I used to look around and find myself strangely jealous of the religious. It’s a compelling bargain, isn’t it? In exchange for just one hour of their day on a Sunday morning, they receive a clear sense of purpose, community, and never have to deal with the existential angst that comes with a purposeless life. It is a prudent deal that means they don’t have to honestly answer some of the toughest questions humans have ever come up with. The hopelessness that comes with a seemingly futile existence is neatly solved with faith. Simple.

But for you and me, that deal eventually broke.

Deconstructing from religion often feels like staring out a window at a falling snow that doesn’t simply seem to fall, but appears to erase. Suddenly, the glass window is the only thing separating you from an endless white void with no landmarks, no exits, and nothing familiar. If you’re lucky you are left with a rhythmic thrum of anxiety in the base of your skull, wondering how you are supposed to navigate a world without the map you were handed at birth. If you’re unlucky you might experience panic attacks at the sudden loss of meaning in contrast of the perspective that a vast universe is completely indifferent to you.

This is where the beautiful, radical grace of Narrative Therapy meets the heavy burden of Existentialism.

In the religious framework I grew up in, I was taught that I was the problem. My doubts were framed as moral failures; and questions were symptoms of a wandering heart. But Narrative Therapy invited me to separate the identity of myself from the problem. The rigid doctrines left behind were not a reflection of who I actually was. They were just a label. And a label isn’t me, it’s a box - an outline of something to pigeonhole us into.

Navigating the tightrope of life without the framework that religion gives can be daunting. The vocabulary of the faith is limiting, but that structure may give some comfort. The religious lexicon ensures that the vast, messy, beautiful truth of human meaning is watered down and lost. It is hammered into a box where it doesn’t really fit.

The secret of deconstruction is that people don’t lose their faith due to being broken, they walked away because they finally realized that the religious experience is a prison of thoughts, experiences, and the limited language we are forced to use.

Deconstruction is outgrowing the cage.

But freedom is heavy.

When you leave the safety of a pre-written religious script, you are forced to confront a deeply scary revelation: meaning and intrinsic worth actually have to be built by your own labor. Sedation with entertainment and being guided to the right answer always seemed the easier and softer way. It is terrifying to look at the blank page of your life and realize that no one is coming to write the next chapter for you.

Are you a writer or a reader?

I truly believe there are two kinds of people on planet Earth: writers and readers.

The readers digest the information given to them; their worldview is passive, automatic, and doesn’t require any difficult thought. They live in a world they simply discover, walking around comfortable and guided. Religion is often built for the readers.

But you, my friend, are a writer.

The writer sees the world through a lens of true novelty, where everything is original and everything has meaning. Writers know the freedom of a world without limits. Yes, stepping into this role means you have to carry the weight of that freedom every day. But it also means that your life is poetry. You no longer have to wait for meaning to be handed down to you from a pulpit; you get to build it from scratch.

Your past is not your destiny. The future is for the taking.

Taking ownership of your own narrative is a violent assertion of tangible reality. It is the ultimate act of rebellion. So, embrace the blank page. Let go of the boxes and the labels. The world is no longer something you just have to blindly discover and accept; it is a landscape of infinite possibilities waiting for you to create your own value.

Subscribe now

Pick up your pen and start to write a story that is finally, authentically yours.

In the Emily Wilson Translation of The Odyssey there is a moment where Odysseus looks out at an unforgiving, calamitous sea. He is a man who survived catastrophe after catastrophe, yet lost himself in the process.

There is a reason this story has stood the rest of time and that stories with similar tropes are ubiquitous. It is because it is a masterclass in portraying a timeless human struggle: the realization that surviving a crisis is rarely the end of the script. The real battle begins on the journey home.

For many of us, our lives feel remarkably like this fragmented epic. I first read Homer in 10th grade, and it spoke to me then, just as it does at 34. We carry invisible weight— what reality show TV viewers might call “Baggage.” We have the aftermath of losses, breakups, old failures, and the exhaustion of trying to exist in a world that demands we constantly succeed and flourish. We are not the storms that try to toss us as we will learn through Narrative Therapy.

Externalizing the storm

In narrative therapy, a foundational principle is radical, yet simple: The person is not the problem; the problem is the problem. When we experience anxiety, grief, or self-doubt, we tend to internalize them, believing “I am broken.”

This goes further than simple Person Centered Language. Calling someone “A person who struggles with addiction,” versus an “Addict,” is one example of person centered language and by externalizing our challenges we separate our core identity from our pain by placing a line of demarcation around it.

The shame and fear we sometimes experience are simply the raging tides we must sail through; they are not the ship itself.

