Writing Fuller Stories for Ourselves

Revising and Expanding Our Internal Narratives Without Gaslighting Ourselves

A note to readers who work with me clinically or might want to in the future: I am going to reference more personal details of my life in this than you would otherwise have access to. You are welcome to read this and can choose if you want to discuss it with me in sessions. You are also invited to skip this post if you quite understandably want to carry less of my story.

---

On my post about how trans folks can survive these modern-day attacks on our humanity and access to gender-affirming care, someone commented wondering how I am able to stay so grounded. I’ve thought about that and this post is my response.

First of all, my substack writing is a distilled expression of my experiences and insights where I’m aiming for cohesion and clarity. These posts probably represent the more grounded parts of me and might obscure the ways in which I, too, can spin out or be more dysregulated. I sometimes think I should include a detailed accounting of my recent various neuroses and GI distress with each post so folks know there is a whole, messy person attached to these writings. (I kid, sort of.) Second, I do have the buffers of various sources of safety and societal privilege that shield me from some of the direct and indirect impacts of transnegativity and oppression that many community members are contending with, making it frankly an easier (though not easy) task to find my grounding.

I also think that something I practice and carry with me is something that we can all cultivate in ourselves and may be able to nurture in others: a commitment to seeing and experiencing life in its fullness — and doing so honestly, which means seeking and holding onto the wonderful dimensions as well as the hard ones. My family likes to share that despite being my mother’s first pregnancy, she labored for only an hour. They barely made it to the hospital before I was out of the womb, in the world and breathing my own air. These days I have come to understand this foundation to my life as consistent with my current experience: I love being in this world. I am amazed by life, mine included, and I relish in it. Which is not to say that my life has been easy or without sources of pain and terror. It does mean that when I tell myself the story of my life (which I do often, and so do you probably, whether you’re fully conscious of it or not), I am sure to not only emphasize the hardships.

Okay you may be noticing that we’re getting a little close to toxic positivity. And I want to be really clear that I don’t ever want to encourage myself or anyone else to ignore difficult feelings and experiences and try to pretend them away by only focusing on the positive. That is self-gaslighting and the denial of what we know in our bones to be true (that we’re aching, or that we’re scared, or that we’re livid, et cetera) is deeply harmful. It also creates a hollow or shallow experience of positivity. If you can only feel good things divorced from the context of difficult shit, you’re experience of the wonder of the world will be constricted and superficial.

---

I don’t know what I believe about synchronicity and that’s a post in and of itself, but in my life synchronicities usually arrive in the form of music. And indeed as I was writing this, a song came on that feels perfect for this theme. And it’s mostly by chance. An algorithmic suggestion of a Portland, Oregon singer-songwriter for my rainy workday introduced me to Anna Tivel and her 2024 album Living Thing. I had it playing as background music, and as I wrote out “I love being in this world. I am amazed by life, mine included, and I relish in it. Which is not to say that my life has been easy or without sources of pain and terror,” I caught some lyrics of the song “Disposable Camera” that had just begun playing softly.

before you come into the world, you should know
there are things that will hurt and things that won't
like scraping your knees on the asphalt
and the freedom right before you fell
nobody tells it like it is
they say isn't it lovely, and buck up kid
but you learn how to breathe just by doing it
how to dream until you believe yourself

taking a picture to pass the time
a disposable camera and sore eyes
you'll be leaning your head in the half light
what a feeling to be alive

I didn’t mean for today’s post to be a music share, but here we are. “There are things that will hurt and things that won’t…what a feeling to be alive.” How could I not share this with you?

When you tell yourself the story of your life, is it full of the things that hurt? The other day I caught myself running through that version of my story. Something had gone wrong and in feeling the impact of that — the sorrow and fear and yearning for something different, my mind start running through the list of all of the other things in my life that made me feel shitty or made my life harder than I want it to be, harder than it “should” be. I’ve lived long enough to have accumulated a decent share of things to go on that list: I’ve lost people I cared for to suicide. My mother, with whom I am very close but who doesn’t live nearby, has metastatic cancer. We’ve already had multiple losses in the family due to cancer and amazing people who didn’t get to experience the old ages and chapters of their lives they wanted to and as long as we all wanted them to. My partner and I have had around a dozen unsuccessful IUI and IVF cycles. We’ve experienced pregnancy loss. I, like you all, am witnessing the state-sponsored violence against immigrants with horror. And bearing witness to the devastating violence against the people of Gaza and others around the world, taking in images and videos of people being starved, children being bombed. I, again like all of you, am living in a time of devastating climate change, with increasingly severe and terrifying impacts promised. I continue to experience occasional but painful gender dysphoria feelings about the ways my body looks, and I’ve had to work hard over the past 15 years to heal from a large rift between my body and mind that formed before I was able to access gender-affirming medical interventions. There are many, many people out there who think my body is disgusting and think I am a danger to society for trying to help people like me find meaningful ways of living and thriving.

Lots of things that hurt.

The other day, when I started to think about how hard the past couple years have been, started recounting to myself my misfortunes and sources of grief, I felt physically heavy. And I noticed I wasn’t leaving room for the other parts of my story. The things that don’t hurt. The things that uplift and comfort and inspire. My sources of love and gratitude and meaning.

