arrived at my plots a number of times. I would have all these wonderful shiny bulbs, each self-contained with nothing to hang them on. But I would stay with the characters, caring for them, getting to know them better and better, suiting up each morning and working as hard as I could, and somehow, mysteriously, I would come to know what their story was. Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad. Some

Our conversation went a little like this: “God, if I lay down my need for those who hurt me to be punished, it doesn’t mean that what they did is okay, right?” “Right.” “So, just to be clear, we are in agreement that what they did is wrong, correct?” “Kim, what they did was wrong. I’m sorry you were hurt.” “When I surrender this to You and release those who hurt me, You know for sure that I’m not saying that I agree with them, right?” “Do you trust Me?” “I trust You, God, but do I still get to be strong? Does surrendering and letting go mean that I’m weak?” “Are you relying on your strength or Mine? You are strong when you trust in Me and rely on My strength.” Ugh. And just like that, God broke through another layer of my old need to protect myself through control. It felt so important to me to be strong. My entire childhood I had to be strong for my mom and siblings. I had to be strong to be brave and defend myself. I had to be strong so fear would not cripple me. And it seemed to me that to trust in God, to surrender, to depend on His strength, to forgive those who hurt me, and to not demand punishment meant I could no longer be strong. I hated that! As I was pondering why this upset me so much, another lie was exposed—the lingering belief that no one can take care of me like I can. Part of me still thought I couldn’t really trust God with my heart and emotions.

But maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all paintings, are actually sitting there hating. Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it. Maybe it’s not a shadow climbing the wall behind her, but smoke from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred. I’m struck by the naive notion of taking the girl home, painting clothes on her, black clothes maybe, painting her into a new framework, as the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk does to Anna Karenina in Places Far from Ellesmere. In this book, van Herk wants to save Anna from being another woman character in literary history who’s crushed by a train, and she plucks Anna from Tolstoy’s novel and gives her a new frame, a new text. She demonstrates how literature and art can tamper with their own past, create new bonds. As far as I know, no one has tried this witchcraft on Munch and his Puberty (she doesn’t even have a name), but now I want to paint or rewrite the girl in the painting, save her, save us. Because it’s definitely just as much about me, about saving myself from the position of a contemporary subject passively accepting the narratives offered it by past art, past stories about gender, expression, hierarchy. I want to save myself from nodding in acknowledgement to Munch, to 1890, from the outside, with insight, and accepting that Puberty is the mirror art has installed for me.

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter. I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes… What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

history has become a beautiful American lie Overseers rewrite it and always deny people the right to know the ugly truth only tell part of it especially to the youth peace peace peace they always insist while lawmakers attempt to cease and desist the full story from impressionable minds there's no better way to keep everyone in line from the Civil War to civil rights they'll never stop downplaying the brutality of our fights so now you know some of the things they keep from you I can only hope you'll spread the knowledge, too because there's one way to set everyone free it starts with making a difference it starts with you and me

You don’t know me anymore.” I know my words come out harsh, but I can’t help it with her. I am angry at her. There are so many reasons for me to be upset. The biggest one being I hate that after all these years apart, I still feel an intense pull toward her. “You don’t know what my looks mean. Maybe that’s just how I always look.

Because I’ve never felt happier. But I’ve also never felt more sad—more scared. Because happiness can be fleeting, and if she brings this much happiness, what happens when she leaves? Her leaving is inevitable. The date of her move is looming. I’ll lose her and Pippa at the same time. It’s not something I want to think about.

You can’t,” Mare sobs. “You can’t tell me you don’t love me because I know this isn’t all in my head. Love like this doesn’t have to be talked about. It’s so much more powerful than words. It can be felt and I feel that you love me like I love y—

We’re a mess and I don’t know how to pick up the pieces between us. We’re both so angry at each other for reasons I can’t even keep track of anymore.

All this time I’ve thought Cade forgot everything we were but he was here living in those memories every day of his life. I want to believe every word he’s telling me. I want to hope that things aren’t really over between us, but I’m scared to have my heart broken again. When I left, I was vulnerable with him. I laid out every single one of my feelings, and he stomped on them. He crushed us. He crushed me. No matter what he says now, I can’t get over the fear of ending up in the exact same position as last time.

