What Stories Do You Tell Yourself?

It was 15 years ago that I went to see the Broadway play Beauty & The Beast. It was always a dream of mine as I love the Disney movie Beauty & The Beast. When the play came to Atlanta and I was living in Florida, I dragged my best friend Amy with me on a five hour joy ride. You can read an excerpt from my journal about the day below. Keep in mind when I typed this it was on a DOS computer in 1996 and I was just learning how to use a computer.

Now mind you when we got lost, we were not only lost direction wise but I lost my religion and had a complete meltdown. Amy was a little scared at my ranting and I felt out of control and embarrassed. Looking back I know that I had that meltdown because I had such a negative outlook on life and I was playing the victim. I played the tune in my head, “who am I to think I deserve to go to a play like this.” “Dreams don’t happen for people like me.” These were stories I was telling myself and still to this day struggle with from time-to-time but I am better able to manage those stories now and re-write them.

Jump ahead to this past weekend and Beauty & The Beast was coming to my town so I thought it would be amazing to call my friend Amy and we go see the play again. We made it a girls night out and she was even going to stay the night. We left the house in a reasonable amount of time to get to the convention center. Not only that, I have driven to the convention center plenty of times to know I wouldn’t get lost.

However, most of the time when I drove to the convention center it was during the day and things look a lot different at night. For whatever reason, I took and exit too soon and we were lost!!! I couldn’t believe it. Was this seriously happening again? The difference between this time and last time is that Amy and I had a good laugh and we thought it was all too perfect. We both believed that it happened as it should. I mean how would we ever top the memory of the last trip if we didn’t get lost.

I follow a blog called Owning Pink written by Lissa Rankin and when I read her latest blog post it was a confirmation that I have grown as a person. Lissa shares her own challenge and how she too has changed her reaction to the small thing. Of course her experience I have to say was much worse than us getting lost. You can check out the post by clicking here.

It is nice to know that I have a chance to re-write the story of my meltdown. I look back at my journal entry and how painful it was to go through that experience and now when I write in my journal about this new experience, I can see how much I have grown as a person. It only took 15 years!

What story can you re-write today in your journal?