The Story Being Told About Me
There is a story being told about me that is not the story of who I am. I do not have to climb inside that story to answer it.
You have been described in rooms you were not standing in. Someone has put together sentences that have your name in them and someone else's meaning inside them. The version of you that has been built in another mouth has very little to do with the person you actually are when you wake up in the morning and pour your first cup of something warm.
You may have spent a great deal of energy trying to step inside the wrong story and tear it down from inside — explaining, correcting, ensuring that everyone who has heard the wrong version also hears the right one. This is a natural impulse, and it is also exhausting, and it has rarely accomplished what you hoped it would. The story being told about you tends to keep its shape no matter how much you press against it from the outside.
There is another way. You can simply not climb inside. You can let the wrong story exist in the rooms where it exists, and you can go on being the actual person you are in the rooms where you actually live. The wrong story does not get to be the real one just because it is being told. The real one is the one being lived. It is the one your hands are doing. It is the one your days are made of.
This does not mean you do nothing. It means your doing is quiet, and steady, and oriented toward your actual life — rather than spent on the static of someone else's version of you. The energy you would have given to defending yourself can instead go to the small ordinary acts that make up the truth of who you are. Those acts will, over time, speak for themselves. They always do.
Today, when you feel the pull to climb inside the wrong story and start arguing from inside it, let yourself feel the pull, and then gently set it down. Stay in your own life. Stay in your own hands. The truth of who you are is here, in the rooms you actually inhabit, doing what it has always done.