The Stories We Carry Around Without Realizing It

Reader’s Note:

Mentions of Trauma. Not graphic, but always walk carefully, friends. Wounds still raw are meant to feel in the now, but if it’s too raw. Stop. Come back another time.

Ever have those moments where you’re sitting there and no matter what, you happen to spill out everything to the person asking a simple yes or no question. No? You haven’t? I do— a lot.

I will consistently apologize for something that isn’t mine to apologize for. It’s a nervous tick sometimes. First words out of my mouth.

“Are you mad?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry”

Why do I do that? Well, before someone says that they are mad or upset at me, I’m picking up their cues. The way their shoulders hunch when I open my mouth. The roll of the eyes. The slight intake of breath and flick of a brow. I catalogue every nuance that they do before I even know the question. It’s like my body knows that something is wrong before they even know.

How often do we do things or believe in things about ourselves without actually deciding why or what to believe?

At a drop of a dime, I’m assessing and realizing that my questions, my presence, my very being in the room is a burden, but especially when I need something. There is a story behind it. A story that was handed to us while growing up, or burned into your fabric of existence— repeated so often that the stories become facts. This is exploring where we get that from.

The Stories We Inherit

Like all things given to us by family, we quickly find out what our own stories are. I’m not talking about the stories they pass down at holidays, the ones told and retold until they calcify into legend. I’m talking about the stories we learn by watching— by sitting quietly in a room while the real information passes overhead, in a look, a sigh, a door closing too hard. The messy details that, as kids, we don’t understand and yet know something is off about someone or something, and no one will say what.

Certain siblings compete for parents’ attention. Others learn something quieter and more dangerous: that if you make yourself small— quiet, unseen, easy— you can approximate being good. Loved a little more easily than a child who is loud and brash. You learn that being silent means you are cared for more. It isn’t love, not really. It’s a workaround. But to a child, they don’t know the difference between love and the absence of punishment; both feel, from the inside, as being safe.

We spend years learning and unlearning that love isn’t supposed to be conditional— that it’s meant to be granted freely to a child, not earned, not rationed, not held out of reach until we perform perfectly. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case for how it goes growing up.

I don’t tell this to gain sympathy. I tell it mainly to state my own credentials. This is my truth, offered plainly: I didn’t understand, watching a parent lavish everyone else with attention and gifts while my hands stayed empty, that I wasn’t the problem. They were. But children don’t have the context to understand humans and their complexities — narcissism, favouritism, the quiet math some parents do about which child is worth investing in. (I wasn’t.)

As kids, our simple truth is this: they don’t love us. Not the way we’re told love is supposed to feel.

That truth is hard to unlearn. I’m still trying some forty-three years later.

The Stories We Write About Ourselves

We take the stories we learned in childhood and then turn them inward, translating what was done to us into who we must be. A quiet kind of alchemy— hurt in, identity out. We cultivate a narrative of heartache, sometimes without noticing, until it’s just how we describe ourselves to strangers. Broken concepts, worn smooth from handling:

I am unworthy of being loved.

I am easy to overlook.

People will always leave me.

I have to earn my place at the table.

We don’t write these down consciously. We start living as if they were already true— because to us, they are.

The Stories That Become Habits

Stories become the habits we perform for each other. “I’m fine,” we say, on a loop, while underneath it we’re actually drowning— floundering, because asking for help was never on the map we were given. Because people have moved in and out of our lives for so long that we stopped expecting anyone to stay past the length of a visit. A brief moment in time.

They become the over-explaining we do, building a case for ourselves before anyone’s even asked for one — justifying, footnoting, pre-defending — everything to validate our worth in the eyes of others. They become the flinch before the phone even rings, the bracing for bad news inside a good conversation. Expecting disappointment in everything that crosses our path, because no one god damn person has shown up to prove us wrong.

In the end, the stories become the architecture of our lives— the load-bearing walls we don’t remember constructing. The foundation we carry from youth into adulthood, and everything we build on top of it afterward: relationships, work, the way we parent, the way we love. We don’t choose the foundation. We inherit the blueprint and start stacking rooms on top of it, hoping the structure is sound and holds. (Sometimes, it doesn’t.)

The Moment You Catch Yourself

You live your whole life like this, until something happens. Something that breaks the cycle. The stone tossed into the winding river that sends ripples and disrupts the current you once thought was still from years ago. Breaking the flow you’d mistaken as the ocean. It could be a loved one finally questioning why you always are so quick to apologize first. It could be your child asking a simple question, making you think it isn’t as normal as you want to believe.

Either way, the simple act of kindness makes you sit down and pause for the moment. And in that pause, something loosens. You realize that you can finally walk into the room and nothing bad is going to happen. Not this time. Maybe not ever again. But you won’t fully believe that yet — not for a while.

The Stories We Don’t Know How to Put Down

We catch ourselves. Now what? Recognizing the story doesn’t mean that you can immediately stop believing it. Rationally, you know you’re safe from the boogeyman. You’ve checked the closet, under the bed, and turned on every light in the house. But knowing doesn’t make the fear of the boogeyman disappear— it makes you feel a little foolish for still flinching at the dark. You can still take a moment. You’re allowed to still be afraid of something you’ve already proven wasn’t there to begin with.

What Happens When We Question the Story

It’s not a simple solution. How do we fix the narrative after years of believing the pages of the story? Things are black and white as they appear. Fixing means admitting that there was a problem.

Here’s the reframe: There isn’t a problem; you were never broken.

Something happened to you that had nothing to do with your worth, and now the work isn’t fixing— it’s unlearning everything a lifetime of survival taught you to believe.

Ask a different question. Not “what’s wrong with me,” but something quieter and harder:

Who am I when I stop assuming the worst about myself?

Not everything needs to get chucked into the garbage. Some of the stories need to stay, because you haven’t finished unpacking them. Not to hold onto the pain, but to remember it and carefully learn to be okay with it. Some of those stories can stay. Some need to be rewritten. Some need a sentence added— a small asterisk that changes everything downstream of it.

I am too much — becomes:

I was too much for some. That doesn’t mean I am too much.

The Stories We Continue to Carry

Sometimes, I wonder…

How many of these stories did I keep simply because no one ever told me putting them down was an option. No one handed me permission. No one said: you can set this down and you will not be an ungrateful child for doing it, you will just be— lighter. I don’t think I would have carried so many. Would you?

Maybe that’s the real work of it. Not becoming someone new, but finally noticing which parts of ourselves were never ours to hold onto to begin with. Not resolution. Not a clean hand-off from being considered broken to whole— fixed.

The slow, unglamorous work of setting a few things down, one at a time, and seeing which ones stay gone.

Maybe— we don’t need to hold all the stories…