The May Monthly | Rewrite Your Reality

Mindset Makeover: Taking a Deeper Dive into The Pause and The Page One

Perhaps it is garishly American (but also canonic and iconic) to claim agency over chance. And I love us for doing it anyway. Consider: have you ever had a moment when you realized your life as you knew it just changed, in that instant?

“When [you] took the road less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”

When, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walk[ed] into mine.”

David Orr’s critique of the popular misreadings of Frost’s The Road Less Taken in The Paris Review explores the multi-layered characterization — by Frost, and by millions of readers over a hundred-ish years— of the existential absurdity of choice (worth reading, if you aren’t going to take the time to dive into his book). Iconically, I think Bogie’s famous line from Casablanca gets at the same sentiment. Because of course she walks into his life (again): after all, this is where the story begins.

Hollywood’s turned this into a trope. In a romantic comedy, it’s the moment when time slows, and the (usually female) love interest is backlit, and the (usually male) gaze locks in, inviting the audience to fall in love with (her), too.

In the romantic comedy of my life, I definitely have this moment locked in: I’ll never forget when I first saw my (now husband) strutting into the gym, wearing that goofy Chi-Town headband that I wanted to buy the day before — but Champs Sporting Goods was closed. Because of course it was. This was where our story began (again).

While it feels a little too cute to consider that we might always find this clarity of self-awareness about the moments that change us in the stories of our lives, I don’t think it precludes the potential for a writing and rewriting of the moment that happens to all of us, regardless of the extent to which we’re aware of it at the time, or afterwards.

We may not always choose the plot twist, but we can choose how we respond to it.

One of my fave themes that I keep coming back to in my creative practice is the parallel between Writing Advice and Life Advice. In our “Rewrite Your Reality” deep dive this month, I want to explore the idea that life is a draft, and we have the agency to reframe the narrative, revise our approach to each chapter, each scene, and continually reinvent ourselves along the way. We’ll explore how mindset shifts become moment-to-moment choices—and how rewriting our reality, both The Pause and The Page One, serves us in our writing, and in our daily lives as well.