The Stories We Tell About Ourselves

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories again lately. Not the ones we put onto the page as writers, but the ones we live as human beings—the roles we’ve taken on in this grand play, and my desire to exit stage right, as my performance days come to a close.

Recently I wrote a post about the stories that have influenced me as writer, and I enjoyed exploring that. However, the deeper exploration I’ve been having these past several years has more to do with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are (and why we are this way). I’m hardly the first person to dive down this particular rabbit hole, and this isn’t the first time in my life where it’s been a focus of my mental energy. It seems to come in waves, with greater depth each time. It’s why I went to school for psychology back in the day, and it’s a big part of the work I do within my writing. I think it’s important to really look at what we believe about ourselves, why we believe those things, and what it might look like if we were to step outside of our expected roles to move into something new.

I was listening to the We Can Do Hard Things podcast today. They mentioned something that’s come up on their show before, and it has to do with the stories we tell about ourselves, often based on the roles we’ve had to play in our family structures and within greater society. And just like that, I was asking myself those questions again. What do I tell myself about who I am? What roles am I playing? Am I happy in those roles, or do I want something different? Am I prepared to deal with whatever consequences may come from my decision to start telling and believing a different story?

The Evolution of My Stories

The Easy One

This one is typically called “the hero” when discussing the 6 roles in family systems.

In my earliest years, that was me. My brother was the difficult child, his ADHD causing him to be disruptive in school and hard for my parents to handle at home sometimes. While they were struggling with helping him, I was reading books, doing gymnastics, getting straight A’s, learning instruments, singing in the all state choir, and just generally crushing it at life. I was “8 going on 28” if you asked any of the adults in my life, and I loved this designation. For a time.

What people didn’t realize is that the pressure (self-imposed as a part of my personality, but also both unintentionally reinforced by my family and quite intentionally reinforced by society) was already getting to me. By age 9 I’d developed the start of what would become a decades-long battle with anorexia. By age 12 I was regularly self-harming and had begun experimenting with substances. It didn’t help that my neurodivergence was undiagnosed, and my mind chose internalization and dissociation for every difficult experience and emotion. The pressure build up of all that unresolved stuff was quite literally killing me.

The Sick One

By the age of 16 I was no longer the easy one. I was the sick one, also called the “identified patient” within family systems.

There was instability due to being raised in the military, and while my parents were objectively good parents, they didn’t know how to connect with me emotionally. It wasn’t even for lack of trying—they were just misattuned. I found that I got approval through achievement, and that was good enough for me. Until it wasn’t.

I’d been sexually abused by a teacher freshman year, which reopened long-buried childhood wounds already there, so when I was raped at age 16, I couldn’t hold it together anymore. My eating disorder was impossible to ignore, I was using substances whenever I could, and even though my grades were still better than my peers, they were slipping. I slept with a knife under my pillow so that, when I awoke during the night from another nightmare, I could regulate enough through self-harm to go back to sleep.

Another complication was my growing disdain for my own body, not just because of the sexual abuse, but because the more it developed, the less it felt like mine. I didn’t want breasts or hips. I didn’t have the language for my gender and sexuality back in the 90’s, but I knew my body didn’t feel quite right. And I was terrified of people knowing about my attraction to women. This led me to lean heavily into femme aesthetics, and into dating a lot of guys, which only caused further dissociation from my body and from myself. It also fueled my anorexia, because it was the only way to minimize the feminine features taking shape.

I wrote a lot of poetry. I journaled daily. I filled sketchbooks. I composed songs. I went to therapy. I took my meds. Still, I spiraled.

On October 5th, 2005, I overdosed and ended up in the ICU for several days, in and out of consciousness. You’d think that would have been enough for me to hang up my mantle of sickness, but it was not. About 6 weeks later, my best friend died suddenly. And instead of using that as motivation and reinforcement of my short-lived sobriety (he died of an overdose), I doubled down and landed myself in a hospital treatment program within months, for PTSD and my eating disorder. I’d been in intensive treatment for years at this point, and everyone in my life knew me as this traumatized, addicted, starving, sick person. It felt so much a part of who I was, I couldn’t imagine living a different story.

The Recovered One

By my early 20’s, I’d been sick for over a decade, and I was tired of that being what I was known for. I left that final hospitalization in 2006 and moved across the country, determined to create a new life. And I did.

By joining a cult.

I made new friends and dove head-first into a more extreme version of the Christian religion that raised me. I sought comfort in church, where my past wasn’t seen as a liability, but rather as a testimony. God had miraculously healed me from all my sickness, and I made the rounds sharing my story of redemption. This led me to drop my psychology degree in the final semester to pursue biblical counseling instead. I led worship. I provided counsel. I ran youth programs. I married a man, and a pastor at that.

I was the hero again! My parents were relieved and proud by this turn of events, even if it upended their beliefs about who I was. In fact, I’d say they continued to view me as the sick one for quite some time despite the complete 180 my life took. But all-in-all I think they were grateful to no longer have my struggles so front and center in everyone’s lives, even if they weren’t sure how to relate with this new version of me at all. I suppose the good news for them is that they didn’t have to figure that out, because my ex husband and the cult would lead me so far away from them it would take another decade-and-a-half for us to find our way back to each other. That’s for another post, though.

I went through a girlboss era during this time, starting businesses that did quite well, all things considered. I networked. I went on podcasts and did interviews. I helped others launch businesses for themselves. I funneled every ounce of my love for helping others into these endeavors, because there were so few ways I could do so within the confines of my community and my marriage. While it looked on the outside like I was thriving, it was no different than my early childhood hero stage—I was breaking down inside, and it was unsustainable, because it wasn’t real.

