Starting Up Your Own Self Detective Agency
Part 5 - Using Words

We invite you to try out the very first exercise. Could you attempt to map yourself out with words? Right here, right now, can you grab a notebook and write down who you are in under 200 words?

You could also break yourself down into smaller, bite-sized chunks? Can you write down some of the following?
• The biggest episodes in your life
• The most important people in your life (for better or worse)
• The high points and the low points
• The hopes and fears
• What defines you as a person

If you would prefer to mark out your life in chronological order,
you might want to use the structure of a time-line instead.

1. Take a pen and a long roll of paper.
2. Start at one end and write down the word ‘birth’.
3. Moving along the page horizontally, note all the significant events that shaped you, giving each one an approximate date or year or age.
4. When you have completed this task, you may wish to extend the time line into the future.
5. If there are major gaps between years, try going back through it again to see if you can recall any more. If you can’t, it may be interesting to go on a journey to discover what was going on for you during this time.
6. Once you have finished, step back and reflect on what this exercise was like for you. What was it like to summarise your whole life in this way? Did you put a mixture of events in? Were they mostly ‘good’ or ‘bad’ episodes?

Another way of using words to express ourselves is to tell our
lives as a story. This can be especially important for someone
who hasn’t had a chance to tell their side of what happened.

Stories are part of the human condition. We are brought up with them, and we live our whole life with them. It is hard to escape from stories, as to do so would be a story in itself.

Stories can be light-hearted, just as they can be serious. They can also be incredibly powerful and can be used to influence whole continents of people.

Yet stories are just stories: tales, narratives, versions, words, gossip, descriptions, hearsay. No more, no less.

Some stories are often called ‘the truth’, or the ‘right’ version, while others are seen as ‘wrong’. This often depends on who is reporting the story – and how influential they are.

But stories are just stories.

To say one story is more important than another is an opinion, and opinions are just stories.

To say one story is right and one story is wrong is to judge, and judgements are only opinions. And opinions are just stories.

Many of us have grown up with fairy tales, where there is a dashing prince and a beautiful princess and a happy-ever-after. This has been known to create huge expectations – not to say big disappointments – when reality bites.

Stories can kill people. Stories can save their lives. Stories can put you in prison. Stories can free you. Stories can ruin a reputation. They can also immortalise someone. Stories can create nightmares. Stories can inspire, inflame, contradict.

And while everyone has a thousand and one stories and a thousand and one different accounts of events and episodes that happened in their lifetime, how is it that some people’s stories are considered more important than others? How come some people are unable to tell their story because nobody wants to listen to it? How come we are so ready to accept stories from some people and not from others? How come some people have their stories taken away from them, adapted and told by someone else?