You Are the Stories You Tell
Why your “short stories” matter and how to change those that limit your life
“There is no greater power on this earth than story.” — Libba Bray
Stories are important. The art of storytelling has played an integral part in humankind’s intellectual, cultural, and emotional evolution throughout history. For millennia, humans have used stories to connect with eachother, to form individual and communal identities, to explain the unexplainable, and to pass on important cultural knowledge to subsequent generations. Beginning with the ancient peoples who practiced oral storytelling, through the birth of writing systems, to the days of the printing press, and now to the era of digital communication, the allure and necessity of storytelling have never changed.
Why We Tell Stories
Telling stories comes naturally to us as a species; in fact, it is almost certainly our preferred way of communicating with one another. Storytelling, both on the grand mythological scale and the personal, private scale, fulfills a need inside all of us. As receivers of a story, we can experience what another has experienced, empathize with them, and question our own selves regarding our beliefs about life. As storytellers, we add meaning to the events in our lives by organizing them into a narrative arc and connect with others by sharing our experiences. We shape our identity by the stories that we tell. No matter if the story is long or short, we put forth, often subconsciously, our truest beliefs about our circumstances, traits, values, and observations about the world.
Telling stories is so ingrained in us, that we do it all the time. We tell stories to communicate with one another. We read stories to escape our own realities. We listen to stories told by others on the news to gain information. We tell our children stories to teach them. We share stories with friends and family for entertainment. I’m guessing that if you made a list of the many ways you encounter stories during the day, you could fill a sheet or two of paper. I wonder though if on that list you would include the stories you tell yourself.
Our Inner Stories
Most of us have an inner voice that talks to us throughout the day. There are names for this voice — consciousness, the ego, inner conscience, the inner critic, the inner child, the self, or the mind. Whichever name or concept you identify with, the function is the same. This voice or awareness is always with us, guiding our decision-making, reacting to events and situations, organizing, sorting, labeling facts and feelings, and generally making sense of everything that happens in our lives. It is also this inner voice that consistently tells us stories about ourselves, and it is these stories that shape our own understanding of who we are and what we are capable of.
Now, you may be thinking, Hey you, I don’t sit around telling myself stories all day, I’m not lost in a fantasy world. And yes, I’ll agree that most of us (memoir writers excluded), do not sit around telling ourselves organized stories complete with character arcs and plot points, featuring ourself as the main character, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t tell ourselves stories every single day, multiple times a day.
I can’t do that. My mom is such a witch. I married the wrong person. I am such a loser. The world is unfair. I’m so tired. It is too hard. I’m too old/young. I already messed it up.
Do these stories sound familiar?
These little tidbits, these little pieces of (what seem like) truth, are stories. Maybe not in the strictest sense in that they don’t have developed narratives, but just like all good tales, these stories reveal what the teller believes to be true about the world and about themselves. Once lived through, experiences become memories, and memories are just stories that we tell ourselves about those experiences. To simplify our experiences and make use of them, our brain distills them into short stories with the essential “truths” that we gained from them. These stories then form the basis for our beliefs about the world, our circumstances, and what we can expect from others and ourselves.
Where Do Our Stories Come From?
Our stories have to come from somewhere. Some we write all on our own, while some are stories that our parents, our teachers, our friends, our co-workers, our partners, or even strangers have told us. Other stories are passed down from the culture of the society we exist in. Stories also come from our perception of past experiences. If we’ve adopted the story I’m not good enough, we experienced something in our life that lead us to that conclusion. Conversely, if our story is, I always find a way to be successful, then our experiences have largely confirmed this story. What’s important to remember about all of the stories we tell ourselves is that they are not absolute, objective truths; however, they are our truths, because they are the stories that we believe to be true.
Stuck in the Same Ol’ Story
We have been told stories, implicitly and explicitly, that have shaped our thoughts about all facets of life. And because we are human, we tell those same stories to ourselves over and over again. If our stories have been mostly positive, chances are that we are generally optimistic and experience life as a story with a happy ending. However, if we have struggled with limiting and unhelpful stories, then unless we have sought to change them, we probably view the world through the frame of a more tragic narrative.
Nobody wants to live their life as the main character in a tragic story. We like to read and watch tragedies, but rarely do we actually want to be the person who lives them. Unfortunately, we often find ourselves doing just that. We trap ourselves in a tragic narrative of victimhood, helplessness, sadness, melancholy, fear, anxiety, and immobility. We repeat stories to ourselves that feel true, that feel correct, but that keep us from living our lives to the fullest. The good news is that by taking the time to identify the stories that we tell ourselves, both good and bad, we can change them, and in doing so, we can change our lives.
Change Your Story, Change Your Life
To change your stories, there are three simple steps to take.
- Recognize the stories you tell yourself, both helpful and harmful.
- Determine which stories aren’t serving your true self/life goals, and which stories you want to change first.
- Work on changing these stories to change your life story.
Sounds easy right? It is simple in theory, but putting these steps into practice takes some work. Here are some tips to get started.
Step 1: To recognize your stories, you need to pay attention to your thoughts. Some call this your inner dialogue or inner critic (some even say to name it — Karen, Beezelbub- whatever you want). Whatever you call it, you need to pay attention to it. Whenever you begin to feel a negative emotion that won’t go away, listen to what this inner voice is saying. I guarantee it is playing all of your limiting stories on repeat. Write them down. Speak them into a voice memo. Whatever you need to do to keep track of the stories you tell yourself most often. You will want to identify these stories as specifically as possible so that you can change them. You can also do this when you feel happy or content. These happy stories can be helpful to build on as you begin to change the limiting ones.
Step Two: The second step is to determine which stories that you tell yourself don’t help you reach your goals. Not only this, but you’ll want to decide which stories to target first. If one of your stories is that it is hard to lose weight, but another is I’m worthless because I’m overweight, the second story should be tended to first. It is far worse to tell yourself the story that you are worthless than the somewhat true story that it is hard to lose weight. One story here is discouraging, but the other is actually harmful. Target your harmful stories first.
You pick the story you want to change and you rewrite it. You edit it. You revise it. You delete the parts you don’t like and you plug in new words.
Step 3: The last step is to change your stories. How do you go about doing this? Honestly, you just do it. You pick the story you want to change and you rewrite it. You edit it. You revise it. You delete the parts you don’t like and you plug in new words. And then, you tell it to yourself over and over again until it replaces the old story in your mind. To a certain extent, it’s the old, fake it till you make it game. The trick is not to quit. If you tell yourself the new story often enough, if you stop the old story in its tracks and replace it with the new version, it will eventually feel natural, and when it feels natural, guess what, you are living the new story.
Our Stories Make Us Who We Are
Rita Charon, physician and author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, has said that “Telling our story does not merely document who we are, it helps to make us who we are”. I believe this to be the literal truth. When we tell stories, to ourselves and others, we are documenting who we are, or rather, who we think we are. Who we believe ourselves to be. This, in turn, makes us that person. If we do not like who we are, we must begin to tell different stories to become the person we want to be.
This can apply to how we label ourselves on social media, on resumes, in bylines, and college applications. It can apply to how we introduce ourselves on a first date or during a job interview. It can apply to how we talk about our experiences to friends and family. It applies to the political stances we make on Twitter or Facebook, and even to the pictures we share on Snapchat or Instagram. All of these present a story to others, a story that many of us carefully craft for the outside world. But what really matters are the stories we tell ourselves. The stories we hear every single day inside our own heads. They define who we are and what we are capable of. Harness your innate power as a storyteller and write the life you desire. Rewrite your short stories now so that they fit into the life story you’ve always wanted.
