How our narratives shape us

The stories we tell ourselves have tremendous power over our fears and actions

For the past few years, I’ve had terrible anxiety at social gatherings. I’ve had a really hard time introducing myself to others and generally just being myself (whatever that means). I’ve found myself repeating thoughts like ‘these people probably won’t like me’ or ‘I don’t have anything interesting to say’ or ‘I’m not charismatic enough for people to enjoy my company’. Usually, I’ve just accepted those statements about myself on face and have gone on to have a pretty bad time since, expectedly, those beliefs manifested themselves in me just keeping to myself and feeling paralyzed, ending the night returning home and feeling insignificant and smaller than ever, with more evidence to validate all the fears I initially had.

Only recently have I started to investigate why I believe those things about myself. And what I’ve realized is that those thoughts swirling in my head are just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t come from nowhere; they are the result of deliberate stories that my mind tells itself to convince me of my own incapacity and unworthiness; the result of narratives that my mind has created through its interpretations of all my mistakes and failures.

My self-sabotaging narrative started back in high school and starts with my debate career. Debate was perfect for me, it was an ideal blend of competitiveness and intellectual rigor that I loved, and I found success pretty quickly. My coach and I were certain that by my junior and senior year, I’d be one of the top debaters in the country if we sustained our work ethic. I tried my hardest, and that breakthrough just…never came. No matter how many coaches applauded my talent and hard work, I never broke through and found consistent success, and quit debate halfway through my senior year because of the mental exhaustion from always falling short of my expectations. I told myself that I just wasn’t good enough. A few months later, I was met with rejections from every single one of my dream colleges, which was just another reminder that I wasn’t enough. I started seeing that message everywhere I looked. My failure to secure an internship after my freshman or sophomore year reminded me I wasn’t enough. My failure to maintain friendships from high school reminded me I wasn’t enough. My struggle to find balance in my life in college reminded me I wasn’t enough. I could go on, but you get the idea. In every single situation, from parties to class to work, I convinced myself that I was not enough, and that’s the energy I carried myself with.

Now there are a couple things that became pretty apparent to me once I defined this narrative that was so entrenched in my mind.

First, this is a fiction. There is nothing inherent about any of those experiences that signals I’m not enough. That’s just my interpretation of them. That’s just the meaning that I assigned to those experiences. For instance, I created the A → B mapping between not getting into my dream colleges and not being enough. At the time, getting into a dream college must’ve been a crucial element of my definition of ‘enough’ (which just proves how unhealthy and poorly defined my value system was - that’s something I’d love to dive into in another post). So my conclusions (that I’m not interesting enough, etc.) aren’t based on my environment or my experiences or my circumstances or anything external to me, they’re built on me projecting my internal thoughts onto my experiences. Regardless of the specific events in my life, I probably would have found some evidence to validate not feeling ‘enough’ since I likely had that thought somewhere in my head and was looking for evidence to validate it. Basically, I did this to myself.

Second, this is an incomplete story. It fails to include so much of my life, instead only fixating on the moments that confirm my initial doubts. It’s the most cruel form of confirmation bias. I put blinders on all the events in my life in which I exhibited my desired characteristics instead only focusing on and torturing myself over the events in my life in which I came up short.

Based on these realizations, I began searching for evidence in my past to validate different traits in myself. I remembered how as a kid I was always adamant to have the teams stacked against me whenever we played any sports or games to prove that I could succeed against all odds. I remembered how in everything I did, from dance to debate to school, I dared to dream big no matter how much people told me to be practical and calm down. I remembered how I stuck with my unconventional path in college, not settling for a corporate job and believing I’d find a better fit for me. The more I looked, the more I found evidence of the capacity to act out of courage, bravery, boldness, charisma, and intellectual curiosity within me in spite of the narrative inside me that was screaming at me that I wasn’t enough for any of it.

With these stories on paper, it’s crystal clear that I have so many stories in my life that are empowering and inspiring, yet I’ve spent the majority of the last few years convincing myself that the first narrative is true. I’ve caged myself, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that collects more and more evidence of my inadequacy as time goes on.

I don’t think I’m unique in this. I think we all have a natural tendency to look for evidence of our inadequacy in the world around us and use that evidence to reinforce self-sabotaging narratives. Why do we do this to ourselves? I think it has something to do with our brains having an instinctive desire to keep us in areas of comfort and safety. In theory, it’s a lot easier and takes less effort to play FIFA obsessively or binge watch TV than it is to, say, start a blog that you’ve wanted to start forever (@me). It’s much safer to not take risks and try new things. But this is also a psychological trick our minds play because fear and inaction and comfort are only going to make things more difficult for us in the long run.

Rewriting our narratives doesn’t require us to believe that we embody all of our desired ideals all the time. For example, the stories I tell myself don’t have to convince me that I am always courageous, that I am always brave, or that I’m always bold. That’s not true for anyone ever, and holding yourself to that standard is going to make you fall into the cycle of inadequacy that you were in in the first place. My narratives just have to prove that I have the capacity for courage, bravery, and boldness. And believing in our capacity to embody these ideals through our actions allows us to accept moments of fear, uncertainty, and anxiety in our lives and not let it consume us. For me, those inevitable moments of anxiety will never take away my capacity to still act with courage. My success stories and my narratives provide all the belief and evidence I need.

It’s not easy. You’re battling years and years of reinforced beliefs and thought patterns. Memories and stories won’t change those beliefs overnight. For the past few weeks, it’s taken deliberate, daily effort to convince myself that my self-sabotaging narrative is an illusion and to believe in my success stories from the past. It’s still hard! But it’s getting easier every single day. Every morning, the sun shines a little brighter. The snow sparkles a little bit more. The air seems a little more fresh. And I feel a little more light, not as burdened by all my shortcomings from the past.

I hope something from my story of introspection has resonated with you. I hope that you’re able to identify self-sabotaging narratives inside you. And I hope that reflecting on your own narratives will cause you to take it a little bit easier on yourself and start believing in your capacity to act in incredible ways.