The stories we don't know we're telling ourselves

How a few words, heard young, can quietly shape decades of how you see yourself, and how to gently begin writing a new story.

There's a particular kind of moment that happens when you're young, where someone says something to you, usually in passing, sometimes meant as a compliment, sometimes not, and you have no idea, in that moment, that the words are going to follow you for the next decade.

You don't know it because you're 18. Or 14. Or 9. Your brain doesn't have the wiring yet to step back, examine the comment for what it actually is, and place it gently to one side. So instead, the words do what young brains do with strong emotional input. They go underground. They tuck themselves into your sense of self quietly, and from that day forward, they start to shape the way you see yourself, the way you talk to yourself, and the version of you you think you have to be to stay safe, loved, or wanted.

I want to talk about this today, because so many of the women I sit across from in my coaching practice are walking around carrying words someone once spoke to them. Sometimes more than one set. They don't always remember it as a turning point. They just know that something in them shifted around that age. They became the perfectionist, or the people pleaser, or the one who had to look a certain way to feel okay being in a room. And underneath all of it, almost always, there are words.

I have a set of my own.

The words

When I was 18, a male friend said something to me that he genuinely believed was a compliment. He said:

"You have the personality of an ugly person, because you were an ugly child, but you turned out hot."

He thought he was being kind. In his head, the "but you turned out hot" was the gift at the end. He thought he was reassuring me that I was warm, caring, good company, and now, on top of that, attractive too. He delivered the line like it was a win.

What I actually heard, somewhere underneath my conscious mind, was very different.

What I heard was: Your warmth, your kindness, the parts of you that other people enjoy, those came from being unattractive. Your value in this room right now is that you grew out of that. And if you ever stop looking the way you look now, you will go back to being that other version. The ugly one. The one whose only currency was being nice.

I did not sit with those words consciously. I didn't write them down. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't have the language to say "I think this just shaped something in me." I was 18. I had an 18 year old brain, not the one I have now at 35. What I did instead was something far more dangerous, because it happens quietly and it happens in the dark.

I ruminated.

How rumination becomes a belief

Here's what no one tells you about rumination at that age. You're not just thinking about the comment. You're building a belief system.

Every time you turn someone's words over in your head, falling asleep, driving, in the shower, getting ready in the morning, you are laying another thin layer of cement underneath them. By the time you stop actively replaying the comment, months or sometimes years later, it's no longer just a comment. It's an operating instruction. It's something you simply know about yourself, the way you know your own name.

You don't decide to believe it. You just absorb it. The thought stops asking permission and starts assuming it's true.

For me, what I quietly came to know, without ever once saying it out loud, was this: I am only loved, valued, and worth showing up as long as I look the part.

That belief never introduced itself. It didn't put up a sign. It just started running the show.

It became the perfectionism. It became the hours in front of the mirror. It became the panic when I thought I'd put on weight. It became the version of me who couldn't walk into something unless she'd worked very hard to look a particular way first. It became, for years, a quiet conviction that the day I stopped being the "after" version of that story, the people in my life would love me less.

And here's the part I really want you to hear.

I didn't know I was doing any of this because of words spoken to me. I just thought I was a perfectionist. I just thought I cared a lot about how I presented. I just thought I was someone with high standards. The belief had been braided into my personality so tightly that I couldn't see the seam between where I ended and the story began.

This is how it works for almost all of us.

Your words are in there somewhere

A throwaway comment from a parent. "Don't be too much." "You're the sensitive one." "That's not very ladylike."

A teacher in front of the class.

A boyfriend at 19 who said the thing.

A look on someone's face when you wore the dress.

Your young brain takes the words in. Your young brain ruminates on them. Your young brain builds.

And by 30, by 35, by 45, you are behaving in ways you don't fully understand, around people who don't know they're standing next to a teenage wound. You think it's just who you are. The way you brace before stepping into a room. The way you over deliver and still feel you haven't done enough. The way you flinch at certain words. The way you go quiet around certain people.

It's not who you are. It's who you became after someone's words.

The awareness piece

The work of becoming a more conscious version of yourself, in my experience, is not loud or dramatic. It is not about going back and burning the memory down. It is not about confronting the person who said the thing. It is much, much quieter than that.

It looks like noticing.

It looks like catching yourself in a moment of self criticism and gently asking, whose voice is this, actually?

It looks like recognising that the panic you feel when you don't look "right" before leaving the house isn't vanity. It's a younger version of you who decided, a long time ago, that her worth was conditional, and she's still trying to keep you safe in the only way she knew how.

It looks like sitting with the words, finally, as the adult you are now, and saying: I see you. I see what you did. I see why my younger self believed you. And I am allowed to put you down now.

This is the part I wish someone had told me earlier.

You do not have to keep being the version of yourself that an 18 year old brain assembled, in a moment, in response to words that were never even fully thought through.

You're allowed to update the file.

You're allowed to question the story.

You're allowed to find the words underneath the behaviour, look at them kindly, and decide, as the woman you are now, that they are no longer the truth you live by.

The question to sit with

If you are reading this and something is rising in your chest, I want you to know. That's the recognition. That's the part of you that has been quietly waiting to be looked at. You don't have to fix it today. You don't have to know the whole story yet. You just have to be willing to ask the question.

What did I decide about myself, back then, that I'm still living by now?

Most of us are walking around answering a question we don't even remember being asked. We are loyal to a belief we never agreed to. We are protecting a version of ourselves that was built, in the dark, by a brain that didn't yet know the difference between a backhanded compliment and a truth.

The first act of coming home to yourself is realising the question was never yours to begin with.

You get to ask a new one now.

With love, Jess x

P.S. If this stirred something in you and you want to gently look at the words you've been carrying, that work is some of the most beautiful work I get to hold space for in my coaching. You don't have to do it alone, and you don't have to know where to start. You just have to be willing.

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