You sit down to write what actually happened.
The real version.
Not the polished summary you’ve told enough times that it barely feels personal anymore.
The actual story.
And about two sentences in, your brain starts negotiating.
That’s too much.
Way too personal.
Do people really need to know that part?
Who asked you to make this about yourself anyway?
So you start editing.
Not grammar.
You.
You soften the parts that feel a little exposed.
Take out the detail that makes your stomach tighten when you reread it.
Change the sentence that sounds too emotional.
Make the whole thing a little more general.
A little easier to defend.
A little less likely to make somebody think something about you that you don’t want them to think.
And by the time you’re finished...
it’s technically still your story.
It just doesn’t really sound like you lived it anymore.
I know this one.
There have been plenty of times I thought I was struggling to find the right words when really I was trying to find words that would let me tell the truth without having to feel exposed by it.
Those are two very different problems.
Because sometimes the writing isn’t the hard part.
Being seen in what you wrote is.
That’s especially true when the story isn’t flattering.
Or finished.
Or easy to explain.
Maybe you made a choice you wouldn’t make now.
Maybe you stayed somewhere longer than you wish you had.
Maybe you were scared.
Maybe you didn’t know what you were doing.
Maybe the version of you in that story doesn’t match the version of you people know now.
It’s tempting to clean her up a little before introducing her.
I mean, we know how the story ends now.
Surely we can make the woman in the middle sound a little wiser than she actually was.
Ahem.
I’ve done that too.
We tell the story from where we are now and accidentally give our past selves information they absolutely did not have at the time.
Suddenly every confusing season has a beautiful lesson attached.
Every bad decision was secretly preparing us for something.
Every hard moment makes perfect sense in hindsight.
Except that’s not usually how it felt while we were living it.
Sometimes we were just confused.
Sometimes hurt.
Sometimes embarrassed.
Sometimes making the best decision we could with the information we had and finding out later that it still wasn’t the right one.
That part matters.
Because when we erase all of the uncertainty from our own stories, we don’t just make them cleaner.
We make them less true.
And I think there’s another reason we do it.
The more specific the story is, the more specifically somebody can respond to it.
If I say:
I went through a hard season and learned a lot about myself.
Nobody can really argue with that.
Very safe.
If I tell you what happened?
What I thought.
What I got wrong.
What I was afraid people would think of me.
Now you have something real to react to.
And I don’t get to control the reaction.
That’s the vulnerable part.
It’s easy to say we want to be known.
It’s harder to let ourselves be knowable.
Because being knowable means giving people something true enough to actually know.
And no, that doesn’t mean telling everyone everything.
I don’t believe authenticity requires handing strangers the keys to your emotional storage unit.
Some things are private because they should be.
Some stories belong to you before they belong anywhere else.
Some parts of a story may never need to be shared publicly at all.
But privacy and self-editing aren’t quite the same thing.
Privacy says:
This is mine, and I’m choosing not to share it.
Self-editing says:
I want to share this, but I’m afraid the real version will change how you see me.
I’ve felt both.
And I think I know the difference when I’m being honest with myself.
One feels like a boundary.
The other feels like shrinking.
Maybe that’s the thing worth noticing the next time you find yourself sanding all the edges off something true.
Are you protecting something that genuinely belongs to you?
Or are you trying to tell your story without risking being seen inside it?
You don’t owe anyone your whole story.
But if you choose to tell it...
maybe you don’t have to rewrite yourself out of it first.
Want to keep going with this conversation?
🎧 Listen to Episode 9: How to Tell Your Story Without Sounding Salesy →