The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Personal Growth

We are all, constantly, in the middle of a story. The question is: who is writing it?

Long before I became a professional writer, I was a person with a narrative. A story I'd inherited, absorbed, constructed — about who I was, what I was capable of, what I deserved. Most of us are carrying stories like this without realising it. They live in the body as much as the mind.

In the writing workshops I facilitate, I see it happen again and again. Someone picks up a pen to write about a memory, or a person, or a moment — and what comes out is not just the event itself, but the meaning they've attached to it. The story beneath the story.

"I'm not a real writer." "I don't have anything interesting to say." "My story isn't worth telling." These are not facts. They are narratives. And narratives can be rewritten.

This is what I find so radical about creative writing as a personal practice — not that it produces beautiful work, though it often does, but that it forces you to look at the story you've been living inside of. To hold it up to the light. To ask: is this actually true? And if not — what story would I rather tell?

The process is not always comfortable. Sometimes the story that comes out surprises you. Sometimes it frightens you. But there is something deeply liberating about being the one holding the pen — about understanding, perhaps for the first time, that you are not just a character in your own life. You are also its author.

You get to decide what happens next.

The Secrets series is designed for exactly this kind of deep narrative work. Four sessions. Your story. Your voice.