10. Writing your origin story
May 24, 2025
Superheroes and villains have origin stories. It is the story of what made them who they are. We each have origin stories as well. Actually, we have multiple origin stories, running in parallel, yet we hardly take time to look back on them and see the patterns, note the lessons we’ve learned, nor note the lessons we don’t seem to learn (because we seem to be getting into the same unwanted situation over and over).
In our resumes, we tell our professional origin story (our “ego” story, according to Dr. Deepak Chopra) where we studied, what special skills we have, where we worked, and what we accomplished at each place. My career trajectory, like many others I think, wasn’t a clear path, but looking back, I can see how one position led to the next. If we are working on our emotional journey, we may map out important emotional experiences in our life. For example, as part of grief work that I undertook after my mother died, one exercise was to go back over your life and note each place where you had a significant loss (you can read more on this in “The Grief Recovery Handbook” by John James and Russel Friedman). And, as part of work with Dr. Amanda Hanson on re-birthing your inner maiden, we made timelines of all the situations in which we betrayed ourselves (our maiden) or were betrayed by others, and lost the connection to that little maiden we started out as. All of these types of “life reviews” can be helpful tools to lead us to re-discover our true selves. If you do an internet search on “life review” many tools will come up. Find the one that works for you.
Sometimes I think I have been multiple distinct versions of Kara over my adulthood – each related to the next but distinctly different in terms of where I lived, what I did with my time, who I associated with, what my main roles were. I moved often as an adult as well, so each physical location, each school I attended, each job I had - looking back, I see that those separate my adult life into phases, different versions of myself. Getting married, becoming a mother, moving, changing jobs – each of these milestones expanded and shifted my story. I mentioned to one of my friends that I had been connecting with former co-workers through posting these essays, and she said - that’s great, they each knew a different version of you, and now you have these reminders of those times.
This past winter, as I was starting to explore my creative side that has been dormant for a long time, I drew a map of my adulthood, starting from my childhood tree that I mentioned earlier, and noting each shift among versions of myself. I created a symbol to represent each phase, and, in the figure attached to this post, drew them in a path, a circle coming out from the center, where I started.
There are a few things I really liked about this exercise - one, it made me consider each of these phases as a distinct part of my story. I thought about the people I was friends with then, how I spent my time, what I was focused on. I also like how there is no clear part of this path that showed that “I made it.” There is no end square in this game of life that we get to and say - oh I’m here, I’m done! It’s simply a path. Finally, I love that there is plenty of room for the next phases. I have this impression that people assume that once you reach retirement, then that’s it- that is the last chapter of your story. But looking back at the many chapters I had over my adult years, there’s no reason to believe that will end. I will keep on growing, changing, creating new chapters. There is still plenty of room to add to this story, and I plan to do so over the next 30 or so years. I’m excited to meet future Kara!
I found creating this map very enlightening, and helped me put together my story of all those different versions of myself in a way that I could reflect on. As an exercise this week, you could spend some time considering the chapters of your own that can help you to tell your story. What does a life review tell you about who you are, where you’ve been and what is important to you?
