Before you can rewrite the story, you have to understand how it was written.

Once upon a time, I thought my life, my story, and who I am were already written—even if I wasn’t obviously the author.

My identity seemed to already be shaped.

I’m anxious because I was always told I was anxious—and I feel anxious.

I’m too much because of my energy and talkativeness.

I’m too sensitive because my emotions are too big.

I’m difficult because dealing with me is complicated.

What I was told I was—or what I felt I was—became who I was.

The people I thought loved me kept taking me to therapists and urging me to go on medication, as if I were a problem that had to be solved.

Maybe if I could just heal enough, regulate enough, understand enough, make better choices, stop choosing the wrong people, stop repeating the same patterns, and somehow become the perfectly evolved version of myself, maybe I would finally be chosen, loved, and accepted.

My reality was shaped by the belief that who I am is not good enough to be loved.

Somehow, I’m simultaneously too much and not enough.

If I can get other people to love me, then I’m lovable.

Seems simple, right?

Turns out, that’s not really how any of this works.

At some point, I realized this couldn’t just be the way life was. There had to be a better way.

Everything changed once I became curious.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking:

“What the hell is wrong with me?”

And started asking a much more interesting question:

“How did I learn to be this way?”

That question changed everything.

The window really opened when I became curious about thought work.

Wait a second.

All of my thoughts aren’t true?

And even more mind-blowing: all of my thoughts weren’t necessarily put there by me?

I could question a thought. Challenge it. Change it. I could actually decide whether I wanted to keep believing it.

Thoughts were optional.

That was a pretty significant piece of information for someone who had spent most of her life assuming that whatever was happening inside her head was simply…reality.

Then I started realizing something even bigger.

Other people’s beliefs and opinions about me didn’t have to become mine.

Someone could think I was too much without me believing I was too much. Someone could find me difficult without me deciding I was difficult. Someone could misunderstand me without me having to contort myself into something more understandable.

Their perception of me didn’t have to become my internal dialogue.

And the deeper I got into this work, the more I started wondering if some of the things I had always believed were who I was weren’t actually me at all.

So I got curious.

I started noticing how much I people-pleased. How often I adjusted myself depending on who was in the room. How frequently my decisions weren’t really about what I wanted, but about what would make someone else happy, comfortable, or more likely to approve of me.

I started asking myself a question that sounds ridiculously simple but was absolutely not simple for me:

Do I actually want to do this?

Or am I doing it because it’s expected of me?

Because someone else wants me to?

Because this is who I’ve learned I’m supposed to be?

It was slow. It was messy. And it definitely wasn’t some inspirational montage where I journaled beside a candle for three weeks and emerged fully self-actualized.

But underneath all those inherited thoughts, expectations, opinions, and stories, I started finding me.

And here’s the part I wasn’t expecting:

I actually really like her.

I didn’t need to become less sensitive. Less energetic. Less talkative. Less emotional. Less strange. Less me.

I needed to stop allowing thoughts that had been written for me to determine how I felt about myself.

And somewhere around here, two parts of my life that had always seemed separate started colliding.

I’m a reading specialist.

For years, I’ve worked with students who struggle to read. And when I talk about reshaping students’ minds, I don’t mean some generic inspirational proverb about teachers shaping the minds of America.

I mean learning actually changes the brain.

When a student isn’t reading, I don’t just decide they’re “bad at reading.”

I get curious.

What isn’t connecting yet?

Is the student struggling to map sounds to print? Is working memory getting overloaded? If the traditional way of teaching something isn’t working, can I approach that learning through another pathway or modality?

The more I trained and worked with students with reading disabilities, the more fascinated I became by neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change through experience and learning.

And I got to watch the evidence of that learning happen in real time.

I watched students acquire information, store it, retrieve it, forget it, confuse it, and sometimes learn something incorrectly.

That last one fascinated me.

Because once something has been practiced incorrectly over and over again, simply telling a student the correct answer doesn’t magically erase what their brain has already learned.

It takes repetition.

Practice.

New experiences with the correct information.

Again and again and again.

We’re not erasing a brain and starting over. We’re helping it learn another way.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, something clicked for me:

What if we learn ourselves in much the same way?

What if the things we repeatedly experience, hear, feel, and believe become patterns our brains learn too?

You’re anxious.

You’re too sensitive.

You’re difficult.

You’re too much.

What happens when those messages are repeated enough times?

Emotion and science aren’t separate. Mind and body aren’t separate. Learning doesn’t only happen when we’re sitting at a desk trying to remember something for a test.

We’re learning all the time.

We learn what love feels like.

We learn what gets us approval.

We learn what causes rejection.

We learn when it feels safer to stay quiet.

We learn when we need to perform.

We learn what parts of ourselves seem acceptable to other people.

And eventually, some of what we’ve learned about ourselves can start to feel indistinguishable from who we are.

That’s when my professional understanding of learning became deeply personal.

Because if the brain can learn a pattern, it can learn something different.

