By the time most people sit down across from me, they have told their story so many times it has worn a groove. I’m the one who holds it all together. I’m the difficult one. I never finish anything. I’m too much. I’m not enough. The sentences arrive polished, certain, almost rehearsed, because they have been. We narrate ourselves into a shape and then mistake the shape for the truth.
I am not against stories. They kept us alive. A child who learns I have to be good or I’ll be left is not being foolish; she is being brilliant, surviving the only world she has. The story was a strategy. The trouble is that the strategy outlives the danger, and we keep paying its price decades after the threat is gone.
The story as armor
Every fixed identity is a kind of armor. I’m the strong one protects you from ever having to be held. I’m broken protects you from the terrifying responsibility of being well. The story isn’t lying to you, exactly; it’s defending you. And like all armor, it works by limiting movement. You cannot become what your story has already decided you are not.
When identity softens, something truer gets a chance to speak.
What softening feels like
People expect that letting go of a story will feel like liberation. Sometimes it does. More often, at first, it feels like grief, even like death. Because the story was someone. To loosen it is to feel the strange vertigo of not yet knowing who you are without it. This is not a sign you’ve gone wrong. It is the doorway.
In a session, I am listening for the place where the story repeats itself a little too smoothly. That smoothness is the tell. And gently, I’ll ask the question the story isn’t expecting: Who told you that? When did you first decide it? What would be true if it weren’t? Not to argue you out of it, since you can’t be argued out of armor, but to stand beside you while you notice, maybe for the first time, that you are the one wearing it, and not the armor itself.
The one who has the story
Here is the quiet thing underneath all of it. You have a story, which means you are not the story. There is a you that was there before the story formed and will be there after it loosens, the one who has been narrating all along. We rarely meet that one directly. We are too busy being the character. But in moments of real stillness, of being truly witnessed, the narration pauses, and you catch a glimpse of who is actually there.
That one was never broken, never too much, never behind. That one doesn’t need a better story. It only needs to be seen.