You Aren’t Who You Think You Are

I found freedom in challenging my story and you can too

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

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.

As for my story, I’ve always had one and have always been 100% certain it’s true. I had my fair share of negative messaging and emotional abuse in my childhood. More than some, less than others, but I’ve always let it control my life, from my high-drama momma teaching me I was a screw-up, and failing to teach me self-esteem, self-discipline, confidence, or independence so I would be dependent on her, to my negative, hater father who made sure I knew he thought I was lazy, worthless, and fat on a regular basis.

Other people may have let the many good memories outweigh the bad. Others would have punched my father’s lights out and felt better about the whole thing. But my choice has always been to use these memories as a torture device on myself; the moment one cut starts to heal, I run my mind over the scar until it starts to bleed again, and the pain comes back fresher than ever.

Despite minor changes that came with therapy, my main story has remained consistent — I was mistreated and that…