personal mythology

The Stories That Tell Us

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There are two kinds of stories: the ones you tell about yourself, and the ones so large you’ve forgotten anyone is telling them.

Every so often I catch one of the first kind halfway out of my mouth. “I’m not the kind of person who…” The rest of the sentence hardly matters. The interesting part is the speed with which the narrator moves in, checks the record, and decides what someone called Clay would or would not do.

I don’t remember appointing this narrator. Most of the time I don’t hear him. He speaks in my voice and knows enough history to sound convincing. A preference becomes a trait; an old embarrassment becomes a law about what is possible this afternoon.

Once you hear the voice, the solid self begins to look less solid. Zoom in and you find a life being narrated as it is lived. Zoom out far enough and you find whole cities, economies and civilizations doing the same thing. The scale changes. The trick does not.

Worcester has a needle that taught me how to see the trick. From a distance it looks like part of a church. Up close, the church is gone.

The Autobiography You Never Chose

We tend to speak about the self as if it were an object carried somewhere inside the body. I have a self in much the same way that I have a passport, a favourite jacket and a National Insurance number. It has qualities. It has a past. It persists through time. When I say “I”, this inner object steps forward to answer.

The closer I look, the harder it is to find.

What I find instead is activity: remembering, selecting, explaining, defending, anticipating, revising. A face in an old photograph becomes “the person I was then”. A difficult year becomes “the time I lost my way” or “the year I finally stopped pretending”. A choice made under pressure gets recruited as evidence of courage, cowardice, loyalty or fear. The event does not arrive with its meaning attached. The narrator supplies it, often years later, then edits the earlier chapters so that the latest version feels as though it had been there from the start.

This does not mean the self is fake. A story can be constructed and still be true enough to live by. It means the self is a process rather than a possession: a telling under way, not a book already printed and bound.

That distinction opens a little space around the facts.

I have old drafts of myself stored everywhere. Some exist in notebooks and blog posts. Others live in the bodies of people who knew me at a particular time. The Army officer. The trainer. The coach. The man who was certain he needed a plan. The man who kept changing the plan. None of them was an impostor. Each was a working version assembled from the demands, desires and available language of the moment.

Some passages have changed without ceremony. I no longer need to make a declaration each time I outgrow an opinion or discover that I can do something I had placed outside my character. I act differently for long enough and the narrator catches up. The new behaviour enters the record. The old sentence begins to sound dated.

Other passages survive long after their circumstances have gone. We read them aloud out of habit: I’ve never been good with money. I always lose interest. People like me don’t do that. I’m too old to begin again. The sentence may have started as a description of one period or one wound. Repetition turns it into identity. Identity then edits perception. We notice the evidence that keeps the sentence intact and pass over whatever might trouble it.

Take two people carrying the same hard event. One tells it as the moment life singled them out for punishment. The other tells it as the period in which they learned what they could survive. Neither narration changes what happened. Neither should be used to tidy away injury, grief or injustice. The second person still suffered. The first may have learned a great deal. “Victim” and “learner” are not moral ranks.

But the narration changes what the event is allowed to do next. One version keeps the past in the role of author. The other places the event inside a life that is still being written. The difference shows up in attention, expectation and action: which invitations we notice, which risks feel available, which kinds of help we can accept, what we imagine will happen when we try.

This is where reality becomes participatory without becoming wishful thinking. We do not make rain stop by describing ourselves as dry. We do not narrate poverty, illness or another person’s power out of existence. The world pushes back. Bodies, institutions and bank balances have their say.

Yet our telling helps decide which part of that world we meet.

A morning can begin with the sentence, “I’m already behind.” Once spoken, it recruits the inbox, the unwashed cup, the unfinished draft and the missed call. By nine o’clock the whole room has joined the prosecution. Another sentence might begin with the same facts: “There is more here than I can finish today. What matters now?” Nothing external has vanished. The cup still needs washing. The email still waits. But attention has stopped gathering evidence for failure and started making a choice.

That is authorship at its least glamorous and most useful. Not declaring yourself the hero of a new life. Not pasting a triumphant caption over pain. Catching a sentence early enough to keep it from becoming the only account in the room.

If this were only about the individual, it would be self-help. The unsettling part is that the same machinery is running at scales too large for any one person to see at once.

The Needle: A Story You’re Standing Inside

I came out of the car park in Worcester and headed towards a spire.