De-Colonizing the Self

The question of identity, who am I, is a central conflict in an overwhelming majority of stories. The coming of age movies with the Brat Pack - The breakfast club, St. Elmo’s Fire, etc all show protagonists stripping away the false narratives written for them by a rigid, demanding world. The beauty of watching other’s do this is the realization that we can peel the layers of our onion of identity back as well.

In his critique of identity, the philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote:

“I am endlessly creating myself. And it is being in this state of total creation that I realize the absurdity of others.”

Truly living in yourself is an act of reclamation. It is the realization that finding yourself is not about arriving at a flawless destination, but about claiming the day to day right to exist in your raw, unfiltered humanity. In doing that, you may walk a lonely path among those bold enough to live an examined life.

Re-Authoring the Voyage

As we look forward to Christopher Nolan’s retelling of the classic story of Odysseus we should keep in mind the powerful healing that is the Cycle of The Hero’s Journey. Acknowledge that healing never really moves in a straight line. We loop back; we stall, we succeed and make progress, non-linearly. This is where re-authoring and existentialism meet. We are cast into a vast ocean, completely free to forge our own meaning. If you look closely at your timeline, you will see a survivor who figured out how to swim in the crashing overhead waves of trauma, discomfort and adversity.

Ithaca is not a physical place. It is the space within where we drop anchor and realize that while we cannot control the wind, we command the rudder. You are the hero of your own story.

-lp

And then, my internal narrator revs up like a jet engine taxiing on a designated runway.

Did you journal yet? Have you done your ten minutes of silent breathwork? Did you track your mood? Are you drinking enough water?

Suddenly, the quiet morning is no longer a space to inhabit; it has become a canvas of expectations. We have taken the sacred, ancient concept of tending to the soul and mapped it onto a sterile, leadership productivity model.

“Self-care,” is a hot topic over the last decade, but if we are honest with ourselves, it often feels like a second job—one where we are both the demanding boss and the exhausted employee, constantly monitoring our own performance.

I often feel like I have fallen into the trap of believing that peace is something I must earn through flawless execution. I have a feeling I’m not alone.

The Panopticon of Wellness

Ironically, there exists a strange, modern anxiety in trying to cure our anxiety. We purchase the journals, download the meditation apps, and curate our winding down routines with the precision of an archivist.

We treat our lives like an intricate puzzle—or perhaps an impossible bottle, where we are desperately trying to build a perfectly shipshape, calm interior life through a ridiculously narrow opening, using only the rigid tools of self-improvement.

But true healing cannot be engineered, it must be experienced. When we turn mindfulness into a checklist, we are practicing a subtle form of self-surveillance. We are constantly stepping outside of our own skin to watch ourselves “heal,” asking: Am I doing this right? Am I calm yet?

This is the tyranny of putting essence before existence. We try to construct a rigid, idealized identity—the “mindful person,” the “healed person,” the “balanced person”—and then we force our wild, unpredictable human selves to squeeze into that narrow mold. We spend so much energy polishing the exterior of who we think we should be that we forget to simply be. We try to be optimized, productive and busy before simply being. This construction is a prison of our own making, a panopticon of wellness.

Introducing Invention into Existence

When we find ourselves trapped in the loop of performative wellness, we must remember that freedom does not come from a more disciplined routine. It comes from the willingness to drop the script entirely. It comes from being authentic to our true selves.

In his landmark work Black Skin, White Masks, the existential philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote a line that cuts straight to the heart of what it means to reclaim one’s own life:

“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.”

What it means to apply Fanon’s wisdom to our modern inner lives is to realize that we are not prisoners of our past patterns, nor are we bound to the scripts of the wellness industry.

The real leap is not finding a better system to fix yourself. The real leap is invention. It is the radical act of stepping into the present moment without a plan. This true sense of authenticity and leaning into our truest selves. I’ve been trying to allow myself to be unfinished, messy, and entirely alive. To be authentically myself, but it is a practice, one day at a time.

We have to treat ourselves as human beings, not human doings. The idea of getting to an ordained finish line must be dropped from our lexicon and we must lean into the experience of the journey.

Letting the Coffee Get Cold

What if, tomorrow morning, you did absolutely nothing to improve yourself?

What if you didn’t meditate to lower your heart rate, and simply sat because the chair was comfortable?

What if you wrote in a notebook not to “process your shadow,” but because you liked the feel of the ink scratching against the paper?

What if you let the day be completely unoptimized?

True mindfulness is the courage to meet yourself exactly as you are—even if who you are in this moment is tired, distracted, or beautifully disorganized. It’s nonjudgemental and appreciative of what is here, now.