For example, my mother has metastatic cancer, yes. This sucks. It is devastating. It is shit. And it’s a profound testament to our relationship — and to her impact on my life— that facing her cancer feels like such a brutal gut punch. And she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer over two years ago and because of the developments in cancer knowledge and treatment and her access to care and her own care of herself, she has found ways to live well. And we walked on the beach together this past new year’s day, and laughed at jokes on my porch a couple weeks ago while I ate the grilled cheese she made me. We’ve had so many positive memories in the past two years and continue to build those. That’s a fuller version of the story. But actually the full version is even more expansive. It includes the flowers that I ride my bike by in our neighborhood that both add beauty and awe to my day and remind me of her. And the technology that allows us to easily stay in contact despite being states away. It includes complicated feelings about being able to be intentional about our relationship with the salience of mortality. And an awareness that many lose parents or are otherwise estranged long before they’re my age. I could go on. There’s more to the hard side of things, too, of course.

Art by Britchida

I can do this narrative work with my gender dysphoria, too. I can tell a story about the ways in which I don’t look like (some) cisgender men, how after all this time and effort my beard isn’t “up to snuff” and I’ve sacrificed my hair line in the process. I can tell myself about the way fat hangs differently on my hips than how it does for (some) other men and the way my narrower back and shoulders emphasize this. That doesn’t feel good to write out. It doesn’t feel good when I tell myself that technically true but incredibly incomplete version of my story with my body and gender, too. The fuller version is that I’m not even sure I want to look like a cis man — or if I do, it’s not because I want to be cis. The full story includes the ways in which my transness has served me, offered incredible gifts and that the cost of that might be some lingering visual differences between me and cis men. The fuller story also includes all the things I love about my body — things that testosterone and surgery offered me, but also things outside of these sexed traits. I can grow facial hair and my facial shape is different. I have a torso that I once dreamed of. I have incredible tattoos that I love catching glimpses of. My body carries me on bicycles for miles and miles when I take proper care of it (and take proper care of my bikes). Again, I could go on.

In Anna Tivel’s song, she sings of “a parade and the emptiness after it.” Neither the post-parade emptiness nor the jubilance of the parade are the full story. “Like scraping your knees on the asphalt and the freedom right before you fell” (emphasis mine).

---

I want to encourage you to do two things: try to catch when you’re telling yourself incomplete versions of your story and take time to intentionally play with lots of different ways of writing and revising and shifting your narratives.

Starting with the latter, do something like I did above. Write out or share aloud with someone a chapter of your life story and strive to only include the hard parts. This will suck. It might be dysregulating. Be prepared for that. Read through it and pay attention to how you feel. (Which again will probably be not great.)

And then write and/or share a fuller version of the story. Include other things that are also true about that time or topic. Where did joy happen alongside grief or connection amidst loneliness? What lessons did you learn that changed something for you? What about that very real suffering was also an indicator of things you are grateful to have experienced or be true (e.g., a loss feeling so bad because that relationship was so valuable to you)? What did you (or can you in retrospect if it’s in the past) also appreciate about life during that time (e.g., a movie that came out or the bluebirds in the neighborhood or that kind neighbor)? Think both small and big.

And pay attention to how that one feels.

You might also play around with how a more “toxic” and selectively/exclusively positive version of your story sounds, too. Write out a version that excludes the hard stuff and just includes the good you’ve just added in. How does it feel to read or share that one?

My hypothesis is that the only-hard-things story will feel heavy and discouraging, not altogether untrue, but weighing you down. The good-vibes-only story will feel superficial. Some of the good parts won’t make sense out of the context of the hard stuff, and even the pieces that make sense won’t feel very deeply positive, nothing or few things you can fully relish in. And the hybrid — the fuller — story will feel honest and real, neither light nor burdensome. I suspect there will be gratitude that comes up, maybe even pride and empowerment. But if none of those things are there, that’s okay. Maybe they can be more present in the future chapters you’ll be living. Either way, the hybrid fuller version is the more authentic version and won’t feel as burdensome as the only-hard-things version.

And I also invite you to listen to yourself when you slip into monochrome narratives about your life. Notice how you are editing your story without meaning to. Start by just catching it and naming that that’s what you’re doing. Then see if you can do some more honest revision and expansion work in the moment. Or come back to it later.

---

Returning once more to “Disposable Camera,” which quite movingly seems to be written to a yet-unborn child, Anna Tivel’s lyrics “a blessing and a burden / I swear this will be worth it” strike me as a promise to this future being that their life will be full of both the hard things and gifts. Gifts that are inherent to being alive and gifts that are specific to each of us and our circumstances. And a promise that it is the combination of these things that make life worthwhile.

I recently told a client who was dismissing that his lot in life wasn’t so bad that I believed life was actually inherently really hard for all of us. This task or project of living, as another client calls it, is incredibly difficult, no matter what extra buffers or extra barriers you experience. It is also incredibly beautiful. This opportunity to feel, to witness, to be a part of ecosystems, to be connected to others and/or the world around us. These are gifts that are as true and real as the challenges.

So this is an important part of how I stay grounded through ~*all of this*~. By staying honest with myself and keeping the fullness of my story (and all our stories) in view. To adapt Anna Tivel’s lyrics, even when I’m sitting with the burdens, I don’t lose sight of the blessings. And yes, I have found time and time again that this thing called living is worth it.

---