I did an exercise from Julia Cameron’s Vein of Gold book some years ago, when I was still trying to get my head screwed on properly and purge the most unproductive and least interesting of my demons. It was a simple one, but lengthy, and the instructions were merely to write your own biography. But– the important part was, you had to write it from your OWN point of view. Only what you remembered and felt, as you remembered and felt it, not as it had been told to you by family or friends. The point of it was to see your life through your own lens, and therefore to realize how much of your view of yourself and your life had been made up of others’ (often skewed) perceptions.
It was a very revealing exercise; I discovered, for example, that although I had always thought of myself as being a shy child, the evidence of my memories didn’t back that up. I remembered many times when I’d made friends easily, approached people without fear, spoken up, instigated play. But because I was often quiet and lost in my own daydreams, and sometimes reserved in new situations until I felt safe there, others had labeled me shy and I’d simply accepted it.
I want to put that aside for the moment and talk about the origins of the word “romance”. “Romance” comes from “romans”, which meant “of the people” or “vulgar” and referred to the vernacular language spoken in France (to differentiate it from the formal Latin) in the medieval era. During this time, adventurous and epic stories of chivalrous heroes became popular at court. They were called “romanz” stories originally because they were written in that common language, but over time the term came to refer to tales with the elements of heroism, adventure, daring, courage, chivalry, and eventually (perhaps due to their large audience amongst the ladies of the court) courtly love. The archetype of these romances became the story of a hero who pledges his love and service to a (usually married and highborn) lady, and proceeds to embark on one or more challenging quests to prove himself worthy of her. Given that these stories flourished in the south of France where the worship of Roman and Celtic goddesses had been sublimated into fervent Magdalene and Marian cults, it is not hard to see a connection between the figure of the untouchable domina in these stories and the feminine divine; they probably struck the same chord, for example, that is touched now by Superman stories in a country soaked in Christian mythology.
One more detour on the path of this post: Recently I was at a Pagan gathering and attended a guided meditation intended to address and heal old wounds. Part of the visualization was to view some of your most traumatic experiences over the course of your life, watching them from different angles, as if they were mini-plays. Honestly, I didn’t expect to get much out of it, because it’s work that I’ve largely done. But as it turned out, I did get something from it, something I wasn’t expecting: Visualizing these scenes from my life, realizing that I was done processing or forgiving and that I no longer felt wounded by them, I suddenly had the sense of the other people who were involved, still as themselves but also on a new level, as archetypes. I felt that whatever it was they were doing in these interactions with me, they were in a sense playing a role that had– for whatever reason– needed to be filled in my life at that time. This did not negate the fact of each of those people being separate and unique individuals having their own experiences at those times; they were simultaneously themselves, and the embodiment of the thing that was being brought into my life. I felt that those adversaries may not even have always known exactly why they were interacting with me in those particular ways. It was like these events from my life were teaching stories that had shaped and guided me to the place and the person I am now; and I found that, having released these events long ago in the course of my self-work, I could now embrace them as stories within the larger story of my life.
We are rarely, if ever, taught how to love the painful and unbeautiful things in our lives. “Ideal” lives, we are told, are ones privileged enough to be as calm and uninterrupted as an expanse of blue sea, gently ruffled now and then but with all hardships and challenges prevented. We are supposed to want for our children lives free of any care. When bad things do happen, we’re at best supposed to “cope”. To work through things or stoically stuff them aside until we’re functional in the world. To be not actively suffering from old wounds, seems to be about the best we’re supposed to hope for.
Yet, it’s problems that spur innovation. Times of hardship that sort out devoted friends from fair weather ones. Crises spin us off in directions we’d never have explored otherwise. Have you ever met someone who’s experienced very little struggle or trauma in their lives? They tend to be uncompassionate, to have difficulty sympathizing with others.
What if we viewed our lives, the good and bad alike, as romances, in the tradition of those old heroic epics?
The descendants of those old stories are our adventure tales today. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a romance like those. So are the James Bond stories, Labyrinth, and definitely Spiderman. Now think about these stories– does the hero breeze through them blithely, achieving his objectives easily, the seas of his world parting for him to stroll through on his quest? Hardly. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He gets shot, captured, tortured, threatened, dangled off buildings, booby-trapped, stranded, abandoned, betrayed.