Put down the checklist. Close the apps. Step out of the surveillance tower and back into your own skin. You do not need to perform your healing to be worthy of your own life. Let go of the need to do it perfectly, and just be.

The theater experience: You sit in the dark, chewing on overpriced popcorn, staring at a massive screen in a room that smells vaguely of artificial butter and spilled soda. The floors are somewhat sticky, and despite this the ritual offered some semblance of solace. But we don’t do it just to kill a Friday night. Sedation with entertainment and being guided to the right answer has always seemed the easier and softer way to handle the existential angst of a purposeless life.

If I have to look at one more predictable CGI explosion, I might actually vomit.

Yet, movies are perhaps the only honest microcosm of our internal rot and our desperate, clawing search for meaning.

So much of our lives is spent trying to edit our own stories in real-time. We trim the awkward pauses, try to cut out the long, mundane scenes waiting, and wish we could fast-forward through the pain. It is exhausting, being both the actor and the director trying to wrest a happy ending.

But sometimes, the easiest way to see our own lives clearly is to sit down and watch someone else’s story play out on a screen. Movies are how we make sense of our lives and the world around us.

There is a profound, almost sacred mirror in cinema. From a narrative therapy perspective, we don’t just watch movies; we inhabit them. We project our unexplored grief, our quiet hopes, and our hidden desires onto the characters before us.

When a protagonist stumbles, our breath catches. When they find their footing, a small, dormant part of us stands up a little straighter too.

Movies remind us of a fundamental truth that the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard once captured perfectly:

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

This is exactly what movies do. In 90 minutes, we see how an inciting incident—the tragedy, the job loss, the broken heart—was actually the precise moment the character’s trajectory had to change. The call to action, as author Joseph Campbell would claim through his 22 beat theory of “The Hero’s Journey.”

In real life, we don’t get the benefit of the soundtrack or the sweeping camera angle to tell us that our current struggle is meaningful. As much as some of us would like to enact the “Mockumentary Stare,” like Jim from the office, we must notice salient features of our life alone. We are stuck in the messy morass of daily life.

The central thesis of this Substack is this: Watching a character navigate their wilderness gives us the faith to navigate our own. It invites us to look at our life as a masterpiece in progress, not some journey that will only have meaning in the end scenes. The sense making is in the journey and this is what movies help us realize.

Re-Authoring Our Script

In narrative therapy, there is a concept known as re-authoring. It is the realization that while we cannot always control the plot points handed to us, we are the absolute authors of what those points mean.

This is where the heavy, brilliant truth of Jean-Paul Sartre meets us in the theater. Sartre famously wrote:

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”

We would never enjoy a movie where everything goes right. What grabs us is the challenges after the initial exposition. It’s the scene where the protagonist realizes the old way of living no longer works, and the script they’ve been following belongs to someone else—their parents, their culture, their past traumas. In addiction recovery this might be called a “bottom,” They are forced into a terrifying, beautiful corner where they must decide who they are going to be. This is the long dark tea-time of the soul, as Douglas Adams hilariously calls it.

That is the exact threshold of finding yourself. Finding yourself isn’t about discovering a hidden, perfect statue buried inside your soul. It is an active, creative choice. Like a lifelong task of carving your own marble bust. It is looking at the raw, chaotic footage of your life—the mistakes, the detours, the relationships that ended too soon—or lasted too long, and choosing how to splice them together. You are the one holding the camera.

Sinking Into the Present Frame

If you are feeling lost in your current chapter, treat yourself with the gentle attention of a cinematographer.

• Notice the wide shots: Step back and look at how far you’ve traveled from the opening scene of your story.

• Honor the quiet and soft close-ups: The moments of transition, the slow mornings, the deep breaths before a hard conversation—these aren’t filler text. They are where the texture of life lives.

• Trust the director’s cut: Sometimes, the universe cuts a scene or a character from our lives that we desperately wanted to keep. It hurts in the moment, but usually, it’s because that specific storyline had run its course to make room for the true climax.

The next time you watch a film and find yourself with a lightbulb moment at a seemingly random line of dialogue, don’t brush it aside. Lean into it. That is your soul recognizing itself on screen. It’s a signpost pointing toward your own healing, a quiet whisper reminding you that you are human, you are feeling, and your story is far from over.

We are all just characters walking each other through the screenplay of existence. “All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare once quipped. We must practice stepping out from the shadows of our old scripts and step boldly into the light of who we are choosing to become.

Keep watching. Keep living. The next scene is about to begin and it’s on you.

-lp