You Aren’t Who You Think You Are
I found freedom in challenging my story and you can too
Our stories are 90% bullshit, and no matter how many facts we put in our autobiographies, all of them are biased.
Everything we know about ourselves and about others is a STORY. We start telling stories to ourselves as soon we’re able to process what goes on around us.
Kellie is a talented artist, while Billy was born to be a mathematician; she’ll probably be broke all her life. Jane is the good child, while Beth is the bad one. My brother is smarter than I am. My parents hate me. My sister got everything she wanted. Some of these stories we tell ourselves, and others are told to us by the people around us, but they’re all equally destructive.
Not only do these stories poison us, but they become self-fulfilling prophecies; we desperately try to become this bad (or good) thing we believe ourselves to be or our loved ones believe us to be. There are millions who do everything from going to medical school to ending up in prison because that’s what other people said they’d wind up doing. We scrunch ourselves up to fit into the little box we’ve been crammed into in someone else’s story. That doesn’t seem like a very comfortable way to live.
