When does our Life Story lead us to our Purpose in Life?

I think if I were to answer the question : "What's your story?", a personal narrative of the events of my life, told with dramatic effect would not sum anything up at all. I've realised that it is because I do not have a fixed identity about who I am. I have come to a conclusion that what happened to me does not make me who I become. That is why I seldom evoke stories about my past unless it is to quote something anecdotal or to offer an empathetic response cultivated from my own personal experience instead of remaining completely detached from another person's narrative.

If who I am and where I came from does not make an interesting story even for myself, then what I 'am' is also not a story, because who and what I am is nothing but a collection of the things I have chosen to believe and discard about myself and the events and things that have happened in my life. As a younger person, I spent quite a significant amount of time trying to figure out what I am as if knowing that will predestines something more purposeful, meaningful, to accomplish in my 'life'.

I've also realized that I cannot define myself by the roles I play; daughter, mother, teacher, sister, niece, Chinese, Malaysian, friend, urbanite,Buddhist, Muslim, Atheist, communist, opposition, mainstream, rebel, etc. Building up a sense of self based on any role requires one, sooner or later, to feel a sense of needing to abide by definitions and stereotypes. I was once described as moving on the same axis with other people but spinning on my own orbit. That itself is another label, another definition but that also does not say anything.

In the end I've come to know this : that none of us have a history, we are all living characters. Our stories have not been written, our plot still running and there is no ending yet. We might have realized that some of the conflicts have already been written for us while we create, with a direct hand or not, other conflicts that arise within our lives. To already settle with a conclusion that we are this or that, rich or poor, clever or not, Indian or Chinese, Muslim or Christian, mother or child, teacher or student, worker or boss, etc is to stop living the story but to replay the set of conflicts that were given and to lull it to a monotonous, painful boredom towards the end.

However, everyone has a story, just not a story of 'me' but a story of "now". To have a story of "now" collapses the entire spectrum of 'past' into a single defining momentum that allows one to have a real 'present story' and to collapse the entire doubts and worry of future into the freshness and creative power of Now. Can each of us know what our story is without making it a summary or a patchwork of events that happened to us in the past, without the plasters of labels we attach to ourselves and without the worries and fears about how we want the future to turn out?

If you can look beyond the events of the past and the ambitions for the future, you can find that story, the story of yourself. And I believe, that story leads the way for the rest of the plot to unfold, the plot of discovering our purpose in life.