Love

we are all authors of our own lives

I’m not against self-affirmation on principle. Many people benefit from empowering messages that remind them of their intrinsic worth. However, that isn’t the sort of bromide that works with my particular chemistry. I want to understand what to do, not how to feel. Even though I might enjoy hearing that I’m good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me, that news doesn’t give me tactical guidance on how to live my life.

So when I tell you that “We are all authors of our own lives” – I don’t mean to trumpet the primacy of your own role in shaping your destiny, even though that’s a useful bit of affirmation. I mean for you to think about the process of authorship, the task of writing a story from both facts and fantasy over many years.

Whether you realize it or not, you carry around a story in your head about who you are. You draft, write and rewrite your internal explanation of the kind of person you are, the character you have, the things you will and will not do. This work of self-conception is the greatest novel ever written, or at least it should be for you.

Early on, very little of your story is constrained by actual events, since you’re too young to have been in all of the situations you anticipate that you’ll experience. You have the freedom of your imagination, and you write your story based on what you’ve seen in your family, friends and others in life and fiction. You’ll imagine, for example, that you’re just like your dad, or not at all like your mom, or a bit like Al Pacino in Scarface, or a lot like Lindsey Lohan on Twitter. Then as you grow older, your story becomes a lot more personalized to you, based more on your experiences and less on your aspirations.

You have years, maybe decades, to write your beautiful story of who you are, and then something happens. It may be one traumatic event, or a series of little events that are only clearly related in retrospect – but it’s...