Losing the Script

Learning to feel my story instead of perform it

I heard something recently on a podcast about “not being confined by our traumas”—that what happened to us doesn’t have to become our identity.

For most of us, especially when the trauma is fresh, that feels nearly impossible.

When we’re actively processing something significant, our stories start to slip into conversation like disclaimers. They become a way of explaining ourselves. Justifying the ways we’re not showing up how we wish we could.

I wrote a song a couple months ago called This Story. It opens with the line:

“I don’t want my story to be the only part that defines me.”

Being the spouse of an alcoholic, and then navigating a divorce that ended abruptly, became something I felt I had to name.

The caveat to my fragility.
The explanation for choosing pleasure over relationship.
The reason my work took longer than usual.

The weight of it all was so heavy, it started to take over who I was.

I didn’t have a home. I was living out of suitcases. My work was on hold. My days were filled with calls to a lawyer, and long conversations with friends and family trying to make sense of what had just happened to my life.

And slowly, that became my identity.
The girl with the story.

I’ve always been a storyteller. I can recount hysterical moments, adrenaline-filled adventures, and even family dysfunction with a kind of lightness, usually laced with humor.

And somehow, even in the scariest, saddest chapter of my life, I got really good at telling this story too.

It became a script.
The sequence of events so clear, I could move through it without breaking apart. (Most of the time).

It was almost like I had stepped outside of myself.

Like I could tell my own story from a distance— observing it, rather than fully inhabiting it.

In hindsight, I can see it for the coping mechanism it was.

My body and brain trying to protect me.
Trying to give me small breaks from a nervous system that had been living in a constant state of activation.

Over time, telling my story got old.

Constantly processing in therapy. In support groups.
Feeling like I had to explain everything to everyone I was close with,
even though no one was ever asking that of me.

It wasn’t until I started to feel my story that something began to shift.

It became something that had happened to me,
instead of something that defined me.

Slowly, I’ve come back to my body.

I still return to my story in moments.
But over time, I’ve lost the script I once relied on.

And now, when I revisit those painful parts of my life,
I can feel the imprint they left in my body
without being pulled back into the moment itself.

I pause more.
I move slower through the memories.
I see them through a different lens.

I am someone who has always believed in the power of story.
But I think sometimes, we can become bound by them.

Our stories can keep us locked into a period of time, taking us out of the present, constant reminders of the past. And sometimes the chains our stories wrap us in, keep us trapped, unable to move forward.

We talk about the importance of verbally processing, but I’m here to argue that it’s not really enough, and maybe not what we ultimately need to move through our pain.

Because vocalizing what something is to us doesn’t mean we’re actually feeling it. It’s way easier to dissociate our emotions from what we’re verbalizing. What’s harder is moving through the feeling, allowing it to inhabit our bodies, to take up space.

Movement.
Creative expression.
Putting down our phones.

This is what we need more than anything
and yet, what we often resist the most.

I believe in the power of story, and how understanding our own can give us a stronger sense of self.
But it’s only when we can hold both—
who we were then, and who we are now,
when we can step outside of the story and see ourselves as more than what has happened to us.

Our value, and who we are, is more than the stories of our lives.

It’s how we choose to show up.
How we choose to honor them,
without letting them become us.