A few days ago, I watched a TED talk by a man called Shekhar Kapur, a bollywood director. He said "We are the stories we tell ourselves". He also raised some other very interesting concepts. If you're interested you can take a look at his wonderful speech here.
This really got me thinking about the nature of stories and their connection to personal development and creativity. What are the stories you used to tell yourself, and how do they compare with your stories now?
I remember all of my stories. I was called the daydreamer at school. I used to make up all sorts of stories in my head, sometimes to distract me from my real-life ones! I still do this sometimes - the act of dreaming for me helps me to keep hoping, keep finding creative solutions and possibilities. I dont know what I would have done if I weren't able to dream. I had so many stories as a child and some of them stuck, some of them didnt. Naturally some of my 'stickiest' ones were negative ones where I've tried all sorts of mediums to un-stick myself from. :) I used to see myself as a freak, an alien - on one dimension culturally; this skinny little black girl in a sea of white; and on another, I felt that my mind was just totally different. I used to think of all the reasons why I could be thinking differently from others...maybe it was the product of being raised by two SL parents with *really* different ideologies to the Western world. Maybe it was a result of my upbringing; while most of the other kids around me were attending sleepovers and parties with boys, I was stuck in my room with bars on my windows (yes, literally!) and told to study. I was protected and sheltered and controlled and like many South Asian Children, wasn't allowed much life exposure in my teens. That seemed to add to my feeling of 'freekiness'. Maybe it was a bit of both and then some, who really knows. The fact was that I was a black sheep in every place or country I moved to - I just couldn't blend in. I remember I used to walk around calling myself in my head a "shrivelled up, black prune" - I was very self-conscious about looking "different" to the majority, as I have done my whole life. I still am at times. However, I've worked on this story a lot, trying to make it more warm and fuzzy inside, but its still definitely there in the pages at the back of my mind, and still recites itself rather crudely sometimes.
"You're not able to do anything. You're just a little Sri Lankan outcast immigrant girl whos always weird, what can you possibly do? You are worth less than the others around you, the ones who dont stick out like you. What do you possibly have to contribute? How could you be better at doing anything than these "normal" white folk, who are at home, with their families, who are supposed to be here? You dont belong here, who the hell are you kidding?!" These were some of my stories. They would (and still do sometimes, if i let them) go round and round in my head, day in day out. How did I develop such a crazy attitude on myself? When I write it it sounds ludicrous, but when it goes through my head every day, it seems perfectly understandable. To some extent Im still dealing with the concept of myself and how I fit in to my 'physical life' as a cultural wanderer; Im still picking up the pieces that were scattered behind my family's decisions, still trying to grapple with the stories of my parents and relatives and trying even harder with the notion that I didnt agree with a *lot* of those stories, and was trying to make up a whole new set of my own. [Note: when I talk about stories here, Im basically meaning belief systems, as the stories we tell ourselves eventually become our fundamental belief system.] Secondly, a few mis-judged perceptions and careless comments from others around me as I was growing up, for a sensitive child, would do the trick.
In the beginning I was raised on these stories, they were my lifeblood and burnt into my brain - that im somehow "littler" than the people of the country I'm in at the time, that for this reason I have to "achieve" or "prove myself", and "lay low and be really really good". That we are somehow always insufficient. I can understand how my parents would have developed these stories for themselves - it comes from their experience as expatriates and of going through decades of racial prejudices. But those stories didnt serve me well when it came to my experience as a second-generation or third-culture kid (or whatever people like to call us these days!), the wanderers who dont have a home, and therefore cant be outsiders; who dont really belong anywhere.
To this day, I witness my parents comfortably fitting into their 20-something year old Sri Lankan pure-skins when we go "home" for the holidays, I see them chatting jovially with my relatives in perfect Sinhalese with perfect Sinhalese behaviour, beliefs, gesticulations and humour - and I watch them from the sidelines. I sit by myself in a corner of the room and observe them all with interest, contribute a few clumsy Sinhalese phrases that I can muster from time to time, and then sit back again in silence. Sri Lankans tend to think I'm perfectly Australian anyway, and it gets tiring to keep fighting people's perceptions all the time, not to mention trying to speak my parent's mother tongue that i've never been educated in. Plus, I dont like not fitting in - it hits a very sore spot.
Im continuously re-writing my stories, putting pen to paper, letting my creative juices flow - writing the warm-and-fuzzy version. They're taking a while, and turning more into novels. But they're getting there. ;)
How about you? What stories are you, or were you, telling yourself in your life? I'd love to know. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.
