March 12, 2024 • 31 mins
There’s a story from my life that I don’t talk about much anymore. But on today’s episode I’m going there. And with a good reason. It’s the place where Write Your Story was born.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun. When
you write your story, you get the.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Words and said, don't you think it's time.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
To let them out and write them down and cover
what it's all about and write.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Your story.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Write you write your story.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about something I haven't talked about
in a really long time. And I kind of thought
I was past this, like I had decided I wasn't
gonna really address this story anymore. But it keeps coming
up a bunch for me in all kinds of different
areas of my life, which I always take as a
sign that there's something there that needs to be explored.
(00:52):
And even though I don't always know what it is,
I have learned over time to really trust that when
these repetitions happen, to pay attention and to dive in.
And so that's what I'm going to talk about today,
This idea of repetition. It's something that you can use
in your life too. And as you're considering how to
engage with the content from write your story, and you know,
(01:13):
what story from your life do you want to write
and how do you want to approach that. This is
something to really tune into and pay attention to that
you will start to see and to witness as you
become more aware repetition and patterns in your life. And
sometimes it'll come like in threes, like you'll hear the
same word three times, or you'll bump into this same
(01:36):
person a few times, or you might hear a phrase repeated,
or you might have someone recommend the same book to
you a couple of times. These sort of synchronicities and
repetitions are I've just learned over time. They're always your
creative insight talking to you, and they're always useful for
how to pull together the story that you're trying to write,
or sometimes like what is the story that I'm supposed
(01:59):
to write right now now? And like in this case,
the thing that keeps coming up for me is to
go back and talk about my divorce, And like I said,
I had kind of decided like I don't really want
to talk about that anymore. In fact, even when Indestructible
came out Indestructible is my memoir where I share the
story of leaving an abusive relationship and rebuilding my life
(02:20):
on the other side. And I had really decided that
I was done talking about that, like I had closed
the door on it, and it felt kind of nice
to move on to the power of Writing It Down,
because then I could like come in and be the
expert and talk about publishing and ghost writing and all
the data and the research on how powerful writing is
for your brain and whatever, and I didn't have to
go in and be like the divorced girl talking about
(02:41):
getting divorced. And that felt nice. And then also, you know,
at that point in my life and my life story,
I was remarried, I had had a daughter. By the
time the Power Writing It Down came out, shortly after
I got pregnant with Charlie, and so it felt like
my life had moved on too, and I wasn't really
that excited about going back and talking about this old story.
(03:02):
So I kind of pivoted away from that, and I
stopped talking about it on Instagram, and I stopped talking
about it on podcast episodes, and I started really focusing
more on the publishing aspect of my work well, in
particular recently, but really ever since I quit talking about it,
I have people ask about it quite a bit and
want to know more about the story. And I have
(03:22):
resisted it and resisted it and resisted it. And now
that Write Your Story is out or available for pre order,
it keeps coming up again and again. Then I'm supposed
to go back and talk about this story. And I
think a big reason for that is that that time
in my life is where this book was born. Like
this book would never exist if it weren't for that
(03:43):
time in my life, even despite the publishing work that
I've done. You know, it's easy for me to say
this book is really born out of my work in
publishing because I've helped all these people tell their personal
stories and I've watched how powerful it is for them, And.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
That is all true.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
It's very very powerful for people to sit down and
write their story and understand themselves. And I had also
done that in Packing Light, which is my first book
that came out in twenty thirteen, But it wasn't really
until I walked through that very tragic and difficult time
in my life that this idea was cemented for me.
(04:17):
I mean I've told the story before. This is the
other reason why my logical brain resists telling this, because
it's like you've told the story one hundred times, everyone's
heard it. But that's not true that everyone has heard it,
and there must be some reason why I'm being asked
to go back and tell it again. So here we go,
I'm going back to tell it again. In November of
twenty fifteen, I uncovered information about my then husband that
(04:40):
was really disturbing, very upsetting, like the betrayal of all betrayals,
really confusing given all of the other things that had
taken place in our relationship and in our marriage. It
was the strathbroker camel's back for me. The marriage had
been miserable for me from day one. I was going
to say pretty much day one, but no from day one,
and like we fought like cats and dogs on our honeymoon,
(05:03):
I felt unsafe around him at all times. I really
was like bending over backwards, twisting myself intoknots to make
this relationship work. So when I uncovered what I uncovered,
it was the information that I needed to do what
I had wanted to do for a really long time,
which was to file for divorce. So that's what I did.
I can't remember how long it was, but it wasn't
(05:24):
It wasn't long at all. It was like the week
before Thanksgiving that I discovered this information. And also like
the information that I discovered was just the beginning. I mean,
it was like pulling at the thread of a sweater
that was unraveling. It's like as soon as I pulled
at it, all this other information came out that really
made everything more clear. And so so I filed for divorce.
(05:47):
The process of filing for divorce, or at least knowing
for sure what I wanted to do, was fairly quick
and intuitive, and I felt confident in my decision. There
was no question in my mind. I can remember being
we were already in marriage counseling, and so I can
remember being in the therapist's office and her having us
sitting there and saying, you know, like couples go through
(06:09):
things like this, and people do choose to stay sometimes
and work it out. And this is like five minutes
into the therapy session, and I was.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Like, yeah, no, not me. I'm not staying. I'm not
working it out. I'm out.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
I would like a divorce and leaving the therapy session early.
I think I left like twenty minutes into the therapy session,
so I mean that was fairly quick and decisive for me.
But then after that, once I waded into the waters
of a loneness, after I had kicked him out of
the house and changed the locks and all of these things,
(06:39):
then I started to really question myself and it was
a really dark and difficult time for me. Looking back now,
it's so silly because I have way more perspective, But
back at that time, one of the things that was
really terrifying for me was my financial situation, in part
because he had made many choices in our financial life
(07:00):
that had put us in jeopardy. Our business was in debt.
I hadn't logged into our personal bank account in over
a year, it might have been a couple of years.
I don't have even a memory of really logging into
the bank account because he kind of handled the finances,
so I didn't have a log into my own personal
checking account. I had no idea how much money was
in there. He was handling the business finances, I didn't
(07:22):
know what was going on, and so I was just
flying completely blind, and I genuinely wasn't sure, how I
was going to pay off our credit card and how
I was going to pay my mortgage at the end
of the month. And he was driving a Mercedes. I
was like, how is I going to pay for the
freaking Mercedes? So it was like a really scary time
for me in that way. It was also a really
(07:44):
revealing time that one of the reasons why I had
stayed in such a dark relationship is that I was
really truly terrified to be on my own, which struck
me as strange because I had been single for a
very long time before I met him. It wasn't like
I was a serial dater or perpetually in long relationships.
