Scrolling through Instagram early this morning, my creative interest was caught by a fun post. One of the people I follow, paperloveproject, wrote “Today’s writing challenge is to write down your life story using only five sentences.”
Well that’s just the kind of challenge that I love and it connects perfectly with this year’s theme of Story.
5 sentence writing challenge … I accept!
Challenge On
The logical side of my brain immediately divided my life years by five, to assist me with this challenge. And, go brain!, that was actually very helpful.
I divided a page in my journal like this:
0 – 12 years
12 – 24 years
24 – 36 years
36 – 48 years
48 – 60 years
It’s both amazing and a bit alarming to see my life broken down so simply. It naturally divided into childhood, teen and early adulthood, adulthood/family raising, early middle age, and my current time, middle age to not quite senior.
This gave me a great framework to build my life story around. And you know what? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, to tell my story in five sentences.
However, here we go…
My Life in 5 Sentences
My childhood was a unique blend of magical playfulness, delightful creativity and scary heart pounding mysteries, and I learned to be silent and afraid.
Instead of outgrowing my fears, I only accumulated more as life appeared to be so chaotic and random, and I hid away my shining self and continued to be afraid.
The incredible joys of raising a family allowed me to tuck the frightened parts of myself deep within, out of sight, and although fear gripped me still, curiosity gained an upper hand.
Weary of living in secret, soul numbing fear I heard that still small voice inviting me to pry open the door that had long been closed, face my terrors and banish them.
My life is a unique blend of magical playfulness, delightful creativity and Divine mysteries, and I am learning to speak my truth and live in joy-filled freedom.
To Be Continued
As I worked on this intriguing challenge, I realized I could actually write my life story in 5 words.
Fear
Fear
Fear
Fear
Freedom
My life has been ruled by fears…of the dark, of my intuitive abilities, of being my true shining self, of speaking up, of being seen, of being enough…and it has been full of worries, anxieties and, as Thoreau aptly wrote, quiet desperation.
How grateful I am that after being continually invited to slay those fears and step into the Light and be my exquisite self, I reached a point in my journey where I cried out Yes.
I am grateful as well to paperloveproject for this thought provoking and fun 5 sentence writing challenge. Creating this abbreviated life story had a deep impact on me and energetically opened new channels in my heart.
It is not the end of the story. Oh no. The story continues on and I am excited to be creating it as I go.