And, of course, we wouldn’t care about these stories if he didn’t undergo and then overcome those hardships. We understand that they are tests, initiations, and that facing them and enduring them is what marks him as worthy of the role of hero. The success at the end of his quest, be it to retrieve stolen plans or to get the girl, is not the quest itself. The success is the symbol of what he has become as a result of undertaking the quest and seeing it through.
Our entire lives are, in a sense, our quest. (“The world is made of stories, not atoms,” says the poet Muriel Rukeyser.) Whether you think that means that just surviving in this life is a hero’s journey, or whether you believe that there is a greater objective you have been put here to accomplish, it is possible to see life very differently when its events are viewed archetypically, as if they are plot elements in a romance.
You have survived every obstacle thrown in your path thus far in life. There are some you may be currently surviving, but the point is, you haven’t been beaten yet. You’re still onscreen. The audience is still waiting to see what’s going to happen next. Don’t you deserve some credit for that? Isn’t it a heroic thing simply that you are still here, breathing, thinking, walking in the world?
Think about some of the bad things that have happened to you in your life. Start small, if you like, with something you’ve gotten over and put behind you. What happened to you as a result of that? How did it contribute to making you the person you are now? What did it teach you? How did you overcome it? See what happens if you describe it to yourself as if it were a pivotal scene in a movie. That was the moment when I knew…just when everything seemed lost…
Have you ever met someone who seems to have led an endlessly fascinating life, who is always full of interesting stories and experiences? Those people have intuitively mastered the art of storytelling their own lives, of integrating not only the joyful and funny experiences but also the dark, painful, difficult ones, into a greater narrative whole. Their lives are an adventure because they have left room in them for a full range of experiences. I have a friend whose anecdotes vary wildly from telling to telling; she explains that it is not the literal truth of the events that matters, but their essence. This is what I mean. Another friend of mine, a singer who grew up down the street from me, writes in his artist’s bio that he’s from “a little factory town”, the product of blue-collar parents with a deep-rooted love of classic rock. None of that is untrue, though I was amused when I read it, thinking, “Well…we were a relatively little town…and it did have *a* factory in it…” The point is, what’s more interesting– to say that you grew up in a boring little suburb full of houses all made out of ticky-tacky, or to paint a picture of a Springsteen-like rough-edged youth built on music and stolen cigarettes and dreams? It’s all in the perspective.
Where are you in your life? Are you at a climactic turning point, or the place of peace between sequels? Are you in a search for the love of your life, or in pursuit of a title or award? Who are the characters in your past– the Wise Mentor, the Childhood Sweetheart, the Nemesis, the Loyal Companion? What have they each brought to the person that you are now? What kind of hero are you in your story– the Jaded Antihero, the Knight Errant, the Trickster, the Devoted Lover?
Tell your story to yourself as if you were describing a great movie to someone. Who would play you, if it were a movie? What music would be on the soundtrack? (Doubling back to my post on music therapy, perhaps you could put those songs into a playlist for yourself to help reinforce the idea that your life is interesting, unique, dramatic.) Would your life be an epic adventure, a splashy musical, or a surreal experiment?
As you think of these things, let them start to reveal the events of your life to yourself in a different light. It may sound as though this would trivialize the things that have happened to you, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is your own personal mythology you are exploring, as rich and multi-faceted and vital as the tapestry of mystic stories underlying every spiritual tradition in the world, only this one belongs only to you. Within it are the archetypes, “good” and “bad”, that have affected you and taught you and directed you down the paths you’ve walked. Within it are your gods and demons, your hidden saints and alter egos, your initiations and your rewards. These stories are your own personal passion plays, full of messages known only to you. Let yourself contemplate them in the bigger context of your existence. Think about what they’ve taught you and how they changed you, how they advanced the plot of your personal epic. Let them become more epic in your mind– the way that the Celts had of telling war stories in hyperbole, where a great warrior did not merely charge into battle, they roared in on a peal of thunder with dragons bursting out of their heads and fire shooting out of their eyes.
Make your story romantic and compelling to yourself, rich and dramatic. Let it catch your interest and your imagination, so that you go forward with energy and engagement, asking the world, What happens next?