I wasn’t trying to complete the city. There was no list of attractions in my hand, no pressure to collect the right photographs. I had time before meeting the rest of my crew, so I followed the thing that caught my eye. Above the modern buildings, a narrow point of stone marked the sky. From where I stood, I assumed there would be a church beneath it.

There wasn’t.

Glover’s Needle is the tower and spire that survive from St Andrew’s Church. The church body was demolished in 1949. Up close, the structure feels both substantial and strangely incomplete. Gates keep you from entering most of it, but I found a place where I could put my hand on the stone. The large openings hold no glass. Sky, trees and newer buildings occupy the frames where an interior once separated sacred space from street.

Near the base lay someone’s sleeping gear.

That stopped the ruin becoming picturesque. Here was the remnant of a building that once offered one kind of shelter, standing beside the evidence of a person needing another. Cars went by. People crossed between the college buildings. The old church had lost its walls, but grief, hunger, hope, loneliness and the need for somewhere to lie down had not left the neighbourhood.

I walked around the Needle trying to read it. That is one way to describe mythogeography: reading a place with more than the official caption switched on. Dates and architecture matter, but so do the body, the name, the missing wall, the discarded object, the angle from which the ruin still pretends to be whole. A place contains the story printed on its plaque and the stories the plaque cannot hold.

St Andrew’s had stood on the site for centuries. A storm destroyed its earlier spire in 1733; Nathaniel Wilkinson rebuilt the spire in 1751. Worcester’s glove trade supplied the nickname. People looked at the tall, narrow structure and called it Glover’s Needle, turning an ecclesiastical landmark into an emblem of the city’s labour and craft.

Already the stone carried more than one account. It pointed towards heaven and towards the workshops. It belonged to the parish and to civic imagination. It ordered a skyline while bells ordered time.

Then the city changed around it. Housing near the church came down in the 1920s. The congregation dwindled. The building decayed. In the 1940s the council accepted the church from the Bishop of Worcester and chose to demolish the body, create a garden of remembrance and leave the tower and spire standing alone.

The Needle did not pass through four tidy historical costumes, each replacing the last. The stories overlapped. That is closer to how places work. Still, I could feel at least four lives pressing against one another: parish church, glovers’ landmark, stranded relic, civic monument. Faith, labour, loss and heritage all claimed the same vertical line. Each telling lit certain details and pushed others into shade.

The most forceful narration was the gap itself. Someone decided that the tower would remain and the nave would not. The demolition created the object I encountered. Worcester did not simply preserve its history; it edited it. The skyline kept the upward gesture. The street lost the room that had once gathered bodies beneath it.

That edit changed what a passer-by can imagine. The isolated spire tells two stories at once: endurance and disappearance. It can serve as heritage, navigation point, memory, peregrine perch or portal, depending on who approaches and what they carry.

The surroundings have kept revising it. Worcester College stands close by, with the Arts Centre and the library in view. I remember looking through a window into a lecture room and seeing the phrases “The Heart of Worcestershire” and “Love to Learn”. The old parish had gathered people around salvation, duty and a sacred order. The college gathers them around skills, possibility and a future. A spire, a library and a theatre now share the ground: faith, knowledge and imagination standing within sight of one another.

Then I walked down towards the Severn. From the river I turned and looked back. Trees concealed the missing body, and the spire performed its small trick again. If you did not know the church was gone, you would see a church. The eye supplied the absent building because the surviving outline gave it enough to work with.

If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know.

We often see the surviving outline of a belief, an institution or an identity and assume the whole structure remains behind it. We let the visible gesture stand in for the vanished interior. Up close, the gates and empty windows tell another story.

Mythogeography gives the official account some company. It asks who chose the plaque, whose labour became a nickname, whose home was cleared, who sleeps beside the monument now, what the tourist photograph crops out, and what the body notices before the mind has prepared a theory. It reads the surface without trusting the surface to be the whole place.

Stand in front of the Needle long enough and a disorienting thought arrives. If something made of stone can carry so many biographies, what about the things made almost entirely of language?

Money. Progress. Justice.

You cannot trip over justice in the street. Money has coins and notes, servers and ledgers, but its force comes from agreement, law, habit and belief. Progress can point to antibiotics, sewers and fewer children dying before adulthood; it can also make a larger television or a faster delivery service sound like proof that history is moving in the right direction. These words do not float harmlessly above the physical world. They tell us what to build, reward, measure, defend and destroy.

Consider economic growth. In the dominant telling, a healthy economy grows. Politicians of opposing parties argue about who can produce more of it, not whether endless expansion remains a sensible aim on a finite planet. Rising gross domestic product becomes the main plot. Forests, care work, exhaustion and polluted rivers appear as side characters, if they enter the account at all.

