Actors on the Stage Called Life

In a recent blog post, Ole Blue the Heretic wrote, “People who have sorrowful looking eyes may be very happy, yet people who have happy eyes may be filled with sadness. We are all actors on the stage called life and each act according to their own life script.” You can read the rest of the post here.

Ole Blue’s words brought three things to mind. First, that writing lifestories gives us the opportunity to allow people to peak behind the mask of the role we’ve created for living our life script. Most commonly we write about events that conform to our own life script. It doesn’t have to always be that way. You can write the Truth behind the eyes. Some of those stories will be intensely private, written for your eyes only. Others may be intensely touching when others read them.

The obvious next thought was that the choices we make about which stories to share are generally consistent with the life script we’ve chosen to live, or at least the script as we understand it, view ourselves and want to be remembered. It takes a conscious and deliberate choice to share a story that moves the mask aside.

Finally, I recognized what may be the key source to discomfort associated with writing about the human frailty of relatives and friends. These stories dislodge the masks of those other people. Messing with someone’s mask, especially in writing, is serious business. If I slide your mask aside, I’m at serious risk of having my own ripped off!

With those three things in mind, I’m suddenly challenged to consider just what life script I’ve chosen for myself. I have some fuzzy idea, but I couldn’t simply sit down and write it out, even for myself, without some floundering. What a fascinating assignment for personal exploration! I see the potential in this exercise for opening new avenues of personal growth I might never discover otherwise.

What about you? Have you thought about the nature of the role you are reading on the stage of life? What’s the story behind your eyes? Is this a story you could tell the world, or perhaps one you’d benefit from writing, then shredding?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal