The Stories You Tell Yourself
The moments that shaped who you are were shorter than you think. You just gave them permission to last forever.
This week’s post has nothing to do with B2B marketing or moving abroad. But it has everything to do with The Long Game.
I was watching some old VHS tapes recently. My 5th birthday. Baptism. Stuff from back then.
My parents got divorced when I was four. It wasn’t friendly. It still isn’t. And growing up through that came with a few negative experiences. For most of my 20s, I let all of that define me.
But here’s what hit me watching those tapes.
The moments that, for a long time, shaped my entire self-image? They were short. Really short. A thing someone said. A thing someone did. Minutes. Hours. Maybe a rough stretch of a few years. When you’re watching it back on a shaky VHS recording, you realize just how brief those moments actually were in the context of a whole life.
And yet, we let them become the whole story.
The limiting version of you
We all do this. We take a handful of bad experiences and build an entire identity around them.
“I’m not disciplined.” “I can’t do that.” “That’s just not who I am.”
People say these things with so much certainty. Like they’re stating a fact. Like it’s permanent. Concrete. Irreversible.
But where did that come from? Usually from something that happened a long time ago. Something that was painful, yes. But something that was also temporary.
“That’s easy for you”
I was talking to someone recently about goals I’m working on. Things that require consistency and effort. And their response was, “Well, that’s easy for you. You have discipline. I’m not like that.”
This is exactly what I’m talking about.
What do you mean you’re not like that? You’re making a choice. Right now. Today. You’re choosing to not do the thing you believe you should be doing, and then blaming it on some version of yourself that you decided is permanent.
It’s unfair to yourself. You’re locking yourself into a story that you wrote, based on a few experiences, and refusing to edit it.
A short period of time
Here’s the thing. There’s real science behind this. Psychologists have studied formative years for decades. Erikson’s stages of development, attachment theory, all of it. About 85% of brain growth happens before age 7. The experiences you have early on genuinely shape how you see yourself and the world. That’s not made up. It’s well researched.
But here’s what the science also says: the brain doesn’t stop changing. Neuroplasticity research has shown that the adult brain continues to rewire itself throughout life. For most of the 20th century, scientists believed the brain was fixed after childhood. That turned out to be wrong.
So yes, those years matter. But they don’t have the final word. You do.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to.
If I sit down and think about the worst moments from my parents’ divorce, I’ll get upset. They were crappy. They weren’t good experiences, and I’m not going to pretend they were.
But they passed. They were a short period in a much longer life. There have been a lot of other times where the experiences were positive, meaningful, and good.
So why would I keep marinating on the bad ones? Why would I hand over the power to define who I am to a handful of painful moments from 30 years ago?
We all get to decide who we are. Not anyone else. Not anything that happened. Those things were upsetting. They were difficult. But they don’t get to write the rest of the story.
The superpower
Once you can break out of this, something shifts.
You stop being a prisoner of a version of yourself that someone else created, or that a bad experience created, or that you created when you were too young to know better. You start making choices based on who you want to be.
And when you do that consistently, it compounds. Not just for you. For everyone around you.
I’m not talking about chasing money, status or power. I’m talking about balance. Happiness. Lightness. Forgiveness. The ability to move through life without dragging a bag of old stories behind you.
That’s a superpower. And the wildest part? Everyone is born with it.
It’s not about pretending the bad things didn’t happen. It’s about not letting them be the only thing that matters.
✌️