But I think one of the things that I had
done is I had had really enmeshed and confusing friendships,
(08:09):
both with men and with women that helped me to
avoid that feeling of loneliness in my single life. And
so I went straight from that to this really toxic
relationship with my then husband, And then when I was
in that house by myself, it was like, oh, like
I was hit with this feeling of just dread and
absolute terror at the idea of being alone with my
(08:32):
own thoughts. And in that season, I had the impulse
to write about what was happening to me. I couldn't
explain it, I didn't understand it. I tried to talk
myself out of it a thousand times because I would
tell myself like, I worked in publishing at the time,
and so I knew I had an inroad to publish
(08:52):
a book. But just as an example, the book that
I had been working on with my agent and my
publisher at the time was a book about marriage, and
I was not making much progress on that book. No
confusion why because there were so many blocks in my
actual life that I wasn't ready to see it or
wasn't willing to see And so I couldn't possibly write
(09:13):
a book about the complications of marriage because I just
wasn't aware of what was going on. So I knew
I had an inroad to publish a book, but I
kept telling myself even with this strong impulse to write
about what was happening to me, I was like, I
could never share this story. It would be impossible to
share this story, and I would never want to, like
it feels way too vulnerable. I would come off looking
(09:35):
terrible if I told this story. If I really told it,
you know with all the honesty that I could muster
from the very beginning, and mostly because the story is
about a young woman who gets married when she doesn't
want to get married. I remember thinking on my wedding day,
I don't want to do this, and I did it anyway,
And I didn't have an explanation at the time for
(09:55):
why I had chosen that path. I didn't know why
I'd made that decision, and so I told myself it
would be a dumb idea to sit down and write
the story. And yet I couldn't shake this feeling. I
had this inexplicable, unstoppable feeling like I've got to write
about this. And what I've attributed that to since then
(10:16):
is it is an urge to heal, It's an urge
to resolve, It's an urge to understand better what is
taking place in our lives. I've watched hundreds thousands of
other people have this same urge and do the same
dance in their brain that I was doing, which is
just like that would be stupid. I could never tell
this story. My mom would never let me, or my
(10:38):
sister would die an early death, or my husband, my kids,
This would never work or like I could never share
this thing about me because that would be too vulnerable,
or you know, this would change the way people think
about me or whatever, or people will say like, I'm
not a great writer. I could never really get the
words out right, and so we talk ourselves out of
(10:59):
telling the story. But that inexplicable urge keeps coming up,
and at least for me, it was so loud during
that time of a loneness that it would wake me
up in the middle of the night. I would be
up from like two to six in the morning many
times just with this like unexplainable tidal wave of desire
to write about what was happening to me. So I
(11:20):
would wake up in the morning, I would go to
my local coffee shop. I would sit down, and I
would just write about what was taking place. It was
not structured, it was not organized. It didn't make any
sense to me. There were a lot of things happening
that were absurd, that were ridiculous, that were infuriating, that
were devastating. Things that would happen, Like we had a
(11:41):
dog when we were married, and I was very attached
to the dog. I'm sure he was also attached to
the dog. He was able to find a way through
the divorce proceedings to come and get the dog from me,
and he was going to get to keep the dog.
So the day that the dog was taken from me,
I just remember writing in the coffee shop about that
experience and just sobbing because I just was like, this
(12:03):
dog is literally my only friend right now, which is
not true. I had a lot of really wonderful friends
who walked me through this process, but the dog was
like my companion who would lay in my bed with
me at night. And even now thinking about this story,
it's just like everything was being stripped away so that
I could have this silence, so that I could really
(12:25):
see what was inside of me. So I would go
to this coffee shop every morning, I would write about
what was taking place in my life. And I think
a lot of us have that same urge, and we're
talking ourselves out of it. So I want to take
this opportunity to just say, if you have the urge
(12:46):
to write your story and you're talking yourself out of
it for any reason, I just want to tell you
that there is a purpose. You may not get to
know exactly why you're doing it, but there is a
reason that you're being asked to write your story, and
I think probably the most obvious reason is just it's
going to give you a lot more clarity about what's
actually going on in your unique set of circumstances. There's
(13:09):
something about the process of writing that gives us a
bird's eye view. It takes us to like a thirty
thousand foot view. Instead of being right in the middle
of something and not being able to see it from
every angle, you just get to rise above it and
see it from a totally different angle that you haven't
seen before, and you will have this rush of clarity
come through, and it's really a really deeply healing and
(13:31):
helpful process. So anyway, the early versions of that story
are very scattered, they're pretty bitter. I was really really angry,
and rightfully so. Even my therapist who I was seeing
at the time, you know, she just pointed out, she's like,
you have this like weird, bizarre way of being like
(13:53):
just sort of like brushing everything over with this toxic positivity,
like well, at least look on the bright side, because
at least X, Y and Z, and she's just like,
be pissed, go ahead, be mad. She's like, you should
be taking kickboxing classes instead of yoga. At the time,
I was doing a lot of yoga. She's like, you
need something where you can get out your aggression, and
I wasn't totally totally there yet. The real anger wouldn't
(14:14):
come until much later, when I felt safe to be angry. Honestly,
it was like when I met Matt, who's now my husband,
and when we really started dating and getting more comfortable
with each other, a lot of the anger started coming
out in that relationship because I started to feel really
safe for the first time in a long time with
another person, and so not that the anger would come
(14:34):
out towards him, but I started to feel safe to
be angry at my ex husband. Anyway, I digress. What
I was getting at is that the first drafts of
what I wrote were very scattered. They had no common thread,
They didn't fit together in any kind of way. They
were actually kind of like dark and angry and bitter
and heavy. And I got the idea, I don't know,
(14:58):
maybe three months into this process, to combine what I
had been teaching authors and what I had learned from
all of my work with story Brand. Story Brand is
Donald Miller's company that helps companies clarify their messaging by
using narrative framework. And I had learned a lot about
narrative storytelling through working with story Brand. I was coaching
(15:19):
at their workshops and teaching private workshops and traveling and
teaching keynotes at the time. So I had learned a
ton about storytelling from that experience and from my experience
ghostwriting and working with authors, and so I was like,
I wonder if I could take the structure that I've
learned from storytelling and apply it to this experience.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
So that's what I started to do.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I started to see if I could fit the experiences
of my life into the structure. And what happened when
I started to do that is to this day very
miraculous to me, which is that I literally reframed my experience.
