Life is Series of Stories That We Make Up

Last week, I put five words on the Awareness Mapping™ board I was working on. I had no idea those 5 words would unlock a story I had been carrying for most of my life:

“I give up carrying burdens.”

I knew those words were significant. What I didn’t know was just how literally—and how quickly—the Universe would respond.

When I was five years old, my family immigrated from Colombia to the United States and we landed in Brooklyn, New York. My mother had four very young children and was mentally and emotionally overwhelmed by everything she was navigating. And somehow, at five years old, I stepped in.

For most of my life, the story I have told about that time has been some version of: "I didn’t get to have a childhood. I had to help carry my family. I had to grow up too soon." The story of carrying a burden for someone else spilled out into other areas of my life all the way into my current adulthood. But I mostly was not really aware of it.

Then came this past weekend.

I was at an Italian restaurant with my husband Dan, my two sisters and my elderly parents. The restaurant’s tagline was “A Little Bit of Brooklyn." Italian music was playing—the same kind of music my dad used to play when we were children living in Brooklyn.

Suddenly, I felt a stabbing pain in my right shoulder blade. Within minutes, the pain became so intense that I could barely move my arm. Dan tried massaging it, but nothing helped. It continued the entire time we were at the restaurant.

Then, with the help of my sisters, I saw it.

The "burden" was on my shoulder blade.

There I was, surrounded by the very family I believed I had needed to “carry,” immersed in the sounds and memories of Brooklyn, in a restaurant literally calling itself A Little Bit of Brooklyn—one week after I had declared that I was giving up carrying burdens.

You really can't make this stuff up.

Something inside me cracked wide open. I wept as I released all the sadness. My family sang and swayed to “Volare” when it played on the loudspeaker. It was that song, my childhood favorite, that escorted us out of the restaurant.

The next day, the tears continued as I allowed myself to revisit that little five-year-old girl and the story I had created about what happened to her.

And then I realized something that transformed me:

I don't have to remember my childhood as a burden.

I can honor the little girl who stepped forward with an extraordinary capacity to serve.

What if I didn’t lose my childhood? What if, even at five years old, I was already expressing one of the greatest powers I came into this lifetime carrying?

The power to serve.

Today, I have a new story:

It was an absolute privilege to have been in service to my mother and my siblings at such a young age. I can have compassion for the little girl who sometimes carried more than a child should have had to carry, without making her experience a lifelong burden.

She was strong. She was powerful. She loved fiercely.

And she became me.

This is what Awareness Mapping™ can do.

Sometimes the thing we are ready to release isn’t the experience itself. It is the meaning we gave the experience.

The past doesn't have to change for us to become free from it.

Sometimes, we simply need to tell a new story.

With love and many blessings,

Lily