Cade leans in, trapping my lips between his before I can get out any kind of answer for him. It’s best that way, I was about to tell him that loving him never felt like a choice to me—it feels embedded in my soul. It just is. No choice, no accident. But that would’ve been me confessing I’ve fallen for him, and I don’t know if we’re ready for that yet.

Mostly, I want to know what I can do to ease the tension between us. Or maybe I need to accept the fact that nothing will ever be the same between us. I give her a few moments to see if she’ll look at me. When she doesn’t, I sigh, knowing I’ll answer her anyway.

I don’t look at her. I can’t look at her. If I do, I might tell her she could keep on lying if it just meant I could have one more happy moment with her. If even for a few seconds we could pretend that shit hasn’t gone up in flames between us.

At least I can hold onto this moment forever, knowing for however fleeting this thing between us is, for a moment I was enough for her to give me everything.

The fact that there’s no use fighting our feelings for each other? I agree. We couldn’t fight them years ago, and I’ve given up on fighting them now. So good point, nothing’s changed. We can hate each other all we want. It doesn’t make denying one another any easier.

I wish that Cade and I can figure this out together. I wish for this to be the best summer of my life. My biggest wish is that I get to keep him once this summer ends.

I hate knowing the best thing I can do for the woman I’m hopelessly in love with is to let her go.

We’re probably a show for those around us, just innocent bystanders trying to buy books. They don’t know that I’m breaking inside or how much it hurts me to know I can’t be the best for someone who is everything to me. “You’re meant to go, and I’m meant to stay.

I close the distance between us. I’m not going to give her the luxury of lying to me from afar. She knows exactly what this house means to me—what it once meant to us. It’s hard to even look at her, I’m so fucking upset with her. I’m done with her pretending that she doesn’t remember our past. It’s so fucking ingrained in my mind, and in my heart, that I can’t fucking fathom that she doesn’t remember things that have haunted me for years.

Nothing ever…” I sigh because I don’t want to lie to her. I’m tired of hiding that Mare was everything to me, and even though it’s been years, that wound still hasn’t healed. “You haven’t been the same since she left. I know you’ve got to be hurting, but I can’t help but wonder if you’ve read Mare’s book. If you know how she feels…

I think Cade has been under the assumption that there’s no hope for the two of you. But I can’t help but read the words you’ve written in these pages and think that there somehow still is hope.

For the both of you, I hope that love can overcome anything that’s happened between the two of you. From the moment your momma died, I’ve always wanted to take care of you, Marigold. I love you like I love my own children.

I want what’s best for you. And from what I’ve observed over the years, what’s best for the both of you, is each other. The two of you have always been like magnets. It’s always been like you can sense each other. It’s something special that I don’t think comes around often.

My shoulders shake as I try to take a deep breath. It’s a useless attempt, the more I try not to cry, the harder I cry. There’s so many feelings coursing through me that I don’t know what to think or how to feel. I feel guilty for never coming back to Sutten knowing what waited for me there. I feel so sad that I can’t tell Linda to her face that Cade and I have found each other again.

And then I feel clarity. Because nothing has ever been more clear in my life. Sutten has always been my home. It always will be. And no matter what living in Chicago has done for me, I don’t want to be here forever. And I can’t go another minute without being with the man I fell in love with as a teenager when he remembered my birthday and told me to make a wish. Everything falls into place. I know the ending of my book. I know what I need to do. There’s only one thing left to do.

Promise me this won’t be the end of us?” The look on her face is so vulnerable. The shakiness to her words about kill me. “I can survive being away from you—even though I don’t want to—I won’t fucking survive losing you again. This isn’t the end of us.

Even though I know he’d typically be asleep by now, he’s staying up just to talk to me. To see my face. My heart thumps in my chest with love. I can’t believe he’s mine. “I’m so happy with the direction of the story. I think people will love it.” “Of course they will.” His voice is sleepy. His eyes get heavier and heavier with each minute that passes by.

I’m not blind. I know the way you look at the girl. I remember looking at your mother the same way. Like she hung the damn moon and all the stars around it.” He sighs, his shoulders becoming shaky with the exhale. “There’s nothing I can do to get your mother back, but I’d give up just about anything to be given the chance. I won’t let you miss out on a love as powerful as I shared with your mother because you feel like you owe it to me or this ranch. You get your girl, Cade.