And this did not happen overnight. It happened over the
course of probably a year and a half. There was
(15:59):
a time when I went away to the beach to
finish writing the rest of the story, and that was
a really, really heavy and hard time to write about.
I needed to write kind of everything abusive that had
happened to me. I needed to get it out of
my body and put it on the paper, so I
don't want to sugarcoat this or rainbow wash it and
act like it was no big deal. As soon as
(16:20):
I put it into this framework, it just, you know,
totally changed. But along the way, slowly and then more quickly,
the story began to shift. It shifted from originally the
question was how could this happen to me? How could
you do this to me? And that was the story
question that I was using to write the story. The
(16:41):
story question is the open loop that your brain wants
to follow to its logical conclusion. The problem with the
question like how could he do this to me being
your story question is there's not really a great answer.
It's like, what answer to that question is going to
satisfy you? How could you do this to me? Because
because it's like, what answer would be satisfying? Because he
(17:03):
did because he's an asshole? Is that would that be
satisfying to you? Because he's wounded? Is that satisfying to you?
Because you needed it? Is that you know? What answer
to that question would be satisfying? There aren't many answers
that would satisfy any reader or any writer, So it
(17:23):
needed a new story question to be the hook to
draw in a reader, but really to draw in me
to my own life story. And so somewhere along the way,
the story question morphed from how could he do this
to me? To what makes a woman say yes when
she means no? What makes a woman walk down the
(17:45):
aisle when she knows she doesn't want to marry this person?
The answer to that question is the key to my freedom,
and it's also a very compelling story question. The answer
to that question is interesting, whereas the other question, the
answer is not that interesting. It's like, well, okay, so
even if you find out in your process of writing
(18:05):
this story that he did this to you because he's
a total asshole, It's like, okay, then what who cares?
It's not that satisfying of an answer. But why does
a woman walk down the aisle and marry a man
she doesn't want to marry? The answer to that question
is endlessly satisfying because the answer to that question is
she doesn't feel worthy. The answer to that question is
(18:29):
she hates herself. The answer to that question is she
believes she deserves punishment. The answer to that question is
she doesn't see herself. Clearly, she doesn't see how beautiful
she is. She doesn't see how magnanimous she is. She's
not yet discovered the truth of herself. She is terrified
of her own power, so she felt she needed to
(18:51):
have power over so that she could keep herself small,
so that she would never have access to her true power.
So that answer is much more interesting and takes us
on a fascinating story arc where the main character of
the story transforms from this bitter, resentful, angry, or really
repressed woman in the beginning of the story to this magnanimous, beautiful,
(19:18):
fully alive woman who sees herself much more clearly and
sees the beauty of who she is. So that's the
transformation that guides the story, and it becomes a much
more interesting story to read, and it becomes a much
more interesting story to write, and it becomes a more
interesting story to live, and there's so much more power
in it. There's so much more meaning in it, There's
so much more life to be found there on that
(19:41):
story arc versus the first one that I started with.
So using the framework that I had learned about narrative storytelling,
both through writing memoirs for people and also through working
with story Brand, helped me to find some kind of
structure for this scattered, confusing bun of writing that I
had been doing over the course of months. It helped
(20:02):
me to find the patterns. It helped me to find
the path from the beginning of a story to the
end of the story. And finding that path gave me
a ton of clarity, It gave me a ton of confidence,
It gave me a thread to follow, and it just
helped make every decision that I made along the way
much much, much easier. And there were other modalities that
(20:22):
I used to help myself heal through that season. It
was you know, probably let's see November of twenty nineteen
is when we split up. The divorces final in the
next April March or April of twenty sixteen. Then I
met Matt for the first time in August of twenty seventeen.
We started dating in like December of twenty seventeen January
(20:44):
of twenty eighteen, somewhere in there, so two years and
some change of a really dark heard even from August
when I met Matt to December when we started dating.
Those three months were a very heavy, challenging, difficult, healing
but heavy time of my life. And then once we
(21:04):
officially started dating. Our dating relationship has been mostly very
lighthearted and really easy, is how I would classify it.
But those first three months, I think in part because
there was still a lot of trauma lodged in my
body that I hadn't worked through yet. And now I was,
you know, coming into relationship with this person who's really
safe and incredibly grounded and who has for the most
(21:27):
part of secure attachment system. I think Matt would say
he's maybe a little avoidant, but has for the most
part of very secure attachment system, and that just made
my body go completely haywire. My body did not know
what to do with that, so I was like having
panic attacks during that time. Basically, I wanted to tell
this part of the story because you know, it's two
years of me wrestling through the healing process that I
(21:49):
was in after leaving my toxic marriage. And during that
time I used some other modalities. I used yoga, for example.
I talked about that that was one that was really
powerful for me. I was seeing a therapist. I was
(22:09):
actually seeing a couple of different therapists. I was doing
AMDR and regular talk therapy. I went to on site workshops,
which i've talked about a few times on this show
before and a bunch on Instagram. On Site Workshops is
a I think they call it a residential treatment facility,
but it's basically like a year's worth of therapy boiled
(22:31):
down into a week of time with a group of people.
You do experiential group therapy. It's called psychodramas the type
of therapy that you do, and it's the most accelerated, fabulous,
wonderful therapeutic process. If you ever have the chance to go,
please go and please check out on Site Workshops. They
do a program called the Living Center program, which is
where I went. You don't have to be like in
(22:52):
crisis or in trauma to go. You can go just
to hit the reset button in your life. You can
go to get creatively inspired. You can go to work
through a difficult story from your past that you may
feel like is mostly healed, but there's still some work
to do. And you go for a week and give
away your cell phone and work together with a group
of people in a therapist in a room, and it's
(23:14):
really wonderful. So check out on Site Workshops. And that
was one of the modalities that I used. One of
the tools that I had in my tool belt during
that time to heal. My point is I had all
these tools that I was using, but really what led
me to each of these tools was the writing. The
writing was always the horse. I guess that's pulling the carriage,
(23:36):
and so it's the first thing in line. And then
behind that was all the things that I was led
to because of the writing. So I was led to
yoga because of my writing. I was led to therapy,
led to all these different tools that I was able
to use because the writing was in place, and the
writing guided me through that entire season. The writing has
guided me through the most difficult seasons of my life,
(23:58):
and this is what inspired me to write write your story.
