The Healing Power of Rewriting Your Story

I realise I haven’t posted here for a while. I’ve mostly been over on Substack (you can join me there if you’d like). 

But here we are, nearing the end of 2025.

Ten years since my whole life changed.
Ten years since the string was pulled and the whole jumper unravelled.
Ten years since my bubble popped.

A decade of suffering, cognitive dissonance, trauma, and growth.

I thought about making a neat little list of “lessons learned,” but honestly, it feels cringe.

So I thought I’d just bring one.
One single truth that has risen from the ruins:

Love embraces both sides of the story.
Freedom writes a new one.

We Live Stories

We are narrative creatures. We don’t just live through events, we weave them into stories, and then we believe those stories. They become the frameworks that hold our identity, the scaffolding that shapes how we see ourselves and the world. 

Sometimes those stories fracture, sometimes they fail us, and sometimes we outgrow them. 

Most of us believe the story that comforts us the most. Sometimes it’s the story that tells us we’re in control, or that everything happens for a reason, or that the people we love will never leave. 

These stories soothe the ache of uncertainty and give us something to lean on when life feels too fragile. They aren’t always true, but they feel safe. And maybe that’s why we hold them so tightly, because deep down we’d rather live inside a comforting fiction than face the rawness of an unedited reality.

What happens when someone comes along and offers an alternative story, one that unsettles our cosy version of things? At first, we resist. We feel defensive, even angry, as if the ground beneath us is being pulled away. Their story can feel like a threat because it exposes the fragility of our own.

Have you even had a story nobody believed? Have you ever spoken up only to not be taken seriously? Of course you have, because you live on earth. Your story was disruptive. Your story made others feel awkward. Your story didn’t line up with their experience. 

Yet often it’s in that disturbance, that uncomfortable clash of narratives, that growth begins. It’s rarely gentle, but sometimes the very story we want to reject is the one that cracks us open to a wider, freer way of seeing.

What I Mean When I Say Love Embraces Both Sides of the Story

For years I silenced the other side, because I myself felt silenced. That’s the advantage those with power hold: they get to set the narrative. Whoever holds the microphone shapes the story. And so I suffered for years, just trying to be heard, just trying to be believed, which, really, is another way of saying I was just trying to be loved.

When I finally arrived at the place where I could acknowledge that there was another narrative beyond my own, I instantly felt a release. 

Although my reasoning is not their reasoning, I still embrace the fact that they had their own story. I don’t have the whole truth, and neither do they. And I cannot expect others to respond to my story in the way I wish they would because they do not have my angle.

Love Always Leads to Freedom

As I embraced the fact that there were two valid sides of the story (actually there are multiple), I got tired of the old narrative, not that I deny there was truth to it. This is when I discovered my ability to tell it differently. 

I could hold a new narrative. One that didn’t highlight all the ways I was unloved. One that didn’t give ‘main character energy’ to those who harmed me. One that named, but didn’t shame. One that lights up ‘here’, where I am, my life now. One that freed me from the past. 

And so I did what we all have the power to do, I wrote a new narrative.

In this new, present, lived in, story, I am learning to set everything free. This new angle is inspired by the quote that has helped me more than any other over the past ten years. Let me share it with you.

Rob Bell writes:

“Let go of the idea that peace and joy and fulfilment and purpose and deep abiding love exist anywhere else but here, in this life, in the one that you’ve got, the reality you are living.

Because this is the only life you will ever have, and this is the only person you’ll ever be. Let’s set everybody around us, including ourselves, free from who we wish they were.

Set everyone free from getting it, seeing it, and being anyone other than what they are.

Set yourself free from the timeline you keep creating on how far along you think you should be.

Set yourself free from the idea that there is a timeline.

Set yourself free from thinking that anyone in your life owes you anything, that you decided they owe you, whether they said that they would or not.

Set yourself free from anything anyone is unable to be for you.

Set yourself free from anything you are unable to be for anyone else.

Set yourself free from the illusion that our peace and joy was ever dependent on anyone doing anything we decide they needed to do for us.

Set everyone free from having to understand your life, your path, your passion, your decisions, your perspective, and your curiosity.”

Freedom Tastes Good

That’s the ticket right there – set everything free. 

Sounds easy, I acknowledge it is deceptively hard. For a long time, I didn’t want to because the break wasn’t even. It didn’t feel fair. 

But freedom doesn’t come when the scales are balanced. It came when I realised love could embrace both sides of the story, and that I had the power to write a new one.

This is the Gold

Regardless of what you think you might gain by holding on, it cannot compare to what you gain by letting go. The illusion of control, the false comfort of replaying the same story, it only weighs you down. But release, however uneven, however unfinished, is the true gift. Because as you set everything free, you set yourself free.

(My husband arrived at this conclusion almost instantly. For me, it took ten years. The truth is: it takes as long as it takes.)