we become the stories we tell ourselves

We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others.

We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We're born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn't choose. We're born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can't control. We're sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don't control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves.

We can spend out lives letting others dictate our narrative, and cast ourselves as the victims. Or we can realize the truth: that we are the creators of our own story.

Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

...the stories we tell ourselves long enough become our truths.

We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I'm not sure why it must be so, but it is.

WE ALL create the person we become by our choices as we go through life.

Much of our life is guided by the beliefs we develop over the course of time; the story we create about what life’s about, how we’re supposed to be, what we’re supposed to do or give.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.

We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a very real sense, by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.