I just thought, if I can take the framework that
I taught myself, which is a little bit different than
the framework that you use to teach a brand to
tell their brand story. It's different than a framework that
you would use to put together a fiction book. Personal
narrative storytelling is its own animal, and it's a little
bit different. So if I could take that framework that
(24:21):
I created to fit my unique circumstance and offer it
to someone else who was going through something like what
I went through a divorce or the loss of a
loved one, or an illness or an injury, or a
chronic pain, some sort of chronic issue, something in your
life that's just befuddling you, and help you to organize
(24:44):
this into a story that's going to make your life
make sense to you.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It's endlessly, endlessly valuable.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
And I had a bunch of you know, I don't
know if it's imposter syn remember what when I first
sat down to write the book, where I was just like,
this is too simple, Like this is not going to
help anyone, that whole inner dialogue that happens anytime we
try to do something important. I had the resistance that was,
like everyone knows this stuff, like this is not going
to help anyone, this is too simple. And I'm so
(25:11):
glad that I pushed through that because what has come
out of me. I'm so proud of this book. I'm
so anxious to hear how this helps you get your
stories down, And honestly, I feel inspired already thinking about
all the stories that are going to come from people
who read this. You may write a story that you
don't feel particularly like sharing publicly. You may just want
to share it with your therapist, or with your spouse,
(25:33):
or with your kids, or with a couple of people
close to you.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
But you may also.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Feel like I feel so proud of the person who
I became on the journey of this story. I want
to share this story with as many people as want
to read it, and you may decide to publish it,
or even just to publish it on Instagram or on
your own blog, or whatever however you choose to share it.
I know one thing, which is that the world is
a better place when we share our stories with each other.
Because there are a lot of things that we're all
(25:59):
going through. I think we're alone in them. Then we
share our stories and we realize that actually we're not
alone at all. In fact, this is one of the
most powerful things about on site is that you get
thrown into a room with a group of people who
could not possibly be more different than you, and then
you find out you're actually not different at all. You
have these shared plot points in the human experience when
(26:20):
you share your stories with each other, and it is
a deeply, deeply, deeply healing experience to share your stories
in that kind of an intimate setting with people who
you assume could never understand what you're going through. And
I hope that right your story can help guide people
to that sort of a place. I mean, it's not
going to be the same if you don't have a
(26:40):
therapist they're guiding you through it. But when think about
the visual of even just sitting around a campfire, Like,
think about the last time you were sitting around a
campfire and you were just spitballing funny stories from things
that happened to you. Maybe someone mentioned summer camp, and
so everyone's telling stories of something funny or crazy or
interesting or sad that happened to them at summer camp.
(27:04):
And then someone talks about church, and so you start
telling stories about church, and everyone's got a different story
about church. So I mean, I get chills even just
thinking about that, Like the connective experience that it is
to sit around a campfire and tell stories. You can't
really see the faces of the people even who are
telling them. Maybe these people are strangers or maybe they're
(27:25):
close friends, but either way, you're going to walk away
from that experience feeling more connected to those people, more
bonded to them, and more human, more more grounded in
your own body than you would have felt without it.
So that's why I wrote this book. I'm really so
thrilled to get to share it with you. It comes
out May seventh. It's called Write Your Story, a simple
framework to understand yourself, your story, and your purpose in
(27:46):
the world. And it was all born out of this
experience of going through a really tragic time in my life.
And I'm grateful for that experience now for so many reasons.
Number one, because it really helped me access my power
in all areas of my life. It helped me access
my power and my romantic relationships. My relationship with my
(28:06):
husband now is a really really deep and intimate and
embodied and loving, caring, beautiful, strong, healthy relationship. We have
two beautiful, healthy kids that are born out of that relationship.
But also I'm grateful for that experience because it gave
me this book, which I now get to share with you,
and I hope that we can connect through both our
(28:27):
struggles but also through our victories in those struggles, because
one thing that I know to be true from helping
thousands of people craft their stories, is that your transformation,
your beauty, your essence, your power, your confidence is all
born out of your struggle and it's really a beautiful
way to see your life, and it's hard to see
(28:49):
it that way until you start to put it on
the page. So I wrote this book for you, Write
your Story, a simple framework to understand yourself, your story,
and your purpose in the world. It is available for
pre order. I hope you'll go order a copy. When
you do, order a copy from your favorite retailer, go
to Write your Story dot com slash book and enter
your order details there, because you're going to get eighteen
hundred dollars worth of pre order bonuses. You get write
(29:12):
your Story journal, a template to help you organize your
personal narrative.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
You're going to get a five video series.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
You get a course that I created called Writer's warm
Up that will help you begin to craft a book
idea if you have one. And you also get to
download the first three chapters of the book right away
so that you can get started reading before anyone else can.
Because the book is not even out until May seventh,
So go pre order a copy of the book. Make
sure you go to Write your Story dot com slash
book put your order details in there, and you'll get
(29:41):
to download your free resources. And also, please tell people
about this book. If you have someone in your life
who you think, God, they need to tell their story,
they have such an interesting life, or you know, I
would really love to hear more from them, or to
understand them better, to really make sense of why they
are this way, buy them a copy the books, send
them a copy in the mail, or just text them
(30:02):
the link and say, like, I really want you to
write your story. Go grab a copy of this book.
Or pull a group of friends together who you'd like
to be in a book club with or a writing
group with. Maybe you've got some people who you feel
close with already, and you guys could all read the
book together and sit down and create your own little
like therapy community. It's not going to be therapy exactly,
(30:23):
but it is going to be very therapeutic to sit
down together and write your stories and then share your
stories with each other. Think about how much better you
would all know each other after that process than before.
I'm excited for where this book is going to take
you personally and the depths that it's going to take
you in your relationships. Writing this book, I was like,
I hope people get this book for their mom or
(30:43):
for their grandma and say like tell me your story.
I want to know more about your life. Or for
your uncle or your aunt, or your neighbor or your
best friends, like give them a copy of the book
and be like, I want to know more about you.
I want to know more more about your life. Read
this book and write your story for me. So that's
the story of my divorce. That's the story of how
(31:04):
this book came to be. I've been avoiding telling that
story or going back to that place, but I'm glad
I did.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
It feels good.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
It feels good to tell the story from this vantage
point because when I was first telling the story, it
felt much more tender than it feels now.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Now.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
I just feel really confident in all the choices that
I made, and definitely writing about my life was a
big part of how I got there. So I hope
that this book can do the same thing for you.
Whatever season that you're in right now that feels shaky
or unsteady, I know that writing about your life is
going to really lend you a sense of stability and
give you a perspective on your life that you didn't
(31:39):
have before.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I'm grateful to get to share this with you.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
It's called write your story simple framework to understand yourself,
your story, and your purpose in the world. My name's
Alison Fallen. You can call me Ali and I'll see
you next week.
