Command your own narrative

What reading other people’s autobiographies taught me about free will.

An epiphany

Since I had this epiphany about free will, thanks to a random YouTube comment, I’ve been feeling more confident about my choices of focus. Namely my choice to focus more on art, and especially music.

Creativity always felt suppressed in me, because my past belief system told me it wouldn’t be worth my time unless it came, ultimately, in the form of a successful business. That has changed since.

An act of free will

An act of free will is to command your own narrative.

Just narratives

What I’ve come to understand, reading some self-authored autobiographies, is that they’re essentially just narratives.

They’re narratives of the lives of their authors. They may or may not reflect actual events. They may or may not be exaggerated, and so on.

Does it matter?

You’ve got to ask yourself, though: does it matter that these events may not be accurate representations of reality?

To me it doesn’t, because these are the narratives that made the authors who they are today. I read the book because I admire the author, or because I find their stories interesting and there might be something in them that strikes a chord in me.

So I respect that this is the narrative they’ve been telling themselves. As a matter of fact, I find great strength in the idea of commanding your own narrative.

You shouldn’t lie to yourself. But you can be positive.

And you can be optimistic, future focused. You can decide to let events touch you and drive you one way or another.

Most people don’t realise this is a power they can command at will, using free will.

Still painful

Imagine you experience something painful. It’s still going to be painful, whether you like it or not. That’s down to your emotions, and they’re much harder to control than your free will.

So what you can do is control how you respond to the pain: as it’s occurring, which is a bit harder, or after it has occurred, which is a bit easier.

Keep the questions

You can decide to say: “Hey, I never want this to happen to me again.”

“How am I to avoid this? What protocols and principles do I need to have?”

“What even caused this to happen in the first place?”

You might not have all the answers right away, but you’ll find them by simply keeping these questions in your head.

Weave it in

Then, when you find the answers, you can weave them into your personal narrative, in a positive light.

“I was hurt deeply by this experience, but it made me sensitive and attentive to these types of things, and it drove me to greatness in the end.”

After all, life’s full of pain and misery. This earthly life isn’t lived in a proxy heaven. We’re much closer to hell.

Transforming, not masking

That’s the power of telling your own narrative. You get to decide how you put things in a positive light, and how you use the painful experiences in your life. You retell them to yourself as a story that gives you strength and power.

It’s not masking the painful events. It’s transforming them, in an almost shamanic way.

New things in the old

We also need to tell the positives. We tend to forget them, and take things for granted. By narrating these events, writing them down and putting them into our story, we remember their essence better, and we can relearn from them over a lifetime.

Each event we’ve experienced takes on a different significance, depending on which stage of life we’re at.

It is possible to see new things in the old.

First written in August 2026.