After reading this beautiful story, I’m hopeful that you do. So many beautiful love stories have endings. I hope that isn’t the case for you and Cade. I hope maybe the two of you can rewrite your story.

Mare laughs as I wipe the tears from her cheeks. These tears I can handle. They’re happy tears. They’re proof of our love—of us being together again.

In the same way I can always sense him, I can sense her. I can sense them. My eyes flutter shut as the wind delicately caresses my cheeks. Hi Mom. Hi Linda. In the middle of the marigolds, with Cade clinging to me, I know that Mom and Linda somehow, some way are here with us. They’re sharing the most special moment of my life with me. With both of us. Mom kept true to her promise. I may not be able to see her, but I feel her.

In the following pages, I will guide you through a four-step healing process. In step 1, we will tend to self-doubt and make room for new beginnings so that we are prepared to walk the path ahead. In step 2, we will work on learning how to befriend our fear so that it no longer controls us. Step 3 offers lessons in reclaiming your power and rewriting your story with intention. And step 4 focuses on leaning in to what feels good so that we can live with gratitude and joy.

As painful as it was for her, it was so important and revealing to work this way. And for the client, it’s powerful. I’m a great believer in the idea that you can’t heal what you don’t feel. Somewhat unfortunately, you have to feel it in order to understand it and therefore heal it. But even though that’s painful, in that understanding comes a phenomenal transformation that enables you to let go.

Won't Let You Be My Downfall" (Verse 1) In the glow of neon lights, I find my stride, Chasing dreams bigger than the Friday night sky. You thought you'd see me crumble, thought I'd crawl, But I won't let you be my downfall. (Chorus) I'm riding high, on this urban rodeo, Got my heart guarded, in the city's afterglow. You can't hold me back, can't make me stall, 'Cause I won't let you be my downfall. (Verse 2) Got my boots laced up, with a modern twist, Walking streets paved with chances I won't miss. Your shadows linger, but I'll walk tall, I won't let you be my downfall. (Bridge) This heart beats to a rhythm, bold and new, I'm rewriting my story, without a trace of you. I'm not just a number, I'm a name they'll call, And I won't let you be my downfall. (Chorus) I'm riding high, on this urban rodeo, Got my heart guarded, in the city's afterglow. You can't hold me back, can't make me stall, 'Cause I won't let you be my downfall. (Outro) So here's to the nights, that turn into dawn, To the fights we fight, to the strength we've drawn. I'm standing proud, through it all, 'Cause I won't let you be my downfall.

The sins of the father are visited upon future generations…” EXODUS 34:7 Oh, how I used to hate this verse. I once had a client tell me that she hated it, too. It made her think of an-impossible-to-please, vengeful god. A god she wanted no part of. I completely understood, because for a big part of my life, I agreed with her. But then one day, a different perspective on this controversial verse presented itself to me. One that I shared with my client. It’s one I would like to share with you, too. What if this verse is not some warning of wrath from a vengeful, punitive deity? What if this verse is not talking about something God does to us, but rather something we do to ourselves—and to each other? What if this verse is actually a compassionate, albeit cryptic, warning? Perhaps it is a rallying cry to get us to show up and own our crap; to heal and to grow, and to set future generations up to do the same. What if this verse is a plea from on High to recognize our choices can set off ripple effects that are far beyond our understanding and that our choices influence the future beyond what we are able to recognize in the tangible, relational realms. And what if this ominous, poetic warning is really pointing us toward something much more scientific and even holistic? What if it’s a proof-text that we are incapable of living compartmentalized lives—that every part of us is inextricably connected to the other, not only within our own lives, but in all the lives that lead up to our existence? What if the ripples set in motion by those who have gone before us cast destructive waves upon the present and have potential to reach into future generations, unless there is some intervention?

When I was a kid, I’d always thought about the new freckles that popped up on your face with each hour you spent outside. I’d always felt like they needed a proper welcome now that they were part of a face as beautiful as yours. So now that I can, I want to kiss them hello.

To rewrite our story, we need effort and imagination. We can access imagination by journaling, painting, music, or art. One of my favorite things about writing is that I get to tell a second story about whatever happens to me. And, in this second story, I can shape events in ways that are more beautiful and happiness-producing. Indeed, what is all art, if not an attempt to tell a better story?

