Stories make us who we are. What’s yours? Okay, girlfriend, you know I’m not talking about a story such as Hansel and Gretel and the trail of breadcrumbs they left to find their way back home.

“What I say to myself about myself is life and death. The difference between the joy ride or the hard road,” says Sheri Salata. So, what are you assuming about yourself and your life? What are you choosing to believe?

In “First we invented stories, then they changed us,” psychologist Dan McAdams explains that narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming. In the process you combine a selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future to give you a sense of unity, moral purpose and temporal coherence.

He found that people who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations are more likely to tell life stories that transition from bad to good, something which he calls redemptive stories.

The opposite of that is a contamination story, in which people feel that their lives are going from good to bad. These people are less driven to contribute and they tend to be more depressed and anxious and interpret their lives as being less coherent compared to those who tell redemptive stories.

It makes one wonder: Do you tell a contamination story because you’re depressed or does telling a contamination story cause your depression? In any case, narrative therapy focuses on helping people to re-interpret their personal stories in a more constructive light. Modify your tale as you spin it, and it will help you to change your mind set.

This is something only you can do. As Mike Dooley says, you are powerless when it comes to living other people’s lives. On the other hand, you are powerful when it comes to living your own. Don’t give away this power waiting to see what happens to the rest of the world when you can decide what will happen in your life.

Michael A Singer writes that you have to change from “outer solution consciousness” to “inner solution consciousness”. He says you have to break the habit of thinking that the solution to your problems is to rearrange things outside. The only permanent solution is to go inside.

In ‘Everything is here to help you’, Matt Kahn offers an emotionally supportive way to shift. He says that when you’re in a situation that causes you agony, you should ask yourself this question: Am I seeing this moment in a way that helps me or hurts me?

It definitely hurts to judge things – whether inside or outside – on whether they’re perfect or not. Perfectionism is a disease, girlfriend. Rather go the wabi-sabi route. Tatenda Chakabuda explains that wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that encourages finding beauty in imperfection, impermanence and the incomplete.

It values authenticity, simplicity and encourages us to embrace the flawed or imperfect aspects of life, objects and experiences. Like everything around us, we are always in a state of change. When we chase perfection, there will permanently be a void, because we’re running after something we will never really achieve, says Tatenda.

“Due to the imperfections that exist around us, sometimes it can be challenging to notice, let alone appreciate the beauty that surrounds us. The Wabi-sabi philosophy is rooted in recognizing and appreciating the beauty of things as they are, even when they are broken, old or damaged . . . Our beauty (and that of the world around us) lies in our imperfections, so why take that away from ourselves,” Tatenda asks. 

You are responsible for finding beauty in your existence, for finding things to be in awe of, for embracing the magical side of life. You are responsible for giving your years and circumstances meaning, for telling a redemptive story and not a contamination story. You have to believe that what’s meant for you will never miss you, although the twists and turns your path can take along the way might be totally unexpected and not always welcome in the moment.

As Sheri Salata says: “Bring that love, bring that magic, bring that wonder to what you’re doing right now because that’s how the breadcrumbs find you.”