How to Create A New Life Story

A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.

~ Coco Chanel

No one will ever know the real Coco Chanel, because she designed it that way. She once said, “People’s lives are an enigma.”

She perpetrated her own mystery by constantly creating a new life story, reinventing her past and weaving around and around her family history.

It wasn’t a history she was proud of. She felt the stigma of her illegitimate birth in a poorhouse to parents who, for all intents and purposes, were wandering gypsies.

To live the fantasy that sustained her as a young girl locked in a convent she imagined a new life—and with it a new life story about her background.

She obscured her past from others, refashioning its heartaches and betrayals, smoothing away the rough edges. She reengineered her history just as she recut the sleeves of a dress, unfastening seams that pinched, cutting unsightly threads, and then sewing it back together.

She once said, “I don’t like the family. You’re born into it, not of it. I don’t know anything more terrifying than the family…Childhood—you speak of it when you’re very tired, because it’s a time when you had hopes, and expectations.”

Like real stories in books and movies, your life story will have a hero (you), a quest, obstacles to overcome to achieve the story goal and a climax—and hopefully, a happy ending.

Your Challenge

Who are you? What’s your story? We live the lives we imagine. Retell your story—leaving out the bits you don’t want to relive.

If your childhood didn’t meet your expectations, if your family or personal history feels like a hindrance, or if you are dragging around the baggage of a disappointing, hurtful or traumatic past—act as if.

Act as if you had a different past. Create a new historical account of the life you lived—as long as your intention is not to create fraud and ruin lives.

Rewrite your life story so that it becomes meaningful—leading to growth and transformation.

~ Catherine Ann Jones, author of Heal Your Self with Writing

This is an excerpt from The Art of Success: Coco Chanel.