Author James Hillman writes of it in his book THE SOUL’S CODE: In Search of Character and Calling. He writes, “Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we learned to imagine our childhoods. We are…less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us” (pg. 4).
I like this. I’m a believer in story. Born into a certain way of fictionalizing the world about us, we continue to create a reality in our minds from preset patterns toward story telling. That story is what creates us. Change happens when we learn to retell the story. When we learn a new story to tell.
Are our traumatic stories really so traumatic? Or were they but the shaping of self toward a new kind of character? One that we try so hard to reject in our attempt to align it with a “normal” that we’ve become convinced our trauma has distracted us from?
Normal is but a leaders vision that we’ve all come to feel most meaningful. We should do like Bob Dylan suggests, and not follow leaders. Lead ourselves unto ourselves, and become what was meant for us to become. …until death do us part.
The Generalist 