Creating a false narrative that's simply untrue!

There are times in our life where we have moments of realisations or a smooth or swift shift in perspective where our learnt normal starts to change. This could be following a traumatic event like the loss of a loved one, losing a job/money, end of a long relationship, losing a friend, etc. When anything significant and familiar to you is taken away from you, life becomes unfamiliar and life as you knew it, is over. This can be a little bit daunting at first but it’s also extremely necessary for us to evolve.

At first, it could feel like we are having an out of body experience. What I mean is we are still living the same life, with the same environment and people surrounding us but it feels like a stranger’s life we are now outside looking in. Whatever the cause maybe that manages to shake our world upside down (I mean we just feel that in the moment, doesn’t mean our physical reality actually changed.), what makes it worse is the narrative we create around it. We start feeling jaded, disappointed, angry, hurt and look at life through a thorny lens. It is completely fine to feel any emotion that you do, but what we need to be careful or be aware of is to not let the mind create a false narrative of how bad things could go or reminisce the past in a deteriorating way.

It’s not the easiest when all the thoughts that come up fuelled with emotion seems so true and you feel this in your entire body. It’s easy to get carried away and let more and more chaotic situations unravel in your life in the next few days if you hold on to this narrative. It is then that it’s crucial to know that your thoughts are not exactly true or telling you a fair narrative of what actually happened. I’m not saying that whatever the event that led you to feel this way in the first place didn’t happen, it did. But the narrative we made around it, that is fear based, and emotionally driven, run on assumptions and what if’s. This is why the words we use even to ourselves or when talking to someone, matter.

We rarely notice that we don’t always see a situation for what it is exactly. We see things through a lens of preconceived judgement from what we’ve learnt in the past that we project on to believing could create a “possible” future (Possible future because it is something that may or may not happen, so ultimately it is something we’ve made up in our minds.). If we look at a situation for exactly what it is, and understand that the words we use to explain it might stray away from the actual reality of it, you’d be able to see it without it being good or bad, but just as it is. For instance, take any thought you have, look at the words, “I only got a few hours of sleep today, I’m not going to be able to get anything done properly today. I should’ve slept earlier”.

Let me break this down, “I only got a few hours of sleep today”, this is the only part that is true. It doesn’t have to be good or bad, it’s just what actually happened. It is a statement of what actually happened, what we think and believe about the number of hours of sleep we get is what labels it to be good or bad, but in reality, we just slept for a few hours. The rest of the narrative “I’m not going to be able to get anything done properly today. I should’ve slept earlier”, these are not true. You don’t know how your day will go today, till you live it. But if you believe it’s going to be impacted by your sleep, and start convincing yourself that you’re tired, and let yourself get frustrated, then it will impact your day. But it’s not because of the number of hours you slept but because you believe it’s a bad thing, and you let your mind talk you in to seeing why it will impact every part of the rest of your day. “I should’ve slept earlier”, you maybe should have, but you didn’t. So it doesn’t really matter. The only thing that's true is what happened, not what could've or could happen. You could berate yourself about something you didn’t do which serves no purpose, spending energy on being annoyed at yourself or see that you're creating a false narrative that’s simply untrue.

When you talk to someone or even when you catch yourself thinking, try to see if you are describing an event just as it is, or from a place of what you think it should be or should’ve been. If this is the case, tell yourself that’s not true or it doesn’t matter. The moment you are able to separate a situation, and the emotion you feel around it that creates a false narrative, you are simply free and not living in your mind anymore. You are open to the moment that is here and now. If you find your mind being too chaotic, simply take a deep breath, feel the air filling in your lungs, and slowly let go. Watch and feel as you exhale through your mouth, which will remind you to come back to the present moment. Feel free to close your eyes and repeat this even for just a few more times or longer and see the difference in how you feel! 😇