Degrowth begins by refusing that plot. It proposes a planned, democratic reduction of production and consumption, especially where material use is highest, alongside redistribution and a shift towards social and ecological well-being. You can reject its policies. You can argue about feasibility, justice and who would bear the cost. But before degrowth becomes an economic programme, it performs a narrative act: it removes “more” from the role of automatic good.

Once that sentence cracks, other questions enter. Growth of what? For whom? Paid for by whom, living where, under what conditions? Which forms of life flourish when output rises, and which ones get converted into fuel for the graph?

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Marriage changed when enough people stopped treating it as a fixed natural arrangement and recognised the law’s story about whose love counted. Smoking changed when the suave adult with a cigarette became, through science, testimony and policy, a person inhaling an addictive product sold by companies that knew the harm. The physical acts did not change first. Their public meanings did, then rooms, laws, habits and expectations changed around them.

Changing the story does not guarantee a better world. Propaganda changes stories too. So does advertising. A new narration can hide damage as efficiently as an old one. The point is less comforting: what we call reality already contains narration, and someone always benefits when the telling disappears from view.

The Same Spell, Different Scales

The machinery looks similar at both scales.

A sentence gets repeated. Repetition wears away the quotation marks. We forget that someone once chose the words. Description hardens into fact, and fact begins issuing instructions.

“I’m not the kind of person who…”

“A successful economy must grow…”

“That is just how the city is…”

Personal mythology and civilizational mythology share this movement from telling to forgetting. The difference lies in how revision happens.

I can catch one of my own sentences and decide to test another. The change may take practice, and old wounds do not yield because I have found a clever phrase, but a personal myth can turn on a choice. I can make one phone call, take one unfamiliar road, refuse one inherited role, then give the narrator new evidence to work with.

No one can revise a civilization alone. Collective myths have laws, markets, schools, rituals, architecture and armed power behind them. They have winners who will defend the plot and people whose survival depends on arrangements they did not choose. Telling seven billion people a better story is not politics. It is a slogan looking for a stage.

Collective revision happens through accumulation and struggle: a word coined, a testimony believed, a strike held, a law challenged, a household organised differently, an old building used for a new purpose. Enough people act as if another account might be true. Institutions follow late, resist, absorb the language, or change shape. The new story remains partial and contested because other narrators are still speaking.

I am responsible for my telling, but I am not sovereign over the conditions in which I tell it. My private revision is neither nothing nor everything. It is one vote cast in language and behaviour for the kind of world I am willing to help rehearse.

This is where personal mythology, change magick and mythogeography meet for me. Personal mythology reads the story called “me”. Change magick treats belief as something to test rather than a prison that must be obeyed. Mythogeography walks into the material world and looks for the edits that power has made there. Each practice asks a version of the same question: what story am I standing inside, and what becomes visible when I notice the telling?

The Needle taught me to ask that question with my hand on stone. It also taught me not to stop at the first answer. Church, industry, monument, absence: each account revealed something. None owned the place.

Perhaps the same courtesy applies inward. The former officer, trainer, coach, writer, husband, father, seeker and fool do not need to fight for the title of the real self. They are voices in a life that remains under narration. The work is not to find the final edition. It is to notice which voice has seized the pen and whether the next sentence leaves room to live.

Revisioning

When I think of Glover’s Needle now, I return to the view from the river.

The spire rises above the trees and the missing church comes back through expectation. My eye completes the structure. Then I remember the walk towards it: the gates, my hand on the stone, the empty window holding sky, the sleeping gear near the wall, the college slogans, the steps descending towards people reading beside the Severn.

The place did not give up one true meaning. It taught me to move between tellings without becoming careless about the facts. The church existed. The nave was demolished. Someone needed shelter. The river kept moving. Around those facts, narrators selected, framed and forgot.

Three small practices follow from that walk:

  • The audit: Catch one “I’m not the kind of person who…” sentence this week. Ask when it entered the story and whether your life still supports it.
  • The reading: Choose one object in your town and trace its biographies. Read the plaque, then walk around the back. Practise re-narration on stone before attempting it on yourself.
  • The catch: Notice one inherited assumption in your speech: growth, progress, success, “that’s just how things are”. Put the quotation marks back around it and listen for who is speaking.

From the river, the Needle still looks whole. That may be its final gift: the reminder that a convincing outline can make us invent the structure behind it.