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun. When
you write your story, you get the.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Words and said, don't you think it's time.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
To let them out and write them down and cover
what it's all about and write.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Your story.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Write you write your story.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about something I haven't talked about
in a really long time. And I kind of thought
I was past this, like I had decided I wasn't
gonna really address this story anymore. But it keeps coming
up a bunch for me in all kinds of different
areas of my life, which I always take as a
sign that there's something there that needs to be explored.
(00:52):
And even though I don't always know what it is,
I have learned over time to really trust that when
these repetitions happen, to pay attention and to dive in.
And so that's what I'm going to talk about today,
This idea of repetition. It's something that you can use
in your life too. And as you're considering how to
engage with the content from write your story, and you know,
(01:13):
what story from your life do you want to write
and how do you want to approach that. This is
something to really tune into and pay attention to that
you will start to see and to witness as you
become more aware repetition and patterns in your life. And
sometimes it'll come like in threes, like you'll hear the
same word three times, or you'll bump into this same
(01:36):
person a few times, or you might hear a phrase repeated,
or you might have someone recommend the same book to
you a couple of times. These sort of synchronicities and
repetitions are I've just learned over time. They're always your
creative insight talking to you, and they're always useful for
how to pull together the story that you're trying to write,
or sometimes like what is the story that I'm supposed
(01:59):
to write right now now? And like in this case,
the thing that keeps coming up for me is to
go back and talk about my divorce, And like I said,
I had kind of decided like I don't really want
to talk about that anymore. In fact, even when Indestructible
came out Indestructible is my memoir where I share the
story of leaving an abusive relationship and rebuilding my life
(02:20):
on the other side. And I had really decided that
I was done talking about that, like I had closed
the door on it, and it felt kind of nice
to move on to the power of Writing It Down,
because then I could like come in and be the
expert and talk about publishing and ghost writing and all
the data and the research on how powerful writing is
for your brain and whatever, and I didn't have to
go in and be like the divorced girl talking about
(02:41):
getting divorced. And that felt nice. And then also, you know,
at that point in my life and my life story,
I was remarried, I had had a daughter. By the
time the Power Writing It Down came out, shortly after
I got pregnant with Charlie, and so it felt like
my life had moved on too, and I wasn't really
that excited about going back and talking about this old story.
(03:02):
So I kind of pivoted away from that, and I
stopped talking about it on Instagram, and I stopped talking
about it on podcast episodes, and I started really focusing
more on the publishing aspect of my work well, in
particular recently, but really ever since I quit talking about it,
I have people ask about it quite a bit and
want to know more about the story. And I have
(03:22):
resisted it and resisted it and resisted it. And now
that Write Your Story is out or available for pre order,
it keeps coming up again and again. Then I'm supposed
to go back and talk about this story. And I
think a big reason for that is that that time
in my life is where this book was born. Like
this book would never exist if it weren't for that
(03:43):
time in my life, even despite the publishing work that
I've done. You know, it's easy for me to say
this book is really born out of my work in
publishing because I've helped all these people tell their personal
stories and I've watched how powerful it is for them, And.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
That is all true.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
It's very very powerful for people to sit down and
write their story and understand themselves. And I had also
done that in Packing Light, which is my first book
that came out in twenty thirteen, But it wasn't really
until I walked through that very tragic and difficult time
in my life that this idea was cemented for me.
(04:17):
I mean I've told the story before. This is the
other reason why my logical brain resists telling this, because
it's like you've told the story one hundred times, everyone's
heard it. But that's not true that everyone has heard it,
and there must be some reason why I'm being asked
to go back and tell it again. So here we go,
I'm going back to tell it again. In November of
twenty fifteen, I uncovered information about my then husband that
(04:40):
was really disturbing, very upsetting, like the betrayal of all betrayals,
really confusing given all of the other things that had
taken place in our relationship and in our marriage. It
was the strathbroker camel's back for me. The marriage had
been miserable for me from day one. I was going
to say pretty much day one, but no from day one,
and like we fought like cats and dogs on our honeymoon,
(05:03):
I felt unsafe around him at all times. I really
was like bending over backwards, twisting myself intoknots to make
this relationship work. So when I uncovered what I uncovered,
it was the information that I needed to do what
I had wanted to do for a really long time,
which was to file for divorce. So that's what I did.
I can't remember how long it was, but it wasn't
(05:24):
It wasn't long at all. It was like the week
before Thanksgiving that I discovered this information. And also like
the information that I discovered was just the beginning. I mean,
it was like pulling at the thread of a sweater
that was unraveling. It's like as soon as I pulled
at it, all this other information came out that really
made everything more clear. And so so I filed for divorce.
(05:47):
The process of filing for divorce, or at least knowing
for sure what I wanted to do, was fairly quick
and intuitive, and I felt confident in my decision. There
was no question in my mind. I can remember being
we were already in marriage counseling, and so I can
remember being in the therapist's office and her having us
sitting there and saying, you know, like couples go through
(06:09):
things like this, and people do choose to stay sometimes
and work it out. And this is like five minutes
into the therapy session, and I was.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Like, yeah, no, not me. I'm not staying. I'm not
working it out. I'm out.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
I would like a divorce and leaving the therapy session early.
I think I left like twenty minutes into the therapy session,
so I mean that was fairly quick and decisive for me.
But then after that, once I waded into the waters
of a loneness, after I had kicked him out of
the house and changed the locks and all of these things,
(06:39):
then I started to really question myself and it was
a really dark and difficult time for me. Looking back now,
it's so silly because I have way more perspective, But
back at that time, one of the things that was
really terrifying for me was my financial situation, in part
because he had made many choices in our financial life
(07:00):
that had put us in jeopardy. Our business was in debt.
I hadn't logged into our personal bank account in over
a year, it might have been a couple of years.
I don't have even a memory of really logging into
the bank account because he kind of handled the finances,
so I didn't have a log into my own personal
checking account. I had no idea how much money was
in there. He was handling the business finances, I didn't
(07:22):
know what was going on, and so I was just
flying completely blind, and I genuinely wasn't sure, how I
was going to pay off our credit card and how
I was going to pay my mortgage at the end
of the month. And he was driving a Mercedes. I
was like, how is I going to pay for the
freaking Mercedes? So it was like a really scary time
for me in that way. It was also a really
(07:44):
revealing time that one of the reasons why I had
stayed in such a dark relationship is that I was
really truly terrified to be on my own, which struck
me as strange because I had been single for a
very long time before I met him. It wasn't like
I was a serial dater or perpetually in long relationships.
