I spent the first thirty years of my life carrying stories that weren't mine. Like invisible luggage, I dragged them from room to room, relationship to relationship, never questioning why my shoulders ached or why forward movement felt so impossibly hard.
These stories came disguised as truths. "You're too sensitive." "You're not the academic one." "You always need to be doing something." They were handed to me so early and so often that I mistook them for my own thoughts. I built my life around these inherited narratives, making choices that fit the character I'd been cast to play.
It wasn't until I found myself in a therapist's office in Stockholm, struggling to explain why I felt like a stranger in my own life, that I began to understand the difference between the stories we're given and the ones we choose.
"The stories we inherit shape us, but they don't have to define us. We can choose which ones to keep and which ones to gently set down."
The Inheritance We Don't Ask For
Every family has its mythology. In mine, the stories were clear: My brother was the smart one. I was the emotional one. My mother was the strong one. My father was the provider. These weren't necessarily spoken rules, but they shaped every interaction, every expectation, every possibility.
I learned to perform my role perfectly. When I struggled in math, it confirmed the story—I wasn't the academic one. When I excelled in writing, it was dismissed as "just creativity," not real intelligence. When I cried at movies or felt things deeply, it reinforced my label as "too sensitive." I shaped myself to fit the narrative, never realizing I had options.
The thing about inherited stories is that they often contain a grain of truth, which makes them harder to question. Yes, I am sensitive. Yes, I do feel things deeply. But somewhere along the way, these neutral traits became limitations, warnings, reasons why I couldn't trust my own judgment.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
By the time I reached adulthood, I had internalized these external narratives so completely that they felt like facts. I chose careers that didn't challenge the "not academic" story. I apologized for my emotions before I even expressed them. I dimmed my sensitivity instead of recognizing it as one of my greatest strengths.
When I was diagnosed with ADHD at 35, suddenly so many of these stories began to unravel. What had been labeled as "too much energy" or "can't sit still" or "always needs to be doing something" wasn't a character flaw—it was neurodivergence. What had been dismissed as oversensitivity was actually a nervous system processing the world differently.
The relief was overwhelming. But with it came anger. How many choices had I made based on stories that weren't even true? How much of my life had I spent trying to fix things that weren't broken?
Rewriting the Narrative
The work of putting down other people's stories is slow and sometimes painful. It requires examining each belief, each limitation, each "truth" about yourself and asking: Is this mine? Does this serve me? Do I want to keep carrying this?
I started with small rebellions. I took a statistics course—and loved it. I stopped apologizing for crying at commercials. I began introducing myself without the qualifiers I'd always used: "I'm probably too sensitive, but..." or "This might be a dumb question, but..."
With each story I set down, I felt lighter. The space they left behind began filling with something new—curiosity about who I might be without these inherited limitations.
"Freedom isn't just about letting go of what doesn't serve us. It's about having the courage to discover what does."
The Stories Worth Keeping
Not all inherited stories need to be discarded. As I sorted through the narratives I'd been carrying, I found some worth keeping—just reframed. My sensitivity, once a burden, became my superpower as a writer and mother. My need for movement, once seen as hyperactivity, became the energy that helps me juggle multiple projects and chase after two small children.
The Swedish concept of "lagom"—just enough—helped me here. I didn't need to throw out everything from my past or reject my family's entire worldview. I needed to find the right amount of their stories to keep, balanced with the new ones I was writing for myself.
Writing a New Story
These days, I'm teaching my children to be curious about the stories they inherit. When my daughter says, "I'm not good at math," I ask her, "Is that your thought, or did someone give it to you?" When my son insists he "has to be brave," we talk about all the ways bravery can look, including asking for help or admitting you're scared.
I want them to know that the stories we tell about ourselves have power, but we always have the authority to edit, revise, or start a new chapter entirely. They can honor where they come from while still choosing where they're going.
As for me, I'm still in the process of writing my new story. Some days I pick up the old narratives out of habit, like reaching for a familiar but ill-fitting coat. But more often now, I remember: I'm the author of my own life. I get to decide which stories are true, which characters I want to be, and what happens next.
The weight of other people's stories nearly broke me. But learning to put them down? That's what finally set me free. And in that freedom, I found something I never expected—not just the space to be myself, but the curiosity to discover who that self might become.
