Internal narratives

Writing a narrative about ourselves, whether truthful or not, is what humans do. Something will happen and we will rationalize it with a thought process that can often be self-destructive and defeatist. For it is unavoidable that events escape our analysis.

The problem comes when the storyline around it is always about failure and we tell ourselves that the event was our fault. Rather than look at things objectively we are adept at filling in the blanks with some failing we possess and thus fall into a negative loop.

Being human is always about suffering in some form but we can make it much worse by reinforcing narratives that aren't true. For example, to a great extent I caused much of my own suffering regarding being a transgender person who was never going to be accepted by anyone. Everyone has a self-created narrative about something.

Doing this cannot be helped because life is so full of greys that it is easy to project our own narrative onto occurrences and turn them into much more ominous things than they really are.

Therefore our job is to work on rewriting our internal dialogue into a more realistic one which understands that life is messy and that not everything that happens is because of our weakness.