But I think one of the things that I had
done is I had had really enmeshed and confusing friendships,
(08:09):
both with men and with women that helped me to
avoid that feeling of loneliness in my single life. And
so I went straight from that to this really toxic
relationship with my then husband, And then when I was
in that house by myself, it was like, oh, like
I was hit with this feeling of just dread and
absolute terror at the idea of being alone with my
(08:32):
own thoughts. And in that season, I had the impulse
to write about what was happening to me. I couldn't
explain it, I didn't understand it. I tried to talk
myself out of it a thousand times because I would
tell myself like, I worked in publishing at the time,
and so I knew I had an inroad to publish
(08:52):
a book. But just as an example, the book that
I had been working on with my agent and my
publisher at the time was a book about marriage, and
I was not making much progress on that book. No
confusion why because there were so many blocks in my
actual life that I wasn't ready to see it or
wasn't willing to see And so I couldn't possibly write
(09:13):
a book about the complications of marriage because I just
wasn't aware of what was going on. So I knew
I had an inroad to publish a book, but I
kept telling myself even with this strong impulse to write
about what was happening to me, I was like, I
could never share this story. It would be impossible to
share this story, and I would never want to, like
it feels way too vulnerable. I would come off looking
(09:35):
terrible if I told this story. If I really told it,
you know with all the honesty that I could muster
from the very beginning, and mostly because the story is
about a young woman who gets married when she doesn't
want to get married. I remember thinking on my wedding day,
I don't want to do this, and I did it anyway,
And I didn't have an explanation at the time for
(09:55):
why I had chosen that path. I didn't know why
I'd made that decision, and so I told myself it
would be a dumb idea to sit down and write
the story. And yet I couldn't shake this feeling. I
had this inexplicable, unstoppable feeling like I've got to write
about this. And what I've attributed that to since then
(10:16):
is it is an urge to heal, It's an urge
to resolve, It's an urge to understand better what is
taking place in our lives. I've watched hundreds thousands of
other people have this same urge and do the same
dance in their brain that I was doing, which is
just like that would be stupid. I could never tell
this story. My mom would never let me, or my
(10:38):
sister would die an early death, or my husband, my kids,
This would never work or like I could never share
this thing about me because that would be too vulnerable,
or you know, this would change the way people think
about me or whatever, or people will say like, I'm
not a great writer. I could never really get the
words out right, and so we talk ourselves out of
(10:59):
telling the story. But that inexplicable urge keeps coming up,
and at least for me, it was so loud during
that time of a loneness that it would wake me
up in the middle of the night. I would be
up from like two to six in the morning many
times just with this like unexplainable tidal wave of desire
to write about what was happening to me. So I
(11:20):
would wake up in the morning, I would go to
my local coffee shop. I would sit down, and I
would just write about what was taking place. It was
not structured, it was not organized. It didn't make any
sense to me. There were a lot of things happening
that were absurd, that were ridiculous, that were infuriating, that
were devastating. Things that would happen, Like we had a
(11:41):
dog when we were married, and I was very attached
to the dog. I'm sure he was also attached to
the dog. He was able to find a way through
the divorce proceedings to come and get the dog from me,
and he was going to get to keep the dog.
So the day that the dog was taken from me,
I just remember writing in the coffee shop about that
experience and just sobbing because I just was like, this
(12:03):
dog is literally my only friend right now, which is
not true. I had a lot of really wonderful friends
who walked me through this process, but the dog was
like my companion who would lay in my bed with
me at night. And even now thinking about this story,
it's just like everything was being stripped away so that
I could have this silence, so that I could really
(12:25):
see what was inside of me. So I would go
to this coffee shop every morning, I would write about
what was taking place in my life. And I think
a lot of us have that same urge, and we're
talking ourselves out of it. So I want to take
this opportunity to just say, if you have the urge
(12:46):
to write your story and you're talking yourself out of
it for any reason, I just want to tell you
that there is a purpose. You may not get to
know exactly why you're doing it, but there is a
reason that you're being asked to write your story, and
I think probably the most obvious reason is just it's
going to give you a lot more clarity about what's
actually going on in your unique set of circumstances. There's
(13:09):
something about the process of writing that gives us a
bird's eye view. It takes us to like a thirty
thousand foot view. Instead of being right in the middle
of something and not being able to see it from
every angle, you just get to rise above it and
see it from a totally different angle that you haven't
seen before, and you will have this rush of clarity
come through, and it's really a really deeply healing and
(13:31):
helpful process. So anyway, the early versions of that story
are very scattered, they're pretty bitter. I was really really angry,
and rightfully so. Even my therapist who I was seeing
at the time, you know, she just pointed out, she's like,
you have this like weird, bizarre way of being like
(13:53):
just sort of like brushing everything over with this toxic positivity,
like well, at least look on the bright side, because
at least X, Y and Z, and she's just like,
be pissed, go ahead, be mad. She's like, you should
be taking kickboxing classes instead of yoga. At the time,
I was doing a lot of yoga. She's like, you
need something where you can get out your aggression, and
I wasn't totally totally there yet. The real anger wouldn't
(14:14):
come until much later, when I felt safe to be angry. Honestly,
it was like when I met Matt, who's now my husband,
and when we really started dating and getting more comfortable
with each other, a lot of the anger started coming
out in that relationship because I started to feel really
safe for the first time in a long time with
another person, and so not that the anger would come
(14:34):
out towards him, but I started to feel safe to
be angry at my ex husband. Anyway, I digress. What
I was getting at is that the first drafts of
what I wrote were very scattered. They had no common thread,
They didn't fit together in any kind of way. They
were actually kind of like dark and angry and bitter
and heavy. And I got the idea, I don't know,
(14:58):
maybe three months into this process, to combine what I
had been teaching authors and what I had learned from
all of my work with story Brand. Story Brand is
Donald Miller's company that helps companies clarify their messaging by
using narrative framework. And I had learned a lot about
narrative storytelling through working with story Brand. I was coaching
(15:19):
at their workshops and teaching private workshops and traveling and
teaching keynotes at the time. So I had learned a
ton about storytelling from that experience and from my experience
ghostwriting and working with authors, and so I was like,
I wonder if I could take the structure that I've
learned from storytelling and apply it to this experience.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
So that's what I started to do.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I started to see if I could fit the experiences
of my life into the structure. And what happened when
I started to do that is to this day very
miraculous to me, which is that I literally reframed my experience.
