Who Wrote Your Story?

Long before we learn how to write our own stories, other people begin writing them for us.

You are clever.

You are difficult.

You are talented — but not talented enough.

You could do this.

You could never do that.

And because we are young when they begin, we often mistake their opinions for facts.

Those words settle inside us. Quietly, at first. Then they become part of the way we see ourselves.

We repeat them without remembering who said them.

I am not clever enough.

I have never been good at that.

I am not that sort of person.

Eventually, we stop hearing someone else’s voice behind the words.

We believe they belong to us.

The Stories We Inherit

Most people do not mean to harm us when they tell us what we can and cannot become.

Often, they are trying to protect us.

Parents. Teachers. Siblings. Friends. Family.

They want to keep us safe from disappointment. Sometimes they want to keep us close. They look at the person we are in that moment, consider everything they know about us, and draw what appears to be a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

“This is not one of your strengths.”

“Perhaps you should choose a different future.”

“Maybe you should not try to build a career from that.”

“You need to be realistic.”

They mean well.

Most of them, at least.

Of course, not everyone does.

There are also those who secretly hope we never reach our goals. Never grow. Never change.

Because the versions of us who still believe every you are and you are not handed to us are easier to control.

If you believe you are not clever enough, you will not challenge them.

If you believe you cannot succeed alone, you will not leave.

If you believe nobody else will ever see anything worthwhile in you, you will remain grateful for the smallest scrap of approval.

There are people who need us to remain exactly as they have defined us because our growth would force them to reconsider their own place in our lives.

Those people exist too.

But whether the words were spoken with love, fear, doubt or something darker, they can have the same effect.

They become walls.

And after enough time has passed, we forget that somebody else built them.

What If You Removed Them?

What would happen if you took all those opinions out of your head?

Every label.

Every conclusion.

Every barrier slammed shut by words that may have been well meant but never belonged there.

What if you removed them?

What if you went somewhere nobody knew you and stood among strangers as nothing more—and nothing less—than yourself?

No school reports following behind you.

No childhood mistakes introduced before you entered the room.

No one reminding you what you had tried before and failed to finish.

No one already certain of what you could never become.

What would remain?

For me, that happened when I moved to England.

I arrived in a village where nobody knew the person I had been. Nobody knew what I had once struggled with, what I had abandoned or what other people had already decided about me.

They did not know which boxes I had been placed inside.

They only knew the woman standing before them.

And slowly, all those buried dreams began to awaken again.

Without the constant chorus of you cannot, I began to realise how strange many of those old conclusions had been.

You were not the best in class; therefore, you cannot become an author.

You struggled with that subject; therefore, you are not clever.

You have never done this before; therefore, you cannot do it.

You are too old to begin; therefore, your chance has passed.

You could not do this ten years ago; therefore, you cannot succeed now.

Why not?

That was the question I finally began to ask.

Why can I not do whatever I want with my own life?

Why should the person I was ten years ago decide what I am capable of today?

Why should a weakness I had as a child become a lifelong sentence?

Why should someone else know the limits of a person they can only ever see from the outside?

I know what I can and cannot do.

And, as a matter of fact, I am the only person who truly can.

Even then, I may be wrong.

I have already proved myself wrong many times.

A Different Kind of Conclusion

Then true magic entered my life in the shape of a wonderful man.

My now-husband.

His conclusions about me are my favourites.

You want to paint?

I’ll get you paints.

You want to knit?

I want purple socks.

You want to learn something else? I think that’s wonderful.

And then:

This is beautiful.

You are so talented.

I am proud of you.

He never required evidence that I would become exceptional at something before believing I should be allowed to try it.

He did not ask whether painting would become a career before buying the paints.

He did not need proof that every new interest would become useful, profitable or permanent.

Although, in fairness, he did apparently expect purple socks.

He simply saw that something made me curious and encouraged me to follow it.

That kind of belief does something to a person.

It does not create talent where none exists. It does not complete the work for you or guarantee that everything you attempt will succeed.

It gives you room to discover what might already be there.

And then, one birthday, he handed me a laptop.

I think it is time for you to write that book.

He did not say those exact words.

He said them through the gift.

Through the quiet certainty of:

“Get that writing programme you used to have. You already know how it works.”

There was no doubt in it. No warning about how difficult writing a book would be. No suggestion that perhaps I should choose something more sensible.

Just a laptop and the assumption that, if I wanted to write a book, then I should begin.

So I did.

One scene became Fearbound. One book became a trilogy. And the question was no longer whether I was the sort of person who could write a novel.

I had written one.

I think you can imagine what he said when I began wondering whether I should publish it.

The Right to Change

We are not the opinions other people have of us.

We are not their conclusions.

We are not our school reports, our unfinished attempts or the things we could not do ten years ago.

We are allowed to change.

We are allowed to learn.

We are allowed to grow beyond the person somebody once knew.

And we are allowed to outgrow the opinions that kept us small—even when they came from people who loved us.

We are also allowed to leave behind those who would rather see us standing still.

That does not mean we will succeed at everything. Some dreams will change. Some attempts will fail. We may discover that we genuinely dislike something we once desperately wanted to pursue.

But there is an enormous difference between discovering our own limits and accepting limits handed to us by somebody else.

You do not know how does not mean you cannot learn.

You have never done it does not mean you never will.

You failed before does not mean you will always fail.

And you are not the person you need to be yet does not mean you cannot become them.

Perhaps I was not the best in class.

Perhaps there was nothing in my school reports to suggest that I would one day write half a million words, publish a trilogy and build a publishing house around it.

I did not have a publishing degree.

I was not a trained designer.

English was not even my first language.

But those facts described where I began. They did not decide where I was allowed to go.

Those school reports only described the girl I had been.

They were never authorised to decide who the woman would become.

Somewhere along the way, I realised that my life was the one story in which I did not have to accept someone else’s ending.

I could tear out the pages they had written for me.

I could leave their conclusions behind.

I could become whoever I wanted within my own story.

And so can you.