Tell Yourself a Better Story

How the stories we tell are the stories we live.

The events of our life do not affect us as much as the stories we tell ourselves about them. The way we interpret the past, understand the present, and frame the future determines everything about how we feel about yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

It’s not that what happens in life doesn’t matter. It’s just that the events of our lives are like scenes in a film — the way we feel about them is greatly determined by how they’re framed within the greater story and how they contribute to the story’s message. As Joan Didion writes:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

Our Past Story

This is why past difficulties can either make us stronger or weaken our resolve to live. Bad things happen. That’s for sure. But the story we tell ourselves about why they happened and what they mean? That one’s up to us. We can be unapologetically real about what happened and write that scene into our story as a precursor to hope and better days.

Our Present Story

If I tell the story of my present as a tale of lack, of not, of less, then it’ll be unimaginably difficult to live and experience any different. If I interpret my present through a lens of gratitude, I’ll begin to see more and more things in a positive light. Every day brings good things and bad things, even if they’re small or we don’t notice them. But they’re just things. We determine their power by how we write them into our story.

Our Future Story

If I frame my future in dread — being focused on all that could go wrong — I might just experience anything that does come as, you guessed it, not so good. I might even attract that kind of stuff. Anxiety and stress have been known to contribute to the realization of the very things we fear. In other words, stress can make you sick. Even if you don’t create the substance of your future’s fears, you’ll probably still experience your life with their quality.

Tell a Better Story

For me, telling myself a different story takes a lot of courage. The stories I tell myself — especially the anxious, depressed ones — feel incredibly true. And it feels like I’m lying to myself if I try to make things more positive. It’s really, really difficult and, if you’re like me, you’re going to fail at this a lot. To succeed, you’re going to have to doubt your own thoughts, and push forward with courage.

For me, telling myself a different story takes a lot of courage.

It’s hard to have faith in your future because faith often just feels fake. But what if the stories we’re already telling ourselves — the negative, pessimistic, anxious, depressed ones — are also stories rooted in faith? What if, although they feel true, they’re just as unknown as their more positive, hopeful versions? So what if we tell ourselves better stories? We have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

This is not an invitation to ignore injustice.

This does not mean we pretend bad things don’t happen and ignore injustice. In this case, choosing to tell themselves a different story means that the victim of the injustice can take their control back — living their story, not the story someone else tried to write for them.

This does not mean we stick our heads in the sand and ignore terrible things.

This is not just popular positivism. There are things to wrestle with and things to weep for. This is an invitation to be completely real. And the reality is that we choose how we view and tell ourselves about life — whether the story we tell is positive or negative, hopeful or discouraging. Accepting this reality means we can accept the reality of terrible things and write them into our story with hope and meaning.

So what if we tell ourselves better stories? We have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

Our experience of life is determined by the stories we tell ourselves. If you’d like to change your experience of life, try this:

When you feel yourself worried today, try to tell yourself the opposite story. Don’t worry if it feels like you’re lying to yourself. Our self-protection mechanisms and fear of being disappointed are strong. Just press on.

Take courage!

Better days are coming. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Hi, I’m Michael. Thanks for reading this article! It represents day 16 of my current 30-day writing project. If you enjoyed it, you may also like to read this article I wrote: To Accomplish Your Goals, Do Something Insignificant Right Now.