CHAPTER 12
Reaching Beyond Yourself
Multiple Perspectives
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” —ANAÏS NIN
We all have a unique life story to write, yet we are all a part of the vastness of mankind. We are individuals but just one of 7.5 billion human beings living today. How can your small story expand beyond you and connect with others?
Each of us is a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-duplicated person. Our genetic makeup is different from all others, and this distinction is mirrored in our life experiences. However, our stories and experiences transcend the individual and resonate with others in myriad ways. Here are some things you can consider to broaden your life story and identify with others.
- UNDERSTAND FEELINGS ARE UNIVERSAL: All humans feel fear, love, hunger, and joy. When you include your feelings in your writing, you are reaching out to all others who have feared, loved, hungered, and experienced joy as well. Our emotions go beyond gender, culture, race, and age, and branch out to connect with all others who have shared similar sensations.
- DESCRIBE MILIEU: Enhance the context of your story by adding details of place, atmosphere, and landscape. If you grew up on a farm, add those visual memories of the rural area where you lived. Was it the flat, never-ending plains of Kansas? Or a small farming community dotted with the lakes of Minnesota? In contrast, if you grew up in Toronto, your description of the subways and taxis, the clang and clamor of car horns and sirens, will bring your story to life for other city dwellers. You will touch others with your memories of place.
- IDENTIFY A HISTORICAL PERIOD: In what era does your life story take place? Are you one of the “Greatest Generation” members from the World War II years? What was it like before color TVs, computers, and fast food? Maybe you are a Baby Boomer who grew up during the prosperous 1950s or in the “make love not war” hippie days of the 1960s. Read old newspapers and magazines of the period to refresh your memory, and then add anecdotes to your story to connect your life to others who will remember those times as well. Consider the momentous events that have affected everyone—the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assassination, or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. When you add these into your stories, you establish a time line and make connections to future generations.
- STEP BACK AND DETACH: Look at your life from a distance. Try to become a character in your own life story. For instance, imagine yourself as the young twenty-two-year-old mother, alone and away from home with a newborn while her husband is in the military. Writing from a place of motherhood alone with a baby connects your story with all women in all periods and places in time who shared similar circumstances. As you write, keep in mind these questions: Is this interesting for me to read? Would I read it if it was about someone else?
- FOCUS ON FAMILY: Write with humor and understanding about others who have influenced and touched you along your life’s journey. Adult children, when they read your story, will be looking for their own name to pop up. They want to know what you thought of them as children, teens, and adults. What were your feelings when they were born? Comment on your family and friends in your life story. After all, who would you be today without them in your life? This makes the story bigger than you. Generations to come will one day read your story and know you for the first time through your words. Keep in mind as you write that you are reaching out to future descendants.
Using these techniques can greatly enhance your story, stamping it with context and time. This allows others to see their own lives through your experiences and your words.
Ending Your Life Story
Your life story is still being unveiled as you write. You will continue to grow, change, and learn each day of your life. How do you end your story while you are still midstream? Here are some ideas to consider when you bring your life story to a close.
Re-examine Your Intent
Go back to the first question we posed before you even began to write: Why are you writing your life story? Did you decide to leave a chronological, historical account of your life? If so, you will be finished with your life story when you reach your current age. Did you want to leave a written record of your thoughts, hopes, and dreams? If this is the case, when you have finished this record you will feel a sense of completion and a natural ending. Have you fulfilled the purpose you began with when you started writing?
Look for More Themes
If you write on the core life themes and beyond as we present them in this book (see Part Two), you will feel a sense of completion when the questions no longer reach out and pull you in. When no new memories arise in response to the themes on family, money, or career, then you are done. You have written your life story.
Assess Your Enthusiasm
You never know when fatigue will strike, but you will most likely reach a point where you are simply tired of writing about your life. You will feel ready to leave the past behind and get on with the day-to-day living of your life. The future will excite you. You will feel as if you’ve been there, done that. Now it’s time to move on.
Look for Patterns
Once you have written stories on a number of themes, you may see a pattern emerge. Is there an undercurrent of love, loss, and rebirth that threads through your life? Maybe you feel that luck and circumstance have played the most significant part in your life; you just happened to be in the right place at the right time to get your dream job and meet your soul mate. Once you see the pattern, you will know how to end your story and bring the theme of your life full circle. One of our students recognized a pattern when her stories about family, spirituality, and death all focused on one overarching theme, forgiveness. She ended her life story with a powerful reflection on this.
Trust Your Intuition
You will simply know when and how to end this chapter in your life story. Maybe a poem or song refrain will begin to play in your mind. Your ending does not need to be dramatic or climactic. After all, your life is not over. You still have chapters to write another time.
Deciding on an Ending
It is often difficult to know how to end your life story. One of the most powerful techniques is to read other memoirs. How did they end? Some tell the story in reverse, beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. Many memoirs will give you insights into your own writing as well as how to end your story. Here are some ideas.
- Choose one of your favorite childhood fairy tales or a movie and rewrite the ending. Have fun with this and play with how the story might end.
- Now that you are warmed up, sit down and write the ending to your story. Keep in mind that you are playing and that nothing you write needs to be kept or shown to anyone else. You may choose to write two or three different endings. Put them aside and review them at a later date. You can then read them with fresh eyes and decide what you wish to keep.
Exercise: Finishing Touches
This exercise will help you step outside yourself and understand and write from another person’s perspective. It will take the “me” out of your story and allow you to make connections with others, both psychologically and in your writing.
- Choose a time from your childhood and write about an experience that you remember well. It could have been your very first vacation or first day of school. Whatever the memory, be certain you recall it completely. Then write down the anecdote, including as many details as you remember.
- Now take the same incident you wrote about the first time and write it from the third-person perspective. In other words, you will be reporting what happened using the he and she pronouns.
- Finally, choose someone else who was present and write the same story from his or her point of view. You will be getting into the mind of someone else and stepping away from “me.”