By Shannon Wright
There’s a story within the story, and sometimes we don’t even realize how many pieces are missing from the one we tell ourselves every single day.
When there’s space, a story will fill it.
The space between what you know and what you THINK you know… Well, that’s where those stories live. And more often than not, those are the stories that keep us stuck.
So, let me ask you, are there holes in the story you’ve been telling yourself about your own life?
Because a lot of us are walking around carrying stories that were never ours to begin with.
We’ve believed stories like; you’re too much… you’re not enough… you’re not worth it… you’ll never amount to anything… people like you don’t succeed… nobody will ever want someone like you.
But THOSE are secondhand stories. And if you’re not careful, they can do more damage than anything you’ve lived through firsthand.
Secondhand stories can ruin your life if you let them!
They can keep you from believing in yourself. They can keep you from loving yourself. They can keep you from ever stepping into who you were created to be.
Some of us are still holding onto words, labels, and assumptions that were handed to us years or even decades ago. Stories that are outdated. Stories that are incomplete. Stories that are simply not true.
You’ve labeled yourself with those secondhand stories. And when you label yourself, you limit yourself.
And sometimes, the stories we tell ourselves weren’t even born out of truth, they were born out of survival.
Maybe someone walked away from you at a time you needed them most, and somewhere along the way you decided that meant there was something wrong with you or you weren’t worth their effort. But that was THEIR story, not yours. You don’t have to carry it. You don’t have to own it.
I don’t know about you, but I want to see the WHOLE story for my life!
Not the edited version. Not the broken version. Not the one filled in with fear.
Because fear has a way of writing stories that aren’t real.
I’ve struggled with that myself. Filling in the gaps when there’s silence, distance, or time. Assuming the worst. Making it personal. Creating entire scenarios in my head that were never true to begin with.
And if I can offer you anything from my own experience, it’s this: DON’T DO THAT TO YOURSELF.
You will spend months trying to fix relationships you damaged with a story you created out of empty space. Not every silence is about you. Not every distance is rejection. Not every shift means something is wrong.
Sometimes people are just dealing with their own fears.
And fear shows up in more ways than we realize. Fear of failure, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of not being enough, fear of losing control, fear of intimacy, fear of change. We all carry it, and we all express it differently.
I learned that the hard way.
When my dad died, I was 16 years old… an only child… when he was killed in a crash with an 18-wheeler. Four days later, on the same day we buried him, my sister was born.
I was scared to death!
But fear didn’t show up looking like fear. It showed up looking like selfishness. It showed up looking like hatefulness. At least, that’s how it appeared to everyone else. And for years, that’s the story I believed about myself.
That I was selfish. I was hateful. There was something wrong with me.
But there was a hole in that story.
The WHOLE story was that I was a terrified teenage girl trying to survive something sudden, traumatic, and overwhelming. I wasn’t selfish. I wasn’t hateful. I was scared. And so was everyone else around me.
It took me 30 years and trauma therapy to finally see that.
For years, I carried anger, resentment, shame and hurt, toward myself and toward others, because I didn’t have the full story. Now I can see that the people I thought had failed me were also just trying to survive in their own fear.
People have asked me why I would want to dredge up such old stuff. THIS IS WHY!
You can’t heal what you won’t face. It doesn’t just go away. It never does.
Healing begins when you’re willing to look at the whole story, even the parts you’ve avoided, even the parts that hurt.
Because when you do, something shifts.
Compassion grows. Understanding deepens. And the story starts to change.
We all want grace for our own gaps. For the parts of our lives that don’t make sense, for the moments we didn’t get it right. But that means we have to extend that same grace to others.
Sometimes the story is bigger than you.
Sometimes what you’re walking through isn’t just about you at all.
You may not understand it in the moment. You may not see the purpose right away. It might take years or maybe even decades to fully understand what was unfolding in your life.
But there IS a bigger story.
And sometimes, all you can do is have the faith to believe there’s more to it than what you can see right now.
So, stop filling in the unknown with worst-case scenarios.
Stop writing horror stories where there are simply unanswered questions.
You may not get to choose every situation you face, but you DO get to choose the story you tell yourself about it.
The good news is that you can change that story at any time.
You can edit it.
You can rewrite it.
You can choose something different.
So why keep suffering under a version of your story that tells you you’re unloved, unwanted, or not enough?
You’ve suffered enough.
Be careful with the short version of your story. Be careful letting others summarize it for you. Or worse, believing those summaries as truth.
Because some of us are stuck in a chapter that was never meant to be the ending.
There’s more to your story.
Don’t stop here.
(Shannon Wright is a real estate agent who is also a digital journalist for Webster Parish Journal. She lives in Sibley.)