Prepare with pen and paper. Always have your notebook and something to write with nearby when you read. Your goal is to be prepared for insight. In addition to reading for pleasure, you will now use words as research and write down what you learn. If you prefer, you can dictate into a recorder or type into the Notes section of your phone. Immerse. Get inside the words, the sentences, the story arc. Don't simply stay on the surface of what you're reading, no matter how shallow it seems. Go deep. Examine. If that cereal box makes you excited to eat the sugar doodles, ask yourself what it is about the words and their formatting is doing that for you. If you read that redwood plaque and walk away feeling smart, ask yourself how it pierced your busy mind. If—especially if—you're reading a novel, and you connect with a character, or you find yourself yanked out of the story, or you read a sentence twice to savor the citrus taste of it, or anything else of note happens, study that situation like a lover's face. Write down what you think is happening (“ main character makes stupid choices,” “too many adverbs,” “lots of smells make me feel like I'm right there,” “each chapter ends with a hook,” etc.) because transcribing information flips a switch in our brain, waking up the records guy who then goes over to pick up what you wrote and file it somewhere so you can access it later.

I will write this story only once, for me, as a form of catharsis – my final attempt at closure. There will be no rewrites, no editors, and no sales strategy – even if I end up holding the only copy of the book ever printed. This story is the retelling of events that occurred three years ago, exactly as they happened and as best I can communicate them. Police reports and coroner’s inquests are not intended nor equipped to address evil. It is not taught in our schools nor recognised in our counselling – yet I walked with evil as it stalked the halls, the hearts and the classrooms of Hunter High on that Black Friday. Then I wasted three years trying to explain and analyse the evil away. Wasted lives, then wasted years -- but I can no longer allow the truth to remain buried with the dead, and the whole story must, finally, now be told.

I am not sure what it is you are trying to get across with this would-be debut novel—but it is not for us here at ****. There is not enough story for us to take notice. The character, though compelling, does not support a moral value or something the reader can latch on to without feeling confused. In all honesty, he is quite the repulsive antihero. I suggest a rewrite, underlining the over-all message you are trying to convey. We may accept something more developed, but until then, here is the manuscript. With our apologies, and best of luck.

Once you uncover your storyline, I encourage you to take these two steps: First, walk through the original drama, but give it a new ending. Change the story, and you change your energetic system—and your neurology. Second, rewrite the characters. In your life play, replace the needy mom with a giving, kind one. Instead of an alcoholic, absent dad, give yourself a super-supportive one. Your workplace dramas will shift as your internal script does. Having rewritten your story, you can formulate an intention for attracting and maintaining supportive work relationships. After all, success really does depend on being open to serving others and receiving help in return. Design an intention with your long-term heart’s desires, not just the next step, in mind.

Rewriting the narrative so as to make my life what I want it to be is the stuff of fiction penned by the hands of fools who have yet to realize that truth writes stories bigger than any eraser fiction can conjure up.

When heaven shows up, when Jesus intervenes in my life, when I encounter God, it can be messy, passionate, and all-consuming. Not in a negative way, but in a way that causes me to say, “I am surrendering to Your love completely, God. I am not fighting for control, and I am trusting You in every outcome.” And when Jesus shows up, He covers everything, just like a sloppy, wet kiss.

This time, I know we can re-write our stories. We can step into love and let our souls be washed by it. We can step into love, knowing that the reflection we give won't give us an unfamiliar face, but a reflection that shows us who we really are deep inside. Our souls reflected back in the mirror.

I'll say it again: it's hard to dream about what's not visible. You can't readily strive toward what you don't see. Rewriting the story of not-mattering takes both courage and persistence. As disheartening as it is, there are people in this world who are more comfortable or feel more powerful when others are made to feel isolated, broken, or unwelcome. They are happy to keep you small. Visibility sits at the center of many of our current and most contentious civic debates. As state legislatures argue about whether to ban teachers from discussing systemic racism in public schools, as school boards vote to remove books about the Holocaust, or racism, or LGBTQ+ people from school libraries, we need to stay aware of whose stories are being told and whose are being erased. This is a battle over who matters, who gets to be seen.