I’d say of all the stories I’ve told myself, this tradwife ultra-conservative Christian one was the most delusional, in the truest sense of the word. I lost all sense of who I was at all. Hell, I lost all sight of what reality was!

The Sick One (AGAIN)

During my marriage, and probably as a direct result of living in such an upside-down world, I became very sick. Literally. I developed an autoimmune disorder and nearly died, after spending years on palliative care, with more specialists and medications than I can count. I dropped out of life, lost most of my friends, gave up my passions and interests, and collapsed in on myself. It’s no overstatement to say that there are entire years where the only reason I kept going was motherhood. I loved my children more than I hated myself, and I held tight to that on the really bad days. And there were lots of really bad days.

I’d married a man who abused me in every possible way, and whose behavior was justified and minimized by our religious leaders. After one particular incident where he abused one of our kids (something I’d told him was a non-negotiable dealbreaker), I kicked him out and told my therapist (who notified CPS). But when we went to our pastor and his wife, let’s just say their advice did nothing to protect me and the kids. Instead, I was removed from ministry and told to focus more time and attention on my husband and our family. Another spiritual authority gave me a book on the power of a praying wife, and encouraged me to submit and support my husband as he dealt with this very difficult time. I would have to flee years later with our children in tow, after he threatened to kill us all in a blacked-out tirade the night before.

All that to say, I was a mess. For a long time. I was isolated from the outside world, often quite literally. At one point, we were living outside of town on a secluded bit of land, and only had one car, which my ex husband took to work all day. I couldn’t go anywhere as a result, and I wasn’t supposed to contact my family or let anyone know where we were living. Still, I did my best to protect our children, and worked overtime to present the appearance of success and optimism. I didn’t want to draw negative attention or have to deal with anyone speaking negatively of my husband and our family. More than one person tried, but I couldn’t hear it. This was my story, and their opinions didn’t fit that narrative.

Even as I was diagnosed with one condition after another, I maintained my positive attitude, to the point where people often commented on how inspired they were by the way I faced these struggles. Little did they know.

My Current Story… The Stable One?

It’s so strange. After defining myself by dysfunction my entire life, I really don’t relate with any of those roles anymore. I’m not sure exactly what this means, other than I’m finally more comfortable in my own skin, and in the life I’ve created. Recently, my kids were asked to describe me in a few words, and my oldest said “stale and boring.” HAHA! I choose to believe he meant staBle, not stale, but even if he didn’t, I’m not sure anyone would have ever used any of those words to describe me at any point in my life prior to this current era.

I physically left my ex husband and the cult in 2021, after years of therapy and separation. While I do still have triggers, and moments that are harder than others, I finally feel like I can see my life clearly. It’s more nuanced without the lenses I’d grown accustomed to—this swing between hero and sick—but it rings true in my body, so I’m learning to let go of that black and white thinking. My story is ever-evolving, and I welcome the unfolding, even if it means I need to adjust the way I’m understanding myself and the world around me. In the past, those inconsistencies in narrative would have thrown me off and left me scrambling to make it fit neatly into the story I was telling (and believing), but that’s not my immediate reaction anymore. Now, I look at it with curiosity and see what it’s telling me about how things are in my life right now, while also remembering this may change in the future, too.

I guess maybe instead of the “stable one” like my kids might say, I’d say I’m the “open one” right now. It feels almost like a second puberty, which I suppose others have described as mid-life crisis. As “crisis” really just means turning point, that’s pretty accurate. I reached a point where I had to make a decision: keep telling the same story about myself and my life, or start living a different, truer one. Since I already knew how that first story would end, I decided to start over. Again. But this time, it was with a strong foundation in myself, and a clear vision of the life I wanted.

Final Thoughts

Ironically, my present day story looks a lot like my early childhood one, only this time without the pressure to perform or the pain chafing against the facade. It’s the version of the story my soul has wanted to live since day one. It’s taken a lot to get here, and there are still hard days, but I’ve found that setting down the labels of who I am has helped. I do my best to simply exist these days.

We’re all writing our own stories. It’s just that we don’t always realize we’re the author. So often, in both roles I’ve played, I forgot the power was within me the entire time. Much like Dorothy, I had to go on a journey before I could come to the realization that my story is my own. I hold the pen, so I hold the power to write what happens next. I could keep believing the stories I was told growing up, or the ones I was told throughout my years in an abusive marriage and deeply entrenched in a cult. I could claim the divorced single mom story. Or the sexual abuse survivor. Or the writer. The thought leader. The comforter and nurturer. The activist. The witchy plant parent. But the reality is that, while all of that is part of my story, it’s not the whole thing. Not one of those is even the most important part.

I think if I were to choose a story to tell right now about myself, it would be that I’m the dandelion. If I’m telling the truest truth I know in this very moment, then I’m writing the story I want to write about myself, regardless of how that narrative looks to anyone else. My dandelion tattoo, and my connection with this symbology, speaks to whatever inherent drive I have within myself to be every version of who I am in this lifetime. Sometimes I’m the bright shock of yellow, and others I’m delicate puffs of white carried away on the wind. Always, I am me, in my stubborn resilience, my soft creativity, and the healing potential I bring to the world. I am just as at home growing wild in a field somewhere as I am steeping in a cozy cup of tea, because it is all me. And whether you look at me and see a weed, or you look at me and see a wish, that changes nothing of who I know myself to be.

That’s the story I tell myself right now. It’s why, when there are short bio sections on social media—or even on my own website—I’ve very intentionally chosen labels that might carry lots of different meanings. Author. Artist. Alchemist. Perhaps I should add Dandelion.

How about you? What stories have you told yourself about who you are? What stories have others believed? What’s the truest story you can tell about yourself today?