Writing Your Own Story: When the Fire Reveals What Matters

There are moments in life when everything falls apart at once. The job, the relationship, the car, the sense of direction. And then, in Laurie Collister's case, the house itself. A neighbor's forgotten french fries started a fire that took nearly everything she owned. But somehow, a floor-to-ceiling shelf of three hundred handwritten diaries made it through the smoke without a page touched. Laurie had been journaling since she was eighteen. Not for posterity, not with any plan. Just to survive, to process, to let the pressure out. She never imagined those entries would one day be the map that led her home to herself. But reading through them, volume by volume, she began to see her own life the way a novelist sees a character: clearly, curiously, with a kind of tenderness that had been hard to access from the inside. This is a conversation about what it means to excavate your own story, to find the thread that was always there, and to finally stop measuring your life against a template that was never built for you. What You'll Hear: How a house fire became the strange beginning of Laurie's deepest self-understanding What it felt like to read her own diaries as if they belonged to someone else, cringing, laughing, and eventually arriving at compassion The way loneliness had become her status quo so quietly she didn't know it was there until it wasn't How writing her memoir forced her to name the arc of her own change and ask whether she had actually changed at all What it means to stop being the sidekick in your own life The idea of a "secret contract," the calling that was being named by others long before she could hear it herself Laurie A. Collister is a memoirist, former counselor of seventeen years, and caregiver to her 97-year-old mother. Her debut memoir, A Different Kind of Vow, traces her winding journey through career, connection, and identity, drawing from decades of personal journals to uncover what she calls her sacred contract. Her second memoir is due in July 2027. She lives in the Pacific time zone with her mother's very large dog nearby. You can find her and her books at lauriecollister.com and on Amazon. Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/follow Subscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/ --- finding yourself through journaling, house fire life change, memoir writing healing, loneliness and self-discovery, starting over in your 30s, reading your own story, identity outside society's template, self-compassion through writing, caregiving and personal boundaries, life purpose and calling Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices