You are living a story whether you know it or not. It's either the one you are writing, or someone else is writing for you.

I gotta tell ya, watching all the chatter about how drastically people are going to change in the new year is quite entertaining to me. Kind of like a movie, that you've seen a million times, where you know the end isn't good but you just can't help but watch it over and over again. Actors. People acting as if they are going to completely rewrite the story of themselves because a calendar went from one year to a next. This movie isn't a comedy, it's a tragedy.

We are all actors, acting out a life. Interacting with one another, influencing one another both for the better and the worse, and creating a story. Some of us are the leading role in our stories, while many deflect the role and responsibility of the leading character to others. The latter seems like the easier way around this story we call life but in actuality, it makes for a tragic ending.

You are assigning your life over to others when you don't even realize it. You give your thoughts over to politicians each time you spend your day reading news aka propaganda. You turn your emotions over to co-workers, family members or even a stranger in a car who isn't driving as efficiently as you think they should. You turn your time over to thousands of others as you scroll through social media, watching their story instead of working on making yours something worth watching. You allow the world around you to take on the starring role in your life because you don't want to bear the responsibility. It seems easier that way. It works quite well to blame others and the chaos of the world around you for your lack of progress. It's much easier to claim that someone else, some other character is the reason your story isn't as good as it could be. How convenient for you.

But, it isn't easier because you never become the person you want to be and your story tragically ends, having never even begun. Your story was started for you by the people who raised you but you get to decide how it unfolds. You get to decide how your character develops. You get to take the lead, develop what is true and what is authentic and scrap the parts that are holding you back. Every story ends, we know that, but the ones that end in tragically are the ones with characters who we knew could have been so much more than they were.

You never get to create the story you were meant to live if you're not the one writing it.

Write your damn story.