✦ On changing your story: 018
Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash
The story you tell about yourself is not a neutral record of what happened. It is a living document, written under conditions - under the pressure of the rooms you were in when you first needed to make sense of things, under the influence of the people who handed you the early language before you were old enough to know you could refuse it, under the editorial constraints of a world that has very specific ideas about which parts of a woman’s experience count as the plot and which parts get classified as digression or dysfunction or delay. So you wrote the story they gave you the template for. The one where the struggle is the obstacle and the credentials are the proof and the decades of competence are the evidence that you made it, that you survived, that the difficulty was worth it because look - look at what it produced. And that story is not wrong exactly. But it is incomplete in a way that has been costing you something, quietly, for a long time. It is incomplete because it was written by the woman who was still inside the systems that required her to make sense of herself on their terms - and she did the best she could with the language available to her, which was not the language of depth or neurodivergence or creative sovereignty or the wonderfully boring life but the language of performance and productivity and proof, because that was the only currency the rooms she was in agreed to accept. The story you have been telling is the survival version. It is accurate. It is not the whole truth.
Changing your story is not the same as rewriting history. It is the act of finally becoming the author - of picking up the manuscript that circumstances wrote about you and asking, with the full authority of everything you now know, whether this is actually how you would tell it.
The narrative archaeologist does not destroy what she finds. She does not pretend the difficult years were secretly fine or that the performance was painless or that the loss of the softer self was not a real and grievable thing. She excavates. She holds each layer up to the light and asks what it was, what it cost, what it built, and whether the story being told about it is the truest one available - or just the most convenient one, the most survivable one, the one that made it possible to keep going inside a life that had not yet made room for the full version of her. Changing your story requires that kind of archaeology before it requires anything else. It requires sitting with the original text long enough to understand it before you reach for the revision. And then - slowly, without performance, without the need for anyone else’s editorial approval - it requires the extraordinary, ordinary, radical act of beginning to tell it differently. Not for the audience. Not for the record. For the woman who lived it and deserves, at minimum, to have it told in her own voice, from her own vantage point, with the whole of her intelligence and depth and hard-won perspective brought to bear on what it actually was and what, finally, it actually means.
A bit about my story
I spent decades building credentials in systems that were never designed for a brain like mine, raising four daughters alone, completing a PhD while the world extracted everything it could from me who gave generously and kept the real work - the inner work, the creative work, the work that was always mine - quietly alive through all of it. Then I stopped. Not because I ran out of ambition but because I finally understood where to point it. I named what I had been doing all along - narrative archaeology - built StarCozi from the truth of my own unbecoming, and began, at last, to tell the story in my own voice.
