"Going beyond the headlines"

After her mother’s death, Vanessa was raised single-handedly by her father. However, as she grew up, she purposely distanced herself from him. She had heard rumors about her mother’s death from several people. They all indicated that her father had abandoned her mother on a sinking ship to save himself.

Nevertheless, her father told her that her mother died from a terminal illness. She saw how devastated her father was after her mother’s passing, so she never questioned him. Although, she just couldn’t help but believe the rumors, as they were said with such conviction. So, despite her father’s on-going efforts, she rarely kept in touch with him.

Many years later, her father passed away, and she was handed some of his belongings. One of them was his diary. As she flicked through it, she found a page that read as follows: “This vacation was meant to help my wife take her mind off things. But it went drastically wrong. Our ship was sinking, and we were going to die. A lifeboat came to rescue us, but there was only one space left. I pushed my wife behind me and jumped on.”

At this point, Vanessa was enraged and burst into tears. However, she continued to read his passage: “As I got on, my wife shouted at me, telling me to take good care of our child. I was crushed, I wanted to float to the bottom of that ocean with her – the love of my life. She was already dying from an illness that she got from giving birth, and we had agreed that we would do anything for this child. I acted instinctively for the sake of our child. For Vanessa, I survived. I will be the best father I can be, while I mourn my sweetheart’s death for the rest of my life.”

Vanessa’s heart sunk in and she felt overwhelmed by a series of emotions, as she finished reading his entry. With regret in her mind, she began to understand everything her father had gone through. Sacrifices were made, all for her. She was their priority and their legacy.

This story makes me stop and wonder how many times I have bought into the “headlines” about someone and missed out on a great connection or friendship. There’s a reason why people are the way they are. We are all often so quick to judge and vilify others that we don’t take time out to understand their story and motives. We step into a scene in their life and think we know the whole story. People are usually deeper than what meets the eye. We judge someone’s entire story by the page we landed on and rarely take time to learn their previous chapters.

Context is a powerful thing. Context is the key to compassion. It’s real easy to make quick judgments off of snapshots when you look at someone’s life. Thinking 'they should have done this or they should have done that.; but if we can zoom out and get some context instead of judging them, we’ll have room for kindness and empathy.

Perhaps you (yes, you!) have a headline about you floating around your respective community, profession, organization or your own mind that you are not altogether proud of and it haunts you. Maybe people have defined you by that headline for so long that you’ve started to identify with it and built your whole life around it.

If you messed up, recognize it was a mistake. Own it. Learn from it. Grow from it. Write a different story now. Change the headline. Don’t be defined by your past; be prepared by your past. Forgiving yourself is as important as forgiving others. Guilt is toxic. Disappointment can either be a tool to build our faith or an instrument to destroy it. We get to choose what we do with it. How you define yourself is YOUR choice. How others define you is THEIR choice. It’s up to YOU which definition you prefer. No book is a chapter; no chapter tells the whole story; no mistake defines who we are.

Many times we are unable to move forward because we struggle with separating the circumstances of our past from the possibilities of our future. Owning your story can be tough but not nearly as challenging as spending your life running from it. Friend, your future needs you – your past doesn’t. Remember, we don’t get to control the story people tell about us. We get to control the one we live!