Not instantly. Not because I wrote an affirmation on a Post-it and stared aggressively at myself in the mirror.

Through awareness. Experience. Practice. Repetition. Curiosity.

The same principles I’d spent years using to help children learn in new ways suddenly gave me an entirely different way to understand myself.

Maybe I wasn’t a problem that needed to be solved.

Maybe I had learned.

And if I had learned…

I could relearn.

That realization gave me something I hadn’t understood I had before:

Choice.

If someone decided I was difficult, I didn’t automatically have to decide I was difficult too.

I could ask myself:

Am I difficult? Or am I having a feeling?

Most of the time, I wasn’t being difficult. I was having a reaction. I was overwhelmed. I was hurt. I was dysregulated. I was having a very normal human emotion—even when that emotion was big.

For a long time, other people’s reactions to my emotions became evidence about who I was.

If someone told me I was crazy, maybe I was crazy.

If someone couldn’t understand my feelings, maybe my feelings didn’t make sense.

If my emotions made someone else uncomfortable, maybe there was something wrong with me for having them.

Choice gave me another option.

Someone can misunderstand me without me misunderstanding myself.

Someone can think I’m too much without me making myself smaller.

Someone can call me crazy without me accepting that as part of my identity.

And perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that I will never be able to control what someone else thinks about me.

What I could do was start paying attention to what I thought about me.

So I practiced.

I started noticing my thoughts instead of automatically believing them. I questioned things I’d accepted as truth for decades. I looked at patterns and asked where they came from.

I cried.

I learned hard things.

I encountered the same patterns again.

I tried something different.

I failed.

I tried again.

Some thoughts were surprisingly easy to change.

Others were buried so deep that I’m still discovering how far down they go.

And somewhere in all of that work, I started seeing all of myself.

The wounds and the pain.

The hope and the joy.

The patterns I wasn’t particularly proud of. The parts of myself I’d spent years trying to hide. The dark, nitty-gritty shadow work alongside the incredible lightness of realizing:

It doesn’t always have to be this way.

I don’t want to romanticize any of this.

The work is hard.

Constantly noticing, questioning, analyzing, unlearning, relearning, and trying something different can be exhausting.

Sometimes you recognize a pattern and change it.

Sometimes you recognize a pattern and walk directly back into it wearing a cute outfit.

Knowing better and doing differently are not always the same thing.

But little by little, underneath everything I had been told I was, I started discovering who I actually am.

Not a perfectly healed version.

Not a permanently regulated version.

Not some enlightened woman who has transcended the human experience and now drinks herbal tea while responding calmly to every trigger.

Me.

Messy. Emotional. Curious. Smart. Sensitive. Loud. Hopeful.

Sometimes regulated.

Sometimes absolutely fucking not.

But mine.

And that is worth writing.

Which brings me to the part I’m still learning now.

The unknown.

Here’s another strange thing about our brains: sometimes we’ll choose something terrible but familiar over something beautiful but unknown.

We like to believe we’re always moving toward what’s best for us.

Sometimes we’re really just moving toward what we can predict.

We repeat patterns. Choose familiar relationships. Tell ourselves familiar stories. Have familiar reactions.

We stay inside cramped little cardboard boxes because, even when they’re uncomfortable, we know what it feels like inside them.

We mistake familiarity for safety.

I once had a meditation where I saw myself sitting inside a cardboard box.

It was cramped. Ugly. Uncomfortable.

But I knew the box.

Outside of it was this ridiculously beautiful, sunlit meadow. Blue sky. Plants. Birds. Flowers. Everything alive and open and almost magical.

And I was terrified of it.

Not because anything bad was happening out there.

Because I didn’t know what would happen out there.

That experience gave me an image for something I’m still learning:

Sometimes the beautiful thing feels more dangerous than the painful thing simply because we don’t know what the beautiful thing feels like yet.

And our nervous systems have something to say about that.

We can consciously decide we want something different while our bodies are simultaneously sounding every alarm they have because different feels unfamiliar.

That’s why rewriting isn’t just about changing our thoughts.

We also have to learn how to tolerate the discomfort of doing something different. How to sit with uncertainty. How to notice when unfamiliarity feels threatening without automatically allowing that feeling to make the decision for us.

That takes practice too.

And slowly, something begins to shift.

The unknown doesn’t stop being unknown.

We just stop automatically assuming that unknown means dangerous.

We peek outside the box.

Maybe we put one foot in the grass.

Maybe we panic and climb back inside for a minute.

Maybe eventually we realize the box doesn’t fit us anymore.

And maybe we don’t need to destroy it either.

Maybe we can understand why we needed it once. Thank it for protecting us when we didn’t know another way.

Maybe we can even turn the damn thing into a birdhouse.

And then we walk into the meadow.

Not because we know what’s waiting for us there.

Because we finally understand that not knowing what happens next doesn’t mean something terrible happens next.

The wilderness is simply where the story hasn’t been written yet.

And maybe that isn’t something to fear.

Maybe that’s the whole fucking point.