The Stories We Mistake for Truth

From Shared Moments with Michelle · 10:12

Show by Michelle L. Potter

Welcome back. This is Day 4 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.For the last three days, we’ve been noticing our patterns, our roles, and what stays the same underneath them. Today I want to talk about the stories we carry about ourselves, and how something we’ve believed for years can begin to feel like the truth.How a story becomes the truthIt tends to go like this. Something happens. We make sense of it, because that’s what people do, and the meaning we land on usually feels like the only reasonable one. Then something similar happens, and the meaning gets stronger. After enough years, we’re no longer interpreting anything. The story has become the way things are. We don’t hear it as a story. It just sounds like common sense.A vow I didn’t know I’d madeI lived inside one of those stories for a long time, and I wrote about it in Awakening: Truth Be Told. It began with fear. I wrote that for years I wasn’t managing my illness as much as I was managing my terror of going back to the darkest places I had already lived through. I had been through collapse once, and I didn’t intend to go through it again. So I built structure. I had my protocols. I was disciplined. I was vigilant, and I believed all of it kept me safe. I wrote that I felt I had built enough internal structure to prevent myself from having another collapse.That is how I described the vow. The fear of what had happened before became the anchor to everything I did. I wrote that control becomes the unconscious vow you make, and that vow was never again.Sometimes a vow like that develops so quietly that we don’t even recognize it until there has been some growth and some wisdom. It begins as a response to something that genuinely frightens us, and over time we start treating it as the only sensible way to move forward. Then it looks like wisdom. From the outside, I looked disciplined and strong. From the inside, I was staying ahead of something I was afraid of.When the story keeps runningWhat interests me most is how long a story like that keeps running after the circumstances change. By the time I was in a job where the hours left no room for rest, the vow had settled into how I lived. I wrote that I shut down the parts of myself that needed softness, rest, or reflection. I thought that if I just worked harder, stayed productive, and kept moving, nothing could catch up with me.When I became sick again, I tried to push through it. I treated myself. I forced myself to function. I refused to stop. I wrote that it wasn’t bravery. It was the subconscious, doing what it had learned to do, and what it had learned was survival through overfunctioning.Then my body said what my mind wouldn’t. By 2022, the façade collapsed. I wrote that my body had reached its limit, but my mind refused to admit it. In Awakening: Truth Be Told, I called my body the truth-teller. By the fall of 2023, the breaking point wasn’t physical. It was emotional. I wrote that I could not pretend to be in control anymore.When I looked back, I could finally see the story that had been running the whole time. I wrote that it was the old blueprint: push harder, do more, stay strong, keep going, don’t stop. It was the part of me that believed slowing down meant I would be swallowed by life again. Control had convinced me that stopping was failure and that asking for help was weakness.None of it had felt like a story to me. It felt like being responsible. It felt like being smart. It felt like the only way to stay safe. It was a form of protection.I began recognizing how unfamiliar rest had become to me. Slowing down wasn’t always peaceful. Sometimes it brought up the very feelings I had spent years trying to stay ahead of. Keeping busy felt familiar, and that familiarity made it easier to continue the same pattern, even when I recognized what it was costing me.Seeing it for what it wasWhat began to loosen it was seeing it for what it was. I put this line in the book, and it’s one I come back to: control is a pattern, not an identity. It is something you learned, not something you are.Something you learned has a beginning. It came from somewhere, and it was doing a job. In the book, I described it as an identity that once helped me survive and later kept me stuck, and both of those are true of the same story.These patterns can show up in ordinary routines, habits, and the expectations we carry into each day. Sometimes staying busy, keeping everything organized, or always being prepared has less to do with what we enjoy and more to do with what we’ve learned makes us feel secure. The stories underneath those behaviors don’t necessarily announce themselves. They sound like simple facts about who we are: I’m not creative. I have to earn my rest. Everyone depends on me. I can’t afford to make a mistake…

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