How To Change The Story You Tell Yourself About You

Everyone tells themselves a certain story about their own life.

You do it too, whether you’re aware of it or not. What’s more, you further interpret your life in a way that fits into this story.

As you keep doing that, the story grows more real in your head. When you repeat it enough, it starts defining you.

It sets the limits for what you can and cannot, should and shouldn’t do. It conditions your self-esteem, your ability to achieve, contest and stand your own ground.

The protagonist of that story translates into who you are. That’s huge.

Unfortunately, society often makes you tell a story that’s less than helpful. The main objective is usually to conform and fit in. When that’s the type of story you tell, the protagonist is reduced to nothing more a well-oiled part in the clockwork orange.

This renders the protagonist powerless. They become a background character, instead of the leader of events.

If you see this happening, it’s time to reclaim agency. After all, this is your story.

Humans understand reality through stories. Long before inventing the alphabet, we already told myths and legends that solidified certain archetypes in our heads.

These ancient stories still apply today. Take the apotheosis of a self-made artist, for example. All over the Internet, we retell the tale about how doing the work “from the heart” day after day eventually leads the protagonist to success.

But the path to the top isn’t a straight line, we say. There’s a high chance that once you reach your goal, you’ll need to re-evaluate everything and start from scratch. And yes, it’ll probably feel like a failure — but you must keep going anyway.

This story isn’t new. It’s nothing else than the ancient myth of Sisyphus, retold to fit the contemporary world.

The myths humanity told from the beginning of time shaped our collective consciousness. We are surrounded by them, whether we want it or not. We can’t deny the fact that we interpret the world through the filter of these stories.

It’s extremely hard to change the collective mythology. But an analogical process is going on in your own mind.

Luckily, your personal narrative is something you have a fair amount of control over.

The mindfulness movement tells us to skip the mental interpretation of events and experience them as they are — without labelling them with meaning.

While it’s a beautiful idea to strive towards, I guess it only happens further down the path to enlightenment. Meanwhile, you and I need stories about what’s happening to us.

Our individual stories, in which we are the protagonists.

Most people don’t find it easy to tell a constructive story to themselves. That’s because, from the earliest days, they received this message from their environment:

If you show too much of your individuality, you risk being excluded from the group.

Being excluded is one of the greatest fears we have. After all, a part of our brains is still wired to depend on our tribe for survival.

Because of this fear, we hide the story that feels true to us. We replace it with a safer one. We reinforce a fake narrative — one that doesn’t favour the protagonist. It’s supposed to help us conform and fit in.

But in the long run, it never really works to our advantage.

I have a very vivid memory of quite literally rewriting my story so that it fit the accepted standards.

At the age of 12, I was given an assignment at school to write an essay. We were supposed to reflect on the meaning of the phrase: “every person is a poet.”

The essay was supposed to analyze a text that we read earlier in class.

But when I sat down to write it, I felt compelled to approach it differently. In one go, I described one magical evening I spent with friends the previous summer. The essay turned out very different — and much more personal — than what the teacher expected.

Reading it to myself, I felt both wonderful and vulnerable. On one hand, I was proud of my work and the raw feelings in it. On the other, I feared that the teacher might read it out loud in class.

After a few hours of mental wrestling between wanting to submit my true story and fearing how it would come across to others, I decided to write a new one. I glued the pages of my vulnerable story together so that no one could ever read it.

Then, I wrote the kind of essay I was supposed to produce. I analyzed the poem as I was expected to and threw in some reserved remarks that had nothing to do with my soul.

Today, I’m trying to revive the story I once learned to hide. It’s not always easy, because my environment still tries to reinforce another one.

Our inhibited society offers a narrative in which I’m insignificant, weak and awkward. But in the end, the story I tell myself is the one that matters most.

The kind of protagonist I choose is crucial to how I’ll write the rest of my book.

I firmly believe that you can rewrite your story, too. You can look at all the events in your life and reframe them to mean something else.

When you choose to see yourself as a proper hero of your story, all failures turn into the “building of character”.

If you had a dysfunctional childhood, you may have believed that you were screwed right from the beginning. But you can tell a different story now. You can see your complicated family relations as a gift which made you self-aware in a way you’d never be otherwise.

If you’re struggling with depression or addiction, you don’t need to see your protagonist as weak. Instead, turn things around to make them a living proof that radical change is possible.

You can’t control many things in life. Where you were born, who raised you, what diseases you’re predisposed you to — that was never for you to decide.

But what you can do is change the story about what these things mean.

Be kind to your protagonist and reinforce a story that serves you. It’s the one you’ve always had in your heart — but buried it along the way out of fear.

Go find the old notebook and crumble the dried glue between the pages. Read that original story and start telling it to the world.