The Story That Arrived Before You Did

How did we learn who we are? We learned from the people around us. From the moment we arrived. Not with a formal pronouncement. Just in everyday life. What got praised? What got corrected? What kind of family is this? What kind of people are we? What does a girl do and does not do?

And remarkably, people are still telling us. The story started before we had language, and it has not stopped since. NOT FOR ONE SECOND. Sometimes we never stop at all. Not because we cannot. Because nobody ever told us we were allowed to. The story is as old as we are. Older, actually. It was already running before we got here. The only question is whether we have ever stopped long enough to ask which parts of it are actually true, and which parts just got repeated so many times they started to feel that way.

I grew up being told I was a handful. A bit too willful for my size and quite, uh, busy. Read very actively. My mother asked me all my life why I didn't just make the choices that would make my life easier. She was not being cruel. She was genuinely confused by me. The story she handed me was that something about my natural way of being in the world was inconvenient. That if I could just soften a few of the edges, round off a corner or two, life would be easier for everyone involved. Including me.

I carried that story for a long time. I carried it as a fact, not a story. It was evidence about who I was and what I was supposed to do with all of that noise inside me. Manage it. Filter it. Make sure it did not land on other people with too much force. The story was so old and so familiar that I stopped hearing it as a voice at all. It had just become the way things were. Not as noise. Not as a question, I had learned to live around. As a real question with a real answer sitting underneath it.

And then I finally heard the question. Really heard it. And I was confused. Why would I want anything to be easier? Why is that the better option? Why is this woman asking me this? Does she not even know me? When have I ever chosen easier? That has never been in my vocabulary.

When I finally heard it, really heard it, it reverberated inside me. And that is when I understood what I had done. I had taken what was true for my mother, her subjective experience of a child she could not quite figure out, and I had turned it into my truth. It became the bridge I would die on. But true and truth are not the same thing. True is subjective. It belongs to the person feeling it. Truth is something else entirely. And I had been living inside my mother's true as if it were my truth for decades. It was not. It was never mine to carry. I just never knew I had picked it up.

It is just one version of a story someone told us. Handed to us early. Repeated until it felt permanent. Accepted as truth because nobody told us we could question it. The details are different. The weight is the same.

Sometimes we never stop at all. Not because we cannot. Because nobody ever told us we were allowed to.

What story have you been living inside that was never actually yours to begin with?

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The Returning Project is a space where women reclaim who they truly are, beyond who they were told to be. New posts every Sunday.

Inward. Onward. Go.