A teenaged boy I know came to see me one afternoon and I sensed he wanted something, and after a few minutes it was clear. “I want to be a writer,” he said. “I am going to be a writer.” He did not ask me for any help or assistance, didn’t want me to read his manuscripts, he did ask me for some advice, some guidance. And I gave it to him. If you want to be a writer, you will be. Start writing and don’t stop. And he has, winning two high school awards, selling his essays to online blogs and magazines, starting a blog and working at it every day.

I know another writer, experienced and gifted, and she was afraid to even call herself a writer for a long time, and she cannot imagine how she might make a living as a writer. The two stories fascinate and touch me. Why is one so certain he can do this thing, and another so tentative? Talent doesn’t seem to be the issue.  I’m sure the answer is complex and goes deep into the families and emotional histories of the two.

But  I am learning that the stories we tell about ourselves – and the stories we believe about ourselves – are important, and I believe they become our truth. If you say you are a writer (or artist or sculptor or painter or photographer) and you believe it, then the story becomes a part of you, fuses with your neural system, connects you to your world, becomes your truth, the air around you. Notions of energy and attraction are epidemic right now in the spiritual world, and I have always struggled with the idea that you can have what you want if you just keep thinking it. For me, it is more complex than that. Becoming what you want begins with the story you tell about yourself. I think of this precocious kid looking me, a writer of 22 books more than twice  his age, and saying with conviction that he is a writer and would be one.

For me, it became true the second he said it. I have no doubt that I will be watching his story come true, and why not? Many thousands of people make their living writing, more than ever before, something few people seem to know.

There are long lines of people waiting in this world to tell you what you can and can’t do and can and can’t be. And longer lines of people who created their own stories and lived them.

I remember the day six years ago when I decided to become a photographer. I remember how many people referred to me as an amateur, told me I did not have the experience, told me all of the things I didn’t know and couldn’t do. I never listened to them, never even heard them.

I remember the day many years ago sitting in the Providence Public Library that I decided to become a  writer, and I wrote my first letters to the Providence Journal. And I was a writer. And I remember the day 25 years ago when I imagined writing a new kind of book, one that told my stories in a new kind of way, text and still and moving images fused together. I will do it, I told myself. I will write that book. And at midnight, when “The Story Of Rose” is released,  it will be true, my story will have come true.

When I met my wife and love Maria, she told me she was once an artist, but was not any longer. She changed her story, and now she tells people without hesitation that she is an artist, and always will be.

Our stories are important, the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell other people. They are sacred to me, the core of my spiritual existence. Even in this greedy, angry,  disconnected  techno-driven age, stories are one of the things nobody can write for us, or take away. They are our myths, our acts of creation. If we wish, our stories can become true.