I love the New Year’s exercise of looking back at my pictures for the previous year and remembering all the wonderful experiences I’ve gotten to have. Reminiscing on the moments that felt unforgettable, that had somehow slipped my mind. Looking at the highlights always brings a smile and excitement for what the highlights of the coming year will be.
But this year was a uniquely rough one for me. I used the words “disaster”, “freefall”, and “trainwreck” on the regular to say how things were going.
It makes me think about how we “narrative-ize” our lives and what stories we tell of what happened and how things are going.
I remember once in high school when something that happened had made me feel like failure (funny, I can’t even remember what it was now). My Dad came to talk to me about it and said, “you know, I could tell the story of my life as a financial failure. With that as the foregone conclusion, I could collect plenty of evidence.” It felt like a vulnerable admission. I wasn’t sure what to say. “But, I could also tell the story of myself as a master of problem solving, getting past each issue to the next big success. There’s enough evidence for that too. It really matters which evidence you choose to collect.”
I didn’t realize just how valuable his advice was until I was sitting around recently with the cast of a show I was in and I mentioned the concept of my life’s narrative and the stories we each write for ourselves by how we talk about the things that happen and no one seemed to know what I was talking about. It was a treasure of knowledge I’d been taking for granted.
So let’s narrative-ize my 2022, shall we?
I could tell the story of a year where we finally bought a second investment property, locked in a super low interest rate right before they went up, found reliable tenants right away.
I got to narrate Lamb of God. It was such a dream to be part of one of the most beautifully written things I’ve ever heard and be inspired by such mastery among those in the company.
My short film screened at a film festival. People truly seemed to resonate with it and be really impressed with me and my ideas. Soon after, I got to play MacBeth and tackle such deliciously interesting material that I never thought I’d get to do.
I got to fulfill the dream I’ve had for probably 14 years of seeing the Oberammergau Passion Play in southern Germany and –even with that kind of build-up, it wildly exceeded my expectations. I loved it so, so much. It was a delight to get to share that experience with my parents and good friends. And it inspired a screenplay idea that I am so excited to write.
I had incredible adventures with my husband and sons. I loved hiking to wildflowers and waterfalls, visiting Bear Lake, and having a Pacific Northwest road trip that made it feel like all the future family adventures we’ve always dreamed about are not only possible, but closer than ever.
I sat in awe of my two amazing boys. Watching them learn and grow is one of the most thrilling and fulfilling things I’ve ever experienced. I am floored by my three-year-old’s memory and tenderness and thoughtfulness. My eighteen-month-old’s laughter and silliness can brighten any day and I love snuggling him so, so much.
We got a new puppy, who still acts like a puppy, which can be hard, but is so, so smart and loves my older son so much.
And I’ve had the opportunity to spend the fall and winter rehearsing for both A Christmas Carol and Pride and Prejudice, both of which have been so rewarding and had such dynamic, warm wonderful people in them and made me feel like myself again as an artist.
The OTHER NARRATIVE of this year could go something like:
The overstimulation and overwhelm and stress of having two toddlers made me feel like I was hitting a breaking point two or three times a week. My house was in a constant, chaotic mess and sometimes we showed up places without any shoes because we sincerely just could not find them anywhere.
My gallbladder starting freaking out again, which started to lead to liver damage, which nearly necessitated skipping the trip to Germany to have emergency gallbladder surgery. My numbers stabilized and we went, only to have my appendix rupture on the trip (which led to daily pain affecting my experience of every beautiful place) and necessitated a different, unrelated emergency surgery only ten days or so after dodging the first one.
Because my appendix was so inflamed, they couldn’t actually get it out and it is still too inflamed to remove, so I’m still waiting on another surgery any time.
We took our dog, Scout, on an awesome birthday hike, only to have me fall and badly roll my ankle and spend what was going to be the rest of her birthday fun at the Instacare.
Not long after, she was hit by a car and passed away. I cried literally every day for a month and just when I was starting to feel peace and accept the reality of the situation, the city came and chopped down 300 20-year-old trees in our neighborhood (200 or more of which didn’t need to go) and restarted my feeling like everything just keeps getting taken away and can’t come back.
Never has an autumn needed the relief of a good Christmas more, but it was not to be. Storms stranded my husband in Utah for Christmas while I was in Alaska and so we were each with the other’s family for all the joys of the holiday and I didn’t get to see my toddler’s Christmas morning expression, which I had looked forward to so, so much.
So, which story is the truth?
They both are.
Both of these years really happened and incidentally, they’re the same year.
But how you tell the story of your life and your experiences matters. Even as I typed those two different versions of my life, I had a physiological response to them. The happy and grateful one made my breathing even, relaxed my muscles; gave me moments of giddiness. The other gave me an instant stomachache and made me well up with tears.
I don’t think we should brush our hard feelings under the rug, but I do think, as we look over what has happened, that we should find ways to see ourselves through the lens of strength and potential and resilience instead of weakness and unluckiness and doom. We should see the world through the eyes of opportunity for creativity and innovation, not a place that offers nothing but sorrow and heartbreak. Life is a chance to keep trying and getting better, not that place where you can’t catch a break.
The two most important parts of how you tell the story of your year are 1) where you fit in, and 2) where the Lord fits in. Are you someone being tossed around by hardship? Or are you a person with occasion after occasion to rise to? Do you see the Lord as ever faithful and continuously by your side or do you see Him as, perhaps, not interceding when you hoped He would?
That has been one of the hardest things about the year I’ve had; to learn that I was a bit more of a fair-weather friend to the Lord than I had hoped. I found myself, in frustrating moments, feeling that He had abandoned me. I found myself so often feeling that He had let certain things happen just to teach me a lesson. A lesson I would rather not have learned.
Is that a narrative you have sometimes told of God as well?
I never realized just how strongly I believed in everything happening for a reason—and by implication the Lord moving the pieces to make difficult things happen–until so many things began to happen at once that felt just too cruel in the irony of their timing. I’d heard the Lord was a tease, but this felt more like a bully.
But I didn’t want to believe that about Him and it didn’t make sense with everything else that I knew of His love for us.
The thing that helped me the most in grappling for a better point of view on that was a video released on the Church’s YouTube channel of a mother of seven whose husband was killed during a deployment in Afghanistan. She was quite open about her annoyance with the typical condolence lines about “everything happening for a reason” and said that she had come to believe instead that “God can make reason out of everything that happens.”
We are in a fallen world where natural processes are in motion and God cannot and will not interrupt every planet’s orbit or every cell’s degeneration. He did not send my dog across the street as a car was coming just to give my life a shake-up. But since she did run out at the wrong time, He has used the opportunity to teach me things that could bless my life as I go on.
He can make reason out of all that happens. And you can make reason out of all that has happened too. You can collect the evidence of your 2022; the memories, the pictures, the posts, the messages and choose what story you want to tell with them. Who are you as its protagonist? What is it all shaping you into? What glorious outcomes could result from this year’s preparations? Where is God in your story? What gifts did He fill last year with? What will you do with them?
Tell the story of last year as a stepping stone to the person you’re becoming. That can include the victories and the low points, but either way let yourself be a character on the rise.
