When You're Trapped in the First Act

New York Times Best-Selling Author, Don Miller.

This might be one of the most important projects of my life.

Last weekend one of my favorite people asked me to partner with her in telling her story. She’s written a novel about her life experiences. She’s lived through trauma, heartache, celebration and now has almost 300 pages of a story written in narrative form.

It is extraordinary. And though I’m only a few pages in, I can already tell it’s going to be one of those projects that you just don’t forget.

Hard work. Heart work.

I’m all about doing the heart work.

It got me thinking about stories. The stories we tell, of course, but more importantly the stories we live in.

I made only one request in exchange for my help: that she pick up Don Miller’s A Million Miles in A Thousand Years and read it immediately. It’s a memoir about Miller’s wildly popular Blue Like Jazz becoming a movie.

It’s a memoir about story.

Miller later used his passion for telling and living a good story to build StoryBrand - a wildly successful marketing firm that helps businesses clarify their message.

They help brands tell a good, captivating story.

But first, this book.

This book, years ago, helped me realize that I was living in a bad story.

Here was a girl in her early 20s, working her tail off to get through graduate school. She was also lonely. She had several romantic relationships – sometimes juggling a few at once – that left her hurt and confused. I think there was even a day where she kissed three different boys in a span of 24 hours.

Not my proudest record, but, hey, a record all the same.

That girl, the girl I used to be, spent so much of her time being angry at God, the Church, her circumstances, the male species in general, that she barely had time for her schoolwork.

That girl didn’t have the perspective she needed to live a good story.

She was trapped in the first act. She couldn’t see herself as a leader. As someone who had the empowerment to choose who she let into her narrative. She spent so much time trying to please other people in hopes that they’d like and affirm her, that she forgot to be true to herself.

The end of that chapter came with a lot of heartbreak, but eventually, a new, fresh start. That girl stopped giving her heart to boys who didn’t deserve it. She got a new job with normal waking hours that afforded her a social life. She got plugged in with a new church.

She met a boy in Sunday school and respected herself enough not to desperately throw herself at him.

Luckily enough, he loved that in her. And the two started a new chapter together as they dated, got married and then had a child together.

They stepped into the next act of their story.

The story picks up again with the two of them learning to be both parents and lovers. Caretakers and friends.

The last 20 months have been difficult for my little tribe. I’ve been to the hospital for anxiety attacks. I’ve felt the strain of providing for our family’s finances. My husband has felt depleted from the waiting game of his career to pick up and from parenting a busy, squirmy toddler for the majority of the day.

Admittedly, our problems are so minute in comparison to so many. I’m quick to remember the privilege we have in just living in this country - and that even those living under the poverty threshold are still some of the wealthiest people in the world by comparison.

It’s a hard pill to swallow.

However, I think where a lot of dissatisfaction, doubt, worry, depression, bitterness, temptation to deceive or even give up entirely comes from a place of losing the broad perspective. Marriages end. Friendships strain. Jobs feel oppressive. Finances feel impossible – everything feels impossible.

It comes from feeling trapped in the first act.

It comes from not having the faith that there’s redemption in the second chapter. It comes from not being able to see hope around the corner.

We, through faith, gumption, and putting both of our bare feet on the floor when we wake up in the morning, have tremendous power over the stories we tell ourselves.

Over the stories we live in. 

We choose how we respond to the world and circumstances around us. It’s the only thing we can really control – ourselves. When we’re facing hardship or struggles, mental, physical or circumstantial, it’s hard to remember that there’s always a second act to a story.

There is always redemption. Seen and unseen.

And there is a second act waiting around the corner. For you. For me. For all of us.

Friend, I don’t know where you are today. I don’t know if you’re trapped in a hard, challenging, impossible story. Or if you’re wondering if there’s hope for a new chapter in your life at all.

But I’m here to tell you, there is.

There’s room to grow. There’s hope in the next step. There’s a way out of the season you’re in.

You only need to do the heart work, and maybe ask someone you love and trust, to help you see the certainty in the second act.