We all carry a story about who we are. Most of us never wrote it on purpose.
It got assembled. Piece by piece. From an old wound that never fully closed. From a limiting belief someone handed us before we knew to question it. From a memory we only ever got half of, so we filled in the rest with our worst guess.
None of that makes the story true. It just makes it familiar. And familiar is what keeps us stuck.
How You Got Here
Somewhere along the way, you learned to tell yourself a version of your life that kept you small. Not because you’re weak, because it was useful once. It explained the rejection. It made sense of the silence. It gave you a reason not to try the thing that scared you.
That story did its job. It kept you safe (or safe enough), but it was never meant to be permanent. Most of us just never got the memo that we were allowed to put it down.
So we keep telling it at the dinner table. In our own heads at 2 a.m. In the way we introduce ourselves before anyone’s even asked. I’m the one who always… I’m not the kind of person who… That’s just how I am. Each retelling presses it in a little deeper, until it stops feeling like a story at all. It starts feeling like fact.
Know thyself is the oldest instruction we have. But knowing yourself starts with noticing this: The self you think you know might just be the story you’ve told the longest.
I spent my early twenties joking, in the crudest possible terms, that I was a ‘broke bitch.’ Guess what? I was broke. I made great money but I always fell short. I re-wrote that story long ago. You can too. You don’t have to listen to the old tapes on repeat. You can always re-record.
Not every story that keeps you small announces itself. Some of them sound like humility. Some sound like realism. I’m just practical. I know my limits. My personal favorite: I’m sensitive. I am, but it doesn’t have to hold me back. The quietest stories are the ones that have learned to disguise themselves as wisdom.
Change Your Story, Change Your Life
A story you told isn’t a story you’re stuck with.
You have the ability to edit it. Not erase what happened. Edit the meaning you built on top of what happened. That’s a different task, and it’s one you’re actually equipped for.
I remember one of the first things my Dad told me after I had my son at 21: “Now you’ll never amount to anything.” That really hit me hard. I took it as a challenge (as I often did when people put me down). Today I realize that was his story he was projecting. He felt like his life was over once he had children. It had nothing at all to do with me. And I proved otherwise.
What if the version of you that stayed small was never the only accurate one? What if it was just the first draft, written by someone with less information than you have now?
You get to write a new draft. One that doesn’t require you to pretend the wound never happened. One that lets the wound be real and still refuses to let it be the whole story. That’s not denial, that’s authorship.
Writing Shifts Your Story
This is why I keep coming back to the page. Writing isn’t just how I process what happened. It’s how I catch myself mid-sentence still narrating the old story out of habit and choose different words.
When you write it down, you can see the story instead of just living inside it. You notice the sentence you’ve repeated a hundred times. You notice where it stops being memory and starts being interpretation. That gap, between what happened and what you decided it meant, is where the real work lives.
Be the author of your own story. Not because it sounds inspiring on a mug. Because someone has been writing it this whole time, and it might as well be you.
Circles Amplify the Shift
There’s a version of this work you can do alone, at your own desk and your own time. It matters, but something else happens when you do it in a circle.
When you write your story out loud in front of people who are doing the same brave, unglamorous work, the story loses some of its grip. It stops being your secret shame and starts being something you can look at together. Someone else’s honesty gives you permission for your own. That’s the quiet magic of a writing circle. You go in thinking you’re there to write. You leave having rewritten something.
My writing circles have taught me this more than any book has. We show up week after week, put our unfinished stories on the page, and read them out loud to each other. Nobody fixes anybody. There is nothing to fix. We just witness and honor. Somehow, that’s enough to loosen a story that’s been stuck for years.
I’ve lost count of the number of people in my writing circles who didn’t consider themselves writers, let alone poets. We have literally re-written our identities by coming together in a circle. Many of these same folks have gone on to publish their own work.
There are so many wondrous stories waiting to be written. Not the polished kind. The true kind. The ones that finally fit who you actually are now, not who you had to be to survive back then. And in being a new story, we don’t just describe a new world. We create one.
That’s the work.
Writing Exercise: Excavate the Old Story
Set aside 20 minutes. Write by hand if you can. Don’t edit as you go.
Part 1: Find it (5 minutes).
Finish this sentence, then keep writing without stopping: “The story I tell about myself when things go wrong is…”
Let it be unflattering. Let it be old. Don’t soften it for the page.
Part 2: Excavate it (10 minutes).
Answer these in any order (or you can choose the questions that pull you in):
- How old were you when you first told a version of this story?
- Who was the first audience for it?
- Who did it protect you from?
- What did believing this story let you avoid doing?
Part 3: Draft the edit (5 minutes).
Write the same story again but change one thing: the ending. Not a fantasy ending. The most honest, most possible ending available to you now with what you know today that you didn’t know then.
Read both versions back. Notice which one you’ve been living in. Now choose the one you want to live into, starting today.
