In terms of my personality, I’m an explorer by nature. Perhaps one who can navigate newer spaces and ways of being fairly well.
However what seems to be lacking in my skills is my ability to fully map these spaces and articulate them fully in story form.
It’s funny because I’ve felt like a bard at times as well. Yet if am one, then my storytelling skills are sorely lacking as well.
I think what I’m fearful of and can’t make sense of is how to map and tell a story that feels like it is changing as one strives to tells it.
You see, as I’ve noted before, when one goes beyond the horizon of one’s “self”, one isn’t mapping and storytelling what is already know. One is mapping and storytelling the unknown, giving it meaningful form and substance.
So there is this desire for certainty in mapping and storytelling. Yet often that certainty doesn’t arise beforehand but after. One has to play with the map and play with the story, moving things around until they suddenly fall into place, and make sense as a whole.
Writing for people works in the same way in that one may not know the outcome of what they are writing until they write it and make sense of it in the act of writing itself. But if they write it out and it doesn’t come together in that writing, it can feel as though the entire writing process was for nothing.
So one has to continually map and tell the story in different ways until finally that one right way, gives it a sense of meaning.
Yet at the same time, one has to have the means of moving the pieces of the map and pages of the story around without feeling like one has to redrawn the entire map or rewrite the entire story every time one tries a different variation.
I’m not fully sure what I’m saying here. But it has something to do with needing a tool or a method of navigating oneself fluidly, so that each new attempt at organizing oneself as a whole, doesn’t require exploring aspects of oneself that one has already explored previously.
What I’m trying to articulate here reminds me of The Maze in the Hero’s Journey. For example, one needs to explore dead-ends if one wants to fully map and make sense of the maze to make it through. Yet what if each failed attempt, causing one to hit a dead-end, caused one to forget previous attempts and dead-ends, thus potentially causing them to explore them again.
That’s what my experience currently feels like.
In effect, unless I can explore and navigate and map everything in one fell swoop, all at once, I forget where I’ve been because they’re so many different areas to cover. (And I think this has to do with vertical development being so expansive and connected to so many aspects of life, that it can be difficult to articulate as a whole.)
Yet I also realize that the way around this is to explore, navigate, and map out clusters of myself, like mapping out the four different corners of a new world. Yet knowing this and doing it are two different things. Knowing is one thing. Embodying that knowing is something completely different.
The knowing doesn’t become embodied until one has the experiences to be able to fully make sense of the deeper meaning of it.
All I can say at this point is that I am continuing to explore and navigate, trying to gain newer perspectives and experiences of what I may have missed previously within this maze before.