Is there a limit to how many times you can tell yourself the same story, and still believe it?
Even after all is done and positively concluded? You’ve held many outcomes in your palms, as offerings to yourself. You are fine, they say.
But your doubt regenerates at lighting speed. Soon enough, you throw each outcome on the compost heap to return to the earth that cultivated it so lovingly for you. You erase whatever grace you gave yourself, and suit up in your storytelling costumes to deceive yourself yet again.
Sure, you’ve walked this peaceful path before, you’ll say, but this time it could be treacherous. The idea that this is self-preservation is wrong. What’s the worst that could happen? Is a wolf going to tear through your apartment and hunt you, specifically, down? Is someone going to not respond to an email? Is a pandemic going to spread across your planet? Some of those things have already happened. (Plus, you’d never have come up with the pandemic story—face it, the world is more creative than you).
You’re likely telling yourself a story today, about something. Fine. I get it. But let’s try this instead: put a bookmark in that tale, and open up the more kindly novels you’ve written for yourself. You know the ones. Sink into those happy stories like they’re a strawberry bubble bath.
Don’t stop storytelling, just try telling a different story.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, wet your eyes with this song and its lyrics, and find one thing to be overwhelmingly, inescapably grateful for.
Do stop believing (the stories you tell yourself)