I’ve been thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and how easy it is to create narratives that limit us and keep us self-contained to boxes that are far too small, boxes that don’t allow us to expand or grow.
What we believe to be true about ourselves is not always the truth, or rather it’s not the whole truth; there is often so much more to our story, a complexity about our personhood that we forget to see—either because those layers scare us or because we’ve ignored them for so long that we forget they exist at all.
An example from my own life: Over the last decade, I’ve told myself I’m a serious person even though, up until my 20s, I would have self-described as silly and playful. I was often the one in my friend group leading the charge in pranks and late-night mischief—which usually just meant TPing the boys’ houses in our suburban neighborhood or dancing around Walmart at 1 a.m. until the staff kicked us out.
As a kid, I was this way too—it’s eviden…
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