The Gap Between Understanding and Becoming

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the gap between understanding and becoming

When psychology replaced mythology, we traded participation for explanation. We gained a remarkable vocabulary for describing the inner life, but in the process we lost something older and more difficult to name: a felt sense of belonging inside a meaningful drama. Myth did not merely tell us what was happening; it gave us a role to play, a pattern to inhabit, a way of recognising that our struggles were part of something larger than private confusion. Psychology, for all its brilliance, often stands at a slight remove. It helps us analyse the wound, trace its origins, and identify its mechanisms. But analysis is not the same as initiation. Description is not the same as transformation. And only now are we beginning to reckon with the cost of that trade: a world full of people who can explain themselves with increasing precision, yet still do not know how to step into a story that might change them.

This is not a complaint about psychology. The frameworks we now have for understanding the inner life, for mapping personality, tracing the patterns in how we attach and protect and sabotage ourselves, naming the voices that run beneath conscious awareness, are extraordinary compared to anything available two generations ago. The vocabulary is richer. The precision is greater. The compassion built into contemporary therapeutic thinking is genuine. None of that is in doubt.

In many ways, we are more self-aware than any generation that came before us. We can identify our triggers in real time. We can name the defence as it activates, watch the pattern unfold even as we are inside it. There is a strange lucidity to modern selfhood, a capacity to observe ourselves with a kind of clinical clarity that would have been unimaginable in a mythic age.

And yet, something curious happens at that point of recognition. The insight lands, but the life does not move. You can see the pattern and still enact it. You can understand the script and still find yourself speaking the lines. The knowledge accumulates, but the trajectory remains unchanged. It is as if awareness has illuminated the structure without altering it, like turning on a light in a room whose furniture you continue to walk into.

What is in doubt, then, is not the value of understanding, but its sufficiency. Whether knowing your patterns is the same thing as being transformed by them. Whether clarity alone has the power to reorganise a life. Or whether something else is required—something closer to participation than observation, to inhabiting a different story rather than simply analysing the one you are already in.

Mythology was never primarily about explanation. That is a mistake we make because we live downstream of the scientific revolution, which installed explanation as the dominant mode of knowledge. When we look back at mythological systems — the Greeks, the Norse, the Vedic traditions, the shamanic cosmologies that preceded and sometimes persisted alongside all of them — we tend to read them as primitive attempts at what science later did properly. Proto-science. Bad explanations that served their purpose until better ones arrived.

But this misreads what mythology was for. Mythology was not trying to explain the world in the way science does. It was trying to give people a place inside it. A role. A character to inhabit. The hero’s descent and return, the underworld journey, the confrontation with the monster that turns out to hold the treasure: these were not stories about what the world contains. They were maps of what the self does when it encounters the challenges that make a life. They were participatory. They located you inside a larger story and gave you something to be.

When the secular world decided the gods were no longer credible, it handed psychology the job of filling that space. And psychology, reasonably enough, tried to do what it knew how to do: explain. Map. Name the mechanisms. Build the models. The entire ambition of modern psychology — to be a science rather than a wisdom tradition — meant it had to work in the register of description. This is what your attachment style looks like. This is what happens neurologically when you experience threat. These are the cognitive distortions running underneath your anxiety.

All of this is genuinely useful. Knowing your patterns matters. Recognising the inner critic, understanding why you pursue certain people and retreat from others, being able to name what is happening inside you in real time — all of this moves the needle.

But it does not give you a place inside a larger story. And that, I am increasingly convinced, is what people actually need. Not just to understand themselves better, but to locate themselves somewhere. To feel that their struggle has shape. That what they are going through is not random noise but something that makes sense inside a larger arc.

People come back from self-development workshops having genuinely understood something about themselves. The insights they gained are real. The framework is sound. The facilitator has done their job. For a brief moment, there is clarity—a sense that something has clicked into place, that the pattern has finally been seen for what it is.

But a few days later, they find themselves moving through the same loops, reacting in the same ways, inhabiting the same emotional terrain. Nothing, in any meaningful sense, has changed. Because understanding, on its own, does not reorganise a life.

What was missing was not more insight, but a shift in narrative gravity. Understanding without a new story to inhabit is like having a map of a country you have no intention of visiting. The map may be accurate, even beautifully detailed, but it does not move your feet. It does not place you on the road. The territory remains unknown, not because it cannot be reached, but because nothing has compelled you to enter it.

And so the gap persists. The understanding had happened. The becoming had not.

NLP was