The Story You Keep Telling Yourself

Somewhere along the way, you picked up a story about yourself. Maybe it was I’m too sensitive. Or I always mess things up. Or people like me don’t get to have that. Or simply I’m just not good at this — fill in the blank with whatever yours is.

You probably don’t even notice it most of the time. It’s just there, running quietly in the background, shaping what you go after and what you don’t, what you believe you deserve and what you write off before you even try.

The tricky thing about these stories is that they feel like facts. They feel like honest self-assessment. But most of them were formed a long time ago — often in childhood, often in a single moment or a series of moments that got lodged somewhere deep. And the version of you that formed those conclusions was doing the best she could with what she had then. She wasn’t wrong to make sense of her world that way. She was just young, and those stories kept her safe.

But you’re not her anymore.

The story is not the truth. It’s an interpretation. One that made sense once and may not make sense now. And the moment you start to see it as a story — rather than a fact — is the moment you get to decide whether you want to keep telling it.

You don’t have to rewrite everything overnight. You just have to start noticing when the story is speaking. To pause and ask: is this actually true right now, or is this something I learned to believe a long time ago?

That one question, asked honestly, can change more than you think.

Sara Miriam Perlmutter is a holistic healer and author of Am I Broken? A Guide to Reclaiming Your Worth. She works 1:1 at saramiriamhealing.com.