So Many Stories

---

Can I introduce myself without introducing my family? I think for now I will summarize my life in brief and fill in the details later. Otherwise you will be here for hours, wading through a jumbled mess of Legos, Fisher Price circus animals, half-remembered overheard arguments, used college textbooks, love letters, a discarded wedding dress, and other countless relics of my past.

My grandfather loved to tell stories. He would talk to anyone who listened. He would tell the story about when he hopped on a train car travelling south to find his mother. He would tell the story about how he met my grandmother. He loved to tell people that my grandmother was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. He'd sing about her: "Five foot two, eyes of blue." He loved music and creating art with his hands. He taught me the nursery rhyme, "Mares Eat Oats." We watched WWF matches and old movies together. I found comfort in the smell of the aftershave he used to cloak the smell of ever-clear on his breath and the lingering scent of the cigarettes he smoked out in his work space because my grandmother could not abide the smell of it in the house.

My mother was a teen mom like her own mother, with a significant difference: instead of staying married, like my grandparents, my sister's dad bolted before my sister was born. Their brief relationship ended in a short divorce. To this day, I don't even know what he looks like. As I learned that my sister and I came from two different men, I imagined a different life, with my sister and I sharing a dad and living together as a family.

When I was born, my mom had remarried. She met my father a few years after her first marriage. They moved into their own house and brought me into the world. Around the same time, my father hurt his back at work in a coal mine. They moved back in with her parents, living together in the upstairs addition that my grandfather had built on the house. My dad moved out before I turned 2. I remember him visiting on Christmas and my birthday, at first, then not at all. My mom called him a stick-in-the-mud. She would give thanks that he wasn't around any more, then curse his stupidity for leaving in the same breath.

Only years later would I be able to pinpoint what actually fragmented these relationships, but not in time to prevent a similar narrative from playing out in my own life.

The Road Less Taken

---

Since I can remember, I've been fascinated by the stories of things. The stories could be about the way things work, or historical events, but I took more interest in the personification of natural forces in mythology. The stranger the story, event, or object being discussed, the more the story fascinated me.

Forming a personal narrative has helped me to recognize the patterns in my life and view power dynamics in the broader society that helped to shape my personality. Where did I get the idea, for instance, of normalcy in my sister and I sharing a father? Did it come from my own grandparents, church, shows, family doll sets, my DNA?

Do we create ourselves as we create a story about ourselves? Where Jordan B. Peterson refers to "self-authorship," I think of self-generation. Self-authorship as a term covers a segment of the full range of power we can claim in telling our own story. It carries power in itself, but remains incomplete. Self-generation may not cover it, either, but I think it gets closer to the goal of pinning grand concepts down with meager words. All work is meant to build on previous work, and Jordan B. Peterson impresses me the more I study his work, so don't get me wrong about the admiration I feel for him.

Authorship points to the past. All written or spoken word becomes the past as soon as it manifests in the physical world. Self-generation as a term points to the future becoming the present. I believe Presence in waking life holds the key to unlock our full potential. Co-creation gets used as a buzzword in New Age circles, but I don't like that, either, for reasons I intend to cover in another article.

Self-generation puts responsibility and power in the hands of the individual to reconsider the stories we tell and their effect on our future by influencing present choices. To generate means to create. As anyone chooses how to tell a personal story, the story becomes shaped by which details the storyteller decides to include, and which details they leave out. Telling the story creates a feedback loop. The listener becomes involved, formulating an opinion about the story and possibly the storyteller. The listener reacts, setting the stage for future interactions. The storyteller may internalize the listener's reaction, forming an opinion about those events, other people in the story, or themselves. This may in turn affect how the storyteller crafts the story at the next telling.

If a person maintains awareness of other people's potential to judge someone based on this feedback loop, they may withhold certain details in storytelling or refrain from telling certain stories, altogether. Detached thinking personalities may conceal details because they see an advantage to doing so. Attached feeling personalities tend to value other's feelings in their own decision-making processes, and may craft the story with the intent to evoke an emotion in the listener.

Anecdote Girl

---

People living with autism tend to possess a weak or nonexistent social filter. One of the first visible indicators that my consciousness fell somewhere on the autism spectrum appeared as my inability to shut the hell up, ever. I remember talking and singing for much of my childhood, until I reached adolescence and became preoccupied with reading books and listening to music. Even then, I played the role of token "anecdote girl" in class. You know, the one who raises her hand with a question or response and winds up telling her life story because something happened of which this class reminded her.

Over time, I wanted to exploit this talent and hone it into a skill. I also needed to learn a lot more about the condition affecting me and how to manage it. Problem was, I had no idea it fell on the autism spectrum until a couple of years ago. I only managed to get tested last winter. I'm still waiting on the full report.

In addition to loving stories, I also desperately hate being lied to. When I became aware the media has been lying to everyone since its inception, I opened myself up to a near-obsessive, deep yearning for the truth.

All this combined led me to study psychology, folklore, sociology, anthropology, and current events. Academic burnout kept me at a Bachelor's degree with some graduate level work completed in 2007. In 2010 and 2014, I birthed my two daughters. I earned a Certificate in Holistic Psychology in 2015. Personal experience has given me a PhD in awareness, a thirst for more knowledge, and a deep ache of loss and betrayal. A debilitating chronic illness keeps me housebound with migraines a lot of the time and has cost me custody of my two daughters because neither of the dads cared to take care of me through sickness. Here I am, 35 years old, a wrecked life, a heaping dose of awareness, and hopefully enough time to pull my life out of the wreckage, which I intend to do.

I want to break through previous writing blocks and keep exploring the truth. I need to turn my abilities into marketable skills. This blog is the draft for a memoir as well as the prototype for a journal as I also design a self-improvement tool based on life coaching, the Tarot, and journalling as mental self care.

I want to inform, uplift, and inspire you to keep reading. I want to show what it looks like to go through a process of self-dialogue and craft a productive way to live despite setbacks or limitations. I want to help you raise your personal awareness and begin to perform exercises if you don't already, or give you new ones, if you do, that will not only encourage you to look within but give you a tool that brings what you look at into clearer focus.

The Bridge

---

Expect to see a wide range of topics from me, on everything from alchemy, shamanism, applying for disability benefits, migraines, to toxic chemicals, mechanical engineering, or herbal medicine. Expect the topics to weave around my personal experiences, beginning from an early age. Expect to be disappointed when I miss my own weekly deadline, on occasion (Thursdays at noon). I was 2 weeks late being born, and I haven't stopped since. Mostly I'm on time, but something just happens, sometimes, which makes lateness inevitable.

Thanks for reading this and any support you show this channel, Steemers. Until next week: Full Steem ahead!