As the printed word bleeds to death in the age of eReaders and tablets, it seems the only places I see magazines anymore are waiting rooms and checkout aisles in grocery stores. Story is not dead. Only the traditional method of subscribing to it. I know very few people who still have the city paper delivered to their driveway each morning. Is there a newspaper or magazine you subscribe to anymore?
You may be surprised to learn you have more subscriptions than you think. We all subscribe to different narratives in our own life. In addition to “receiving something regularly”, subscribe also means “to agree with”; as in I subscribe to the 1945 curse of the billy goat which says the Cubs will never win the World Series. Such a belief has led to the casualty of hope in countless Chicago Cubs fans. Until last year when the narrative changed, of course.
Our personal narratives begin with vows, too. When we make a vow, we subscribe to a story. The vows in our life create a plot by which we spend our days.
I cannot trust anyone. I am overweight. God will not show up for me. I have nothing to say. I will never have enough money. I will never be chosen. I do not belong.
You have your own.
Consider a forty-five year old single man who spends his evenings and weekends chatting on college dating sites and hitting the bars with 20-somethings. Unbeknownst to him, his narrative goes something like this, I will never be enough for relationship with women my own age, so I must try for someone younger.
A woman graduated from an Ivy League school in three years. Immediately she got to work on her masters, and followed suit with her doctorate. As she walked across the doctoral commencement stage toward her diploma, she could not shake the sense that she still felt like the ten year old girl whose 4th grade report card was not good enough for Dad.
These are the stories we live by. Vows made out of wounds which act as composers and directors for the plays of our lives. We subscribe to storylines before we are even aware, and soon our script is the only strategy we know for life.
If you struggle to know the narrative you have been living, ask yourself: What would happily ever after be for me? If things fell into place and my heart’s desires came true, how would my story resolve? Or, perhaps, your inability to even hope for happily ever after exposes your script. The answer to these questions and the process by which you think about them points to the story to which you have subscribed.
What stories show up each morning in your head and heart?
How much would it cost to unsubscribe?
