Retelling Our Stories
Photo by Nirav Insomniac on Unsplash
I attended an online discussion last week on the Asian immigrant experience where one of the panelists, Micah Kessel, said some things that resonated with me. He talked about how empathy meant treating our experiences and those of others as valid--even if we don't always agree or understand each other. I was so impressed with his sharing that I looked up his website. According to his bio, Micah pivoted from a theater background to human-centered design to starting a company that creates empathy training for organizations. The bio skillfully showcased his experiences and achievements, and my attention was caught by the seamless connection between his theater background and his understanding of the relationship between emotions and design. It gave his story a sense of wholeness. This approach was so different from how I saw my own work history that it got me thinking.
I often downplay my experiences and see myself as "not good enough" for what I want to do next. Part of that tendency is cultural--Chinese people are trained see what’s missing and keep ourselves humble, while Americans are trained to puff themselves up. But then again, many Americans don't believe in themselves, either—otherwise, imposter syndrome wouldn't be a thing. This tendency to see what's not enough has made it so difficult to share my work with other people, and I wondered if I could try something different.
Feeling ashamed of the past
My background has been "all over the place"--writing, energy healing, investing, accounting, and now back to writing--and I've always felt ashamed of it. In job searches or business, we market ourselves based on our experiences and achievements that contributed to the position we want to be in. But I always saw my multiple career directions as missteps. Until I decided to get back into writing, I'd never mentioned to even my close friends that I majored in it in college. I thought it was behind me.
Each time I changed career direction, I tended to walk away from an experience rather than see it as a building block to where I was going. But ignoring my past didn't mean that my past ignored me. With each new direction, I unconsciously tried to prove that my life wasn't a series of failures. And each new choice was weighed down by the fear that I would repeat those mistakes.
A new perspective
Only in the last couple of years have I started seeing my history from a new perspective. I came across Human Design, a personality system based on astrology and I-Ching. My aura type is a "Manifestor" in the Human Design system, which is a personality type all about initiating new things and bringing new ideas into form. Now, anybody can be creative and bring in new ideas, but Manifestors tend to need to create according to their vision rather than work on other people's visions. They often don't fit into traditional jobs that require consistent energy and staying in the same type of work for years. Their energy ebbs and flows, and they tend to have a lot of energy for new projects and need downtime between projects.
Now, I don't believe in everything Human Design says about my personality because sometimes the interpretations get too prescriptive. But parts of it have been enlightening. For me, I have always struggled with work. I've never had a job I didn't tire of in six months--about the time I became good at it. I once thought that if only I found my "passion," I would feel interested enough to stay in it. That is until I thought I found it in accounting. I went through two years of school (which I enjoyed) and started working, but I realized something was wrong. I loved learning accounting and understanding how businesses work. But doing the same thing over and over made me depressed. After a few years, I realized working for others would never work for me, and I began working toward self-employment.
Human Design showed me that my work history was not a series of mistakes but the result of someone who needs flexibility and creativity while living in a culture that values the opposite. Accepting who I am and redefining my past gave me a sense of wholeness and trust that I've never had.
Taking it further
After reading Micah's bio, I started thinking about how the different things we get into have a throughline, a theme, that is who we are and what we're fascinated by. If we can pinpoint the themes that run through each of our interests, they wouldn't seem like disjointed parts of us but each contributing to a beautiful whole.
Of course, work is not everything we are, and our most meaningful experiences in life often have nothing to do with work. But today, I'm thinking about how my perspectives about my past inform the stories I tell others about who I am. Perhaps I can find confidence in the threads that connect what once seemed like random or experimental choices (and combat imposter syndrome!).
As a teenager, I wrote a story about a dragon who was turned into a human as punishment for murdering humans (then fell in love with a girl, of course), so he could understand what it's like to be one of them. Another story that comes to mind was about an alien searching for her lost friend who had crashed on Earth, eventually finding humans dressed up like her friend near the crash site--Area 51. Even back then, my stories were about empathy and understanding people through their own eyes.
In my twenties, I found a fascination with metaphysics and psychology and dove into healing the parts of me that held deep shame. I had grown up not knowing how to talk to anyone about my feelings, and my relationships were superficial and unsatisfying as a result. I loved the results of this work so much that I never stopped, always trying to resolve my internal and external conflicts and understand their dynamics better. Along the way, I learned several healing modalities and tried to work as an energy healer, but I found it too difficult to continue since I still struggled to work with people.
After moving on from healing work (but still using it for myself), I became interested in studying money, first through investing for my husband's retirement, then through school to be an accountant. I found accounting to be not so different from energy work because money is a type of "energy" that flows through our households, our businesses, and the economic system. Money and emotions are both part of systems that can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on how we use and navigate them.
Over the years, I realized that I constantly study the systems I'm part of and consider ways of optimizing them for health and efficiency. The systems I've learned include physical health and nutrition, emotional health and healing, business, and creative flow.
I returned to writing when I felt the need to share what I'd been studying. It was not enough to use it to help my friends here and there. But returning to creative work made me face my lifelong fears of being criticized and other inner obstacles that kept me from working in more creative fields. These challenges launched me into several years of learning about inspiration and creative flow, resolving conflicts and misunderstandings within myself that keep me from living freely. So that's what I write about today.
Which of these stories is true?
You might be wondering, which of these stories is true? The one where I see myself as not "having it together," the one where I'm an experimenter, or the one where everything I've done serves where I am now? Do we get to choose?
Yeah, we do. Despite what some religions think, whether we define ourselves through other people's values or our own, we define ourselves regardless. The question is whether we default to what's given to us or choose stories that reflect who we are.
As far as which of my stories is true, I think the only untrue one is the default story that made me feel ashamed. There's nothing wrong with valuing consistency, stability, and depth of knowledge and skill in one field. We need people like that. But when we believe that's the only "right" way to work and live, we treat those who don't fit in as malfunctioning robots rather than humans with personalities and preferences. We buy into a value hierarchy that makes some people feel better about themselves at the expense of others, which is never sustainable--because we can always end up at the bottom of that hierarchy unless we keep proving ourselves worthy.
Anyway, this is me redefining my story in a way that feels not just accepting but empowering, and it's been fruitful. I hope this gave you some ideas of how you can retell parts of your past that you may feel ashamed of. Please feel free to share your stories with me!
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what thoughts it might have provoked for you. Let me know down below!
