I am, and have always been, a storyteller.
A lot of the stories I tell are the ones I tell myself.
I remember one story I told to myself as a kid. I stood at the foot of an iron-posted twin bed and rested my elbows on the cross bar. It was my podium as I played pretend, imagining I was a Hollywood auteur accepting one of multiple statues at the Oscars.
Back then, I told myself the story that I’d be a great writer, a great director, a great actor. I glowed with hope and ambition.
Things were bearing down on me that I couldn’t yet imagine. I didn’t know that some of my quirks and anxieties were chapters in a story of neurodivergence and I didn’t know that puberty would collide with that fact like the meeting of two hurricanes.
As I moved through my teens and twenties, the stories I told myself became much sadder. Less ambitious. The scope of my stories became less about the future and more about the past. Traumas floated to the surface of me like empty life vests.
I developed a disdain for hope because, back when I still had some, I didn’t yet possess the map around my obstacles. I didn’t even know most of my obstacles. Disappointments were rife.
“Traumas floated to the surface of me like empty life vests.”
So why am I thinking about all of this right now? I’m thinking about it because, as a general skeptic, I feel like I’m missing out on something.
A lot of the women I love and am close to engage in some form of “manifesting.” They approach it in ways that shouldn’t rattle the skeptic in me. They’re not binge reading The Secret and all its offshoots. They’re not joining cults or MLMs. What they’re doing strikes me—even when dressed in talk of crystal energy—as something healthy. And as something I lack.
I’m a little repulsed when the word “manifest” arises and I used to think it was because of my aversion to the mystical trappings that sometimes mingle with it. But I’m starting to realize it’s just my fear. Fear and trauma. Jealousy, even.
Because I once had the ability to tell myself good stories about the future too. And I lost it. And I miss it. I see my friends tap into that hope—in whatever form suits them best—and wish I could do it too.
What’s even harder to accept is that there’s something to it. I’ve watched these friends do great things and dip their toes into lives that look increasingly like their vision boards. The skeptic in me still asserts that imagining a desired future does not make it come true, but also inside of me is an innate and obvious certainty that the inability to imagine that future is a stone wall built against it.
When I tell myself a story about the future these days, it’s all doom and gloom, informed by the pains of my past. But I thankfully got a lesson in hope from my therapist earlier this year.
Something in my life seemed to be going sideways and the pain of my future—of the story I told about my future—was excruciating. I wanted to abandon ship. To run from the possible pain before it inevitably caught up to me. I’d catastrophized myself right to the edge of a cliff, giving myself no other way out. Or I saw no other way before my therapist pointed out that hope was always an option.
The path of hope was, for me, so long neglected that it looked like the craggy dark forest path at a cartoonish fork-in-the-road. There was low visibility and howls from its depths. It took courage to go that route. I can say now though that, had I not braved it, the painful future I’d envisioned would have been a certainty. All because I was not open to anything better for myself.
What a cruel way to think.
I know I won’t magically make myself a manifester overnight. (Pinterest knows, I’ve tried.) But if I absolutely must tell myself stories, I’m going to try to tell myself more stories with happy endings. Some of those will still play out in heartbreak, sure. But I dare myself to think: Maybe some of them… won’t?