Your Story Shapes Your Reality. You Can Change it.

This morning, my son told me he hated school.

I know this to be untrue. The kid loves learning. So I made him tell me a better story. It took a few minutes, a lot of eye rolls, repeated asking, and stumbling over one thought fragment after another. Then finally: "I get to sit with a friend at lunch."

That was good enough.

There’s a weird thing about stories. They aren’t facts, exactly. But they tell everything. My son’s story about school wasn’t really about school. It was about safety, belonging, and whether the world outside our front door was worth the risk.

For the first two-plus years of his life, we told him exactly that: outside is dangerous, home is safe. In 2020, that story helped him survive. In 2025, it can make every place he goes feel like a threat.

The perfect story for one moment can become the wrong story for the next one.

I didn’t understand this about myself until recently.

Rare scotch at the top of the World Trade Center. Commercials on national television. The birth of my kids.

Someone else would have those moments and say, "my life is full." I’d have them and immediately start calculating what was still missing. The experience wasn’t the problem. The story was. And the story ran so quietly I didn’t even know it was playing.

I’ve never been one for manifestation. Thinking yourself into being rich or skinny or produced always seemed like self-help cosplay. What I didn’t understand was that I was already manifesting—I’d just been doing it in reverse. Running a scarcity narrative so long it had become invisible.

My son doesn’t remember COVID. He just lives in the story it left. So do I. The question isn’t whether you have a story. The question is whether you’re still living in the version that was true ten years ago.

Stories can be rewritten. Not by pretending. Not by faking optimism you don’t feel. By choosing the story that serves the future you want instead of the one that got you through the past.

The version of you that you’re becoming has to be able to recognize you. Right now, for a lot of us, it can’t.

And whether it’s time to tell a different one.