Rewrite the Stories that Define You

Have you heard that thing about captive elephants?

As babies, they are tied to a chained or a rope so they won’t run away. And then, when they get older, when they become too strong to be tied up at all anymore, their mindset is already formed.

They don’t believe they can break the chain, so they don’t even try.

And what about us? We can feel trapped by the circumstances of our upbringing, too. But do we ever challenge that mentality, as adults?

Our formative experiences integrate deep inside of us, becoming the core stories that we tell ourselves: “I was the smart one, the weak one, the most loved, the least wanted.”

And we reinforce these notions with anecdotes that support the narrative – whether they are accurate or not. We carry these stories around with us.

They shape everything, including what we decide we are allowed to have or do.

?Our formative stories can trap us.

We may get older, but our minds are stuck inside these outdated and sometimes inaccurate narratives or identities that inhibit us from moving forward.

It’s like we don’t believe we can break the chain, so we don’t even try.

But here is what I want you to know: It’s not true. We can break those chains. We can revisit – and reframe - the stories that define us. And we can set ourselves free.

I know it’s possible, because this is what I did. And this is the story of how I did it - in four steps.

First, the recognition.

For me, it all began as an identity crisis.

If you are accustomed to intense forward motion, then going slow is the scariest pace.

You keep yourself protected from grappling with hard or painful things by being too busy, all of the time. Often, this works – until it doesn’t.

?Most of us will keep on running until we run ourselves straight into a wall, marked by a fantastic explosion of burnout, crisis, or depression. For me, this happened around 2017.

After two kids, my identity was shifting, my priorities morphing, and the process was excoriatingly uncomfortable. I didn’t fit anymore inside the career I’d carefully built, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

I remember seeing Hamilton at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC that year, and feeling something deep and hardly recognizable that kept niggling at me. I was so taken with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s words and music, overcome by the brilliance and originality of his work. And it forced a reckoning that I tried hard to ignore.

Who was I living for, I wondered?

What was I truly capable of, if I were to create something for myself instead of working against someone else’s schedule and demands?

A new tension emerged. I felt this tiny ember of wonder, of creative energy, of “what ifs?” buried inside me. As it grew, it became harder to ignore. I was scared of it, I didn’t trust it, and it made things feel complicated.

I wasn’t the kind of person who did creative things. I didn’t make things. That wasn’t me. Or, could it be?

That ember represented questions I didn’t feel I had the luxury of indulging. It came to represent the sum total of everything I was capable in my life that I wasn’t even exploring/

It was the opportunity cost of throwing all of my intellect and emotional energy into my job.

It was my voice, my original thought, something I hadn’t exercised in a very long time.

Around this time, a friend gifted my daughter the beautiful book “What do you do with an idea?” I read it, and I wept. I didn’t even know why. My ember wasn’t formed enough then to be an untended idea – it was simply energy begging to be released so it could become an idea to begin with.

What I didn’t realize then was how many years it would take to heed that call. How many hard, and scary, and uncertain, steps I would have to take.?

Next, the disentangling.

Once I started to feel this question, it became harder to bury the sound of it under my busy to-do lists and other obligations. But without knowing how to respond to it, I fought against it.

?I kept working and juggling the way I always had, barely holding it all together day to day and week to week. But I felt angry.

I was mad at my life for beginning to feel like a box, keeping me inside, not letting me grow or evolve in new ways. I was too afraid to try something new, I didn’t know which lever to pull – new job, new city, new house? – without making the whole carefully designed structure fall.

And then, one day, we moved. I remember the moment we decided – my family was at the beach for a weekend one may. Our kids were playing in the sand, and my husband said to me, “maybe we don’t need to stay in DC forever.”

Suddenly, it became simple. We released ourselves, and made that one change.

It was like taking a hand grenade and tossing it into our carefully constructed life and saying, ‘let’s see what happens when we change locations?”

It took nearly a year, from that conversation to the moving trucks. But after that, the changes came easier, faster. It was like I had shown myself that I wasn’t, in fact, stuck.

I could be free again.

Then, rebuilding.

After 19 years in a city, I was in small town Vermont. Everything felt different.

My new surroundings showed me different ways of living. Maybe, I didn’t need a nanny to survive. Maybe, I didn’t need to work so late. Maybe, I actually could find time to ski 4 days per week – if I wanted it badly enough.

As we settled in, I started to believe that I had the ability to change.

In the quiet of the wilderness, I walked more. I heard more. I gave that burning ember of wondering more airtime.

?Eventually, I faced a new reality: I had outgrown my job. It was time to leave.

?So after 6 months working remotely, I took the leap into self-employment. Once I was on my own, the silence was deafening. No to-do lists, no obligations, no contracts...

Just wide-open space, room to ask, “what will I do with all this time? What do I want to do?”

I found my footing, even secured some contracts before COVID hit a few weeks later. I did my time homeschooling in between work calls and pit stops in the laundry room to cry from frustration.

The quarantine ended, work grew, I experimented, and I learned how much I could earn when I was on my own. It wasn’t small. It went sort of like this:

• Year 1: can I replace my salary?
• Year 2: how much can I actually make?
• Year 3: maybe I don’t need to work so much.
• Year 4: what do I want to do next?

?Nobody tells you at the outset that working for yourself isn’t about “figuring it all out” and then growing. It’s about the journey – the constant evolution and reinvention, the way your business becomes almost an expression of you, yourself.

?Always changing.

Finally: The personal project.

Finally, in 2023, I spent more time with that ember.

After taking all of these steps, redrawing the lines of my days and way of working, I was free to keep on pushing myself.

?My mother had died in 2022, ending a long and painful and wildly slow decline. I dedicated myself to therapy, and let work take the back burner for about a year. I kept going, but my emotional energy went to grief and to family, not business-building.

Never in my life had that been the order of things.

?As I moved through the process, from the shock and anger of the loss, to acceptance, and finally the sadness, I discovered something. I had an intense creative urge to write about her.

I'd never indulged a creative urge before - note one that couldn't be tied to business or work.

Not only that, I wanted to understand her. My relationships with both my parents were formative, to say the least, but they were complex. Now that I had reclaimed the trajectory of my career and my lifestyle, I realized, it was time to revisit and reclaim the reality of my past.

?This was the genesis of my first-ever sabbatical, and the creation of my Lost and Found audio documentary. In it, I took on the effort of revisiting and reimagining the most fundamental of all the stories that defined me: where I come from.

?I’ve written extensively on this already , but here’s what I learned – in a nutshell:

We don’t have to be trapped by the stories we tell ourselves.

And by spending time, by giving over generous love, attention, and creative energy to them, even the sheer act of talking about these stories with others – this is how we begin to re-conceive, rewrite, and reclaim them.

Everything looks different through the lens of adulthood. Including ourselves.

So what?

So, here is what I want you to know: We don’t have to be held captive by the stories that define us.

?We can revisit – and reframe – these narratives, so they work for us. In looking back, we can see something new for ourselves. And, we can give ourselves permission to change the story of our life.

The world is just waiting to tell you what you are not allowed to do. But it’s not up to the rest of the world, it’s up to you.

Give yourself permission to change. Rewrite your own story. Start today.

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