And this did not happen overnight. It happened over the
course of probably a year and a half. There was
(15:59):
a time when I went away to the beach to
finish writing the rest of the story, and that was
a really, really heavy and hard time to write about.
I needed to write kind of everything abusive that had
happened to me. I needed to get it out of
my body and put it on the paper, so I
don't want to sugarcoat this or rainbow wash it and
act like it was no big deal. As soon as
(16:20):
I put it into this framework, it just, you know,
totally changed. But along the way, slowly and then more quickly,
the story began to shift. It shifted from originally the
question was how could this happen to me? How could
you do this to me? And that was the story
question that I was using to write the story. The
(16:41):
story question is the open loop that your brain wants
to follow to its logical conclusion. The problem with the
question like how could he do this to me being
your story question is there's not really a great answer.
It's like, what answer to that question is going to
satisfy you? How could you do this to me? Because
because it's like, what answer would be satisfying? Because he
(17:03):
did because he's an asshole? Is that would that be
satisfying to you? Because he's wounded? Is that satisfying to you?
Because you needed it? Is that you know? What answer
to that question would be satisfying? There aren't many answers
that would satisfy any reader or any writer, So it
(17:23):
needed a new story question to be the hook to
draw in a reader, but really to draw in me
to my own life story. And so somewhere along the way,
the story question morphed from how could he do this
to me? To what makes a woman say yes when
she means no? What makes a woman walk down the
(17:45):
aisle when she knows she doesn't want to marry this person?
The answer to that question is the key to my freedom,
and it's also a very compelling story question. The answer
to that question is interesting, whereas the other question, the
answer is not that interesting. It's like, well, okay, so
even if you find out in your process of writing
(18:05):
this story that he did this to you because he's
a total asshole, It's like, okay, then what who cares?
It's not that satisfying of an answer. But why does
a woman walk down the aisle and marry a man
she doesn't want to marry? The answer to that question
is endlessly satisfying because the answer to that question is
she doesn't feel worthy. The answer to that question is
(18:29):
she hates herself. The answer to that question is she
believes she deserves punishment. The answer to that question is
she doesn't see herself. Clearly, she doesn't see how beautiful
she is. She doesn't see how magnanimous she is. She's
not yet discovered the truth of herself. She is terrified
of her own power, so she felt she needed to
(18:51):
have power over so that she could keep herself small,
so that she would never have access to her true power.
So that answer is much more interesting and takes us
on a fascinating story arc where the main character of
the story transforms from this bitter, resentful, angry, or really
repressed woman in the beginning of the story to this magnanimous, beautiful,
(19:18):
fully alive woman who sees herself much more clearly and
sees the beauty of who she is. So that's the
transformation that guides the story, and it becomes a much
more interesting story to read, and it becomes a much
more interesting story to write, and it becomes a more
interesting story to live, and there's so much more power
in it. There's so much more meaning in it, There's
so much more life to be found there on that
(19:41):
story arc versus the first one that I started with.
So using the framework that I had learned about narrative storytelling,
both through writing memoirs for people and also through working
with story Brand, helped me to find some kind of
structure for this scattered, confusing bun of writing that I
had been doing over the course of months. It helped
(20:02):
me to find the patterns. It helped me to find
the path from the beginning of a story to the
end of the story. And finding that path gave me
a ton of clarity, It gave me a ton of confidence,
It gave me a thread to follow, and it just
helped make every decision that I made along the way
much much, much easier. And there were other modalities that
(20:22):
I used to help myself heal through that season. It
was you know, probably let's see November of twenty nineteen
is when we split up. The divorces final in the
next April March or April of twenty sixteen. Then I
met Matt for the first time in August of twenty seventeen.
We started dating in like December of twenty seventeen January
(20:44):
of twenty eighteen, somewhere in there, so two years and
some change of a really dark heard even from August
when I met Matt to December when we started dating.
Those three months were a very heavy, challenging, difficult, healing
but heavy time of my life. And then once we
(21:04):
officially started dating. Our dating relationship has been mostly very
lighthearted and really easy, is how I would classify it.
But those first three months, I think in part because
there was still a lot of trauma lodged in my
body that I hadn't worked through yet. And now I was,
you know, coming into relationship with this person who's really
safe and incredibly grounded and who has for the most
(21:27):
part of secure attachment system. I think Matt would say
he's maybe a little avoidant, but has for the most
part of very secure attachment system, and that just made
my body go completely haywire. My body did not know
what to do with that, so I was like having
panic attacks during that time. Basically, I wanted to tell
this part of the story because you know, it's two
years of me wrestling through the healing process that I
(21:49):
was in after leaving my toxic marriage. And during that
time I used some other modalities. I used yoga, for example.
I talked about that that was one that was really
powerful for me. I was seeing a therapist. I was
(22:09):
actually seeing a couple of different therapists. I was doing
AMDR and regular talk therapy. I went to on site workshops,
which i've talked about a few times on this show
before and a bunch on Instagram. On Site Workshops is
a I think they call it a residential treatment facility,
but it's basically like a year's worth of therapy boiled
(22:31):
down into a week of time with a group of people.
You do experiential group therapy. It's called psychodramas the type
of therapy that you do, and it's the most accelerated, fabulous,
wonderful therapeutic process. If you ever have the chance to go,
please go and please check out on Site Workshops. They
do a program called the Living Center program, which is
where I went. You don't have to be like in
(22:52):
crisis or in trauma to go. You can go just
to hit the reset button in your life. You can
go to get creatively inspired. You can go to work
through a difficult story from your past that you may
feel like is mostly healed, but there's still some work
to do. And you go for a week and give
away your cell phone and work together with a group
of people in a therapist in a room, and it's
(23:14):
really wonderful. So check out on Site Workshops. And that
was one of the modalities that I used. One of
the tools that I had in my tool belt during
that time to heal. My point is I had all
these tools that I was using, but really what led
me to each of these tools was the writing. The
writing was always the horse. I guess that's pulling the carriage,
(23:36):
and so it's the first thing in line. And then
behind that was all the things that I was led
to because of the writing. So I was led to
yoga because of my writing. I was led to therapy,
led to all these different tools that I was able
to use because the writing was in place, and the
writing guided me through that entire season. The writing has
guided me through the most difficult seasons of my life,
(23:58):
and this is what inspired me to write write your story.