Lots of love :-)
This really got me thinking about the nature of stories and their connection to personal development and creativity. What are the stories you used to tell yourself, and how do they compare with your stories now?
I remember all of my stories. I was called the daydreamer at school. I used to make up all sorts of stories in my head, sometimes to distract me from my real-life ones! I still do this sometimes - the act of dreaming for me helps me to keep hoping, keep finding creative solutions and possibilities. I dont know what I would have done if I weren't able to dream. I had so many stories as a child and some of them stuck, some of them didnt. Naturally some of my 'stickiest' ones were negative ones where I've tried all sorts of mediums to un-stick myself from. :) I used to see myself as a freak, an alien - on one dimension culturally; this skinny little black girl in a sea of white; and on another, I felt that my mind was just totally different. I used to think of all the reasons why I could be thinking differently from others...maybe it was the product of being raised by two SL parents with *really* different ideologies to the Western world. Maybe it was a result of my upbringing; while most of the other kids around me were attending sleepovers and parties with boys, I was stuck in my room with bars on my windows (yes, literally!) and told to study. I was protected and sheltered and controlled and like many South Asian Children, wasn't allowed much life exposure in my teens. That seemed to add to my feeling of 'freekiness'. Maybe it was a bit of both and then some, who really knows. The fact was that I was a black sheep in every place or country I moved to - I just couldn't blend in. I remember I used to walk around calling myself in my head a "shrivelled up, black prune" - I was very self-conscious about looking "different" to the majority, as I have done my whole life. I still am at times. However, I've worked on this story a lot, trying to make it more warm and fuzzy inside, but its still definitely there in the pages at the back of my mind, and still recites itself rather crudely sometimes.
"You're not able to do anything. You're just a little Sri Lankan outcast immigrant girl whos always weird, what can you possibly do? You are worth less than the others around you, the ones who dont stick out like you. What do you possibly have to contribute? How could you be better at doing anything than these "normal" white folk, who are at home, with their families, who are supposed to be here? You dont belong here, who the hell are you kidding?!" These were some of my stories. They would (and still do sometimes, if i let them) go round and round in my head, day in day out. How did I develop such a crazy attitude on myself? When I write it it sounds ludicrous, but when it goes through my head every day, it seems perfectly understandable. To some extent Im still dealing with the concept of myself and how I fit in to my 'physical life' as a cultural wanderer; Im still picking up the pieces that were scattered behind my family's decisions, still trying to grapple with the stories of my parents and relatives and trying even harder with the notion that I didnt agree with a *lot* of those stories, and was trying to make up a whole new set of my own. [Note: when I talk about stories here, Im basically meaning belief systems, as the stories we tell ourselves eventually become our fundamental belief system.] Secondly, a few mis-judged perceptions and careless comments from others around me as I was growing up, for a sensitive child, would do the trick.
In the beginning I was raised on these stories, they were my lifeblood and burnt into my brain - that im somehow "littler" than the people of the country I'm in at the time, that for this reason I have to "achieve" or "prove myself", and "lay low and be really really good". That we are somehow always insufficient. I can understand how my parents would have developed these stories for themselves - it comes from their experience as expatriates and of going through decades of racial prejudices. But those stories didnt serve me well when it came to my experience as a second-generation or third-culture kid (or whatever people like to call us these days!), the wanderers who dont have a home, and therefore cant be outsiders; who dont really belong anywhere.
To this day, I witness my parents comfortably fitting into their 20-something year old Sri Lankan pure-skins when we go "home" for the holidays, I see them chatting jovially with my relatives in perfect Sinhalese with perfect Sinhalese behaviour, beliefs, gesticulations and humour - and I watch them from the sidelines. I sit by myself in a corner of the room and observe them all with interest, contribute a few clumsy Sinhalese phrases that I can muster from time to time, and then sit back again in silence. Sri Lankans tend to think I'm perfectly Australian anyway, and it gets tiring to keep fighting people's perceptions all the time, not to mention trying to speak my parent's mother tongue that i've never been educated in. Plus, I dont like not fitting in - it hits a very sore spot.
Im continuously re-writing my stories, putting pen to paper, letting my creative juices flow - writing the warm-and-fuzzy version. They're taking a while, and turning more into novels. But they're getting there. ;)
How about you? What stories are you, or were you, telling yourself in your life? I'd love to know. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.
Lots of love :-)