I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didnt matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong.Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted.If you tell yourself youre a winner, you know what kind of story youre telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself youre a loser, youve made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the losers story as in the winners story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything.Heres the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasnt the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname Heidi to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again.Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my heros journey.
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About Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater was a contemporary American author. Margaret Stiefvater is an American author who is best known for her young adult fantasy series The Wolves of Mercy Falls and The Raven Cycle. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Life — Reflections on the meaning, challenges, and beauty of life
- Motivation — Powerful words to drive action and perseverance