I just thought, if I can take the framework that
I taught myself, which is a little bit different than
the framework that you use to teach a brand to
tell their brand story. It's different than a framework that
you would use to put together a fiction book. Personal
narrative storytelling is its own animal, and it's a little
bit different. So if I could take that framework that
(24:21):
I created to fit my unique circumstance and offer it
to someone else who was going through something like what
I went through a divorce or the loss of a
loved one, or an illness or an injury, or a
chronic pain, some sort of chronic issue, something in your
life that's just befuddling you, and help you to organize
(24:44):
this into a story that's going to make your life
make sense to you.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It's endlessly, endlessly valuable.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
And I had a bunch of you know, I don't
know if it's imposter syn remember what when I first
sat down to write the book, where I was just like,
this is too simple, Like this is not going to
help anyone, that whole inner dialogue that happens anytime we
try to do something important. I had the resistance that was,
like everyone knows this stuff, like this is not going
to help anyone, this is too simple. And I'm so
(25:11):
glad that I pushed through that because what has come
out of me. I'm so proud of this book. I'm
so anxious to hear how this helps you get your
stories down, And honestly, I feel inspired already thinking about
all the stories that are going to come from people
who read this. You may write a story that you
don't feel particularly like sharing publicly. You may just want
to share it with your therapist, or with your spouse,
(25:33):
or with your kids, or with a couple of people
close to you.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
But you may also.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Feel like I feel so proud of the person who
I became on the journey of this story. I want
to share this story with as many people as want
to read it, and you may decide to publish it,
or even just to publish it on Instagram or on
your own blog, or whatever however you choose to share it.
I know one thing, which is that the world is
a better place when we share our stories with each other.
Because there are a lot of things that we're all
(25:59):
going through. I think we're alone in them. Then we
share our stories and we realize that actually we're not
alone at all. In fact, this is one of the
most powerful things about on site is that you get
thrown into a room with a group of people who
could not possibly be more different than you, and then
you find out you're actually not different at all. You
have these shared plot points in the human experience when
(26:20):
you share your stories with each other, and it is
a deeply, deeply, deeply healing experience to share your stories
in that kind of an intimate setting with people who
you assume could never understand what you're going through. And
I hope that right your story can help guide people
to that sort of a place. I mean, it's not
going to be the same if you don't have a
(26:40):
therapist they're guiding you through it. But when think about
the visual of even just sitting around a campfire, Like,
think about the last time you were sitting around a
campfire and you were just spitballing funny stories from things
that happened to you. Maybe someone mentioned summer camp, and
so everyone's telling stories of something funny or crazy or
interesting or sad that happened to them at summer camp.
(27:04):
And then someone talks about church, and so you start
telling stories about church, and everyone's got a different story
about church. So I mean, I get chills even just
thinking about that, Like the connective experience that it is
to sit around a campfire and tell stories. You can't
really see the faces of the people even who are
telling them. Maybe these people are strangers or maybe they're
(27:25):
close friends, but either way, you're going to walk away
from that experience feeling more connected to those people, more
bonded to them, and more human, more more grounded in
your own body than you would have felt without it.
So that's why I wrote this book. I'm really so
thrilled to get to share it with you. It comes
out May seventh. It's called Write Your Story, a simple
framework to understand yourself, your story, and your purpose in
(27:46):
the world. And it was all born out of this
experience of going through a really tragic time in my life.
And I'm grateful for that experience now for so many reasons.
Number one, because it really helped me access my power
in all areas of my life. It helped me access
my power and my romantic relationships. My relationship with my
(28:06):
husband now is a really really deep and intimate and
embodied and loving, caring, beautiful, strong, healthy relationship. We have
two beautiful, healthy kids that are born out of that relationship.
But also I'm grateful for that experience because it gave
me this book, which I now get to share with you,
and I hope that we can connect through both our
(28:27):
struggles but also through our victories in those struggles, because
one thing that I know to be true from helping
thousands of people craft their stories, is that your transformation,
your beauty, your essence, your power, your confidence is all
born out of your struggle and it's really a beautiful
way to see your life, and it's hard to see
(28:49):
it that way until you start to put it on
the page. So I wrote this book for you, Write
your Story, a simple framework to understand yourself, your story,
and your purpose in the world. It is available for
pre order. I hope you'll go order a copy. When
you do, order a copy from your favorite retailer, go
to Write your Story dot com slash book and enter
your order details there, because you're going to get eighteen
hundred dollars worth of pre order bonuses. You get write
(29:12):
your Story journal, a template to help you organize your
personal narrative.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
You're going to get a five video series.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
You get a course that I created called Writer's warm
Up that will help you begin to craft a book
idea if you have one. And you also get to
download the first three chapters of the book right away
so that you can get started reading before anyone else can.
Because the book is not even out until May seventh,
So go pre order a copy of the book. Make
sure you go to Write your Story dot com slash
book put your order details in there, and you'll get
(29:41):
to download your free resources. And also, please tell people
about this book. If you have someone in your life
who you think, God, they need to tell their story,
they have such an interesting life, or you know, I
would really love to hear more from them, or to
understand them better, to really make sense of why they
are this way, buy them a copy the books, send
them a copy in the mail, or just text them
(30:02):
the link and say, like, I really want you to
write your story. Go grab a copy of this book.
Or pull a group of friends together who you'd like
to be in a book club with or a writing
group with. Maybe you've got some people who you feel
close with already, and you guys could all read the
book together and sit down and create your own little
like therapy community. It's not going to be therapy exactly,
(30:23):
but it is going to be very therapeutic to sit
down together and write your stories and then share your
stories with each other. Think about how much better you
would all know each other after that process than before.
I'm excited for where this book is going to take
you personally and the depths that it's going to take
you in your relationships. Writing this book, I was like,
I hope people get this book for their mom or
(30:43):
for their grandma and say like tell me your story.
I want to know more about your life. Or for
your uncle or your aunt, or your neighbor or your
best friends, like give them a copy of the book
and be like, I want to know more about you.
I want to know more more about your life. Read
this book and write your story for me. So that's
the story of my divorce. That's the story of how
(31:04):
this book came to be. I've been avoiding telling that
story or going back to that place, but I'm glad
I did.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
It feels good.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
It feels good to tell the story from this vantage
point because when I was first telling the story, it
felt much more tender than it feels now.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Now.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
I just feel really confident in all the choices that
I made, and definitely writing about my life was a
big part of how I got there. So I hope
that this book can do the same thing for you.
Whatever season that you're in right now that feels shaky
or unsteady, I know that writing about your life is
going to really lend you a sense of stability and
give you a perspective on your life that you didn't
(31:39):
have before.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I'm grateful to get to share this with you.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
It's called write your story simple framework to understand yourself,
your story, and your purpose in the world. My name's
Alison Fallen. You can call me Ali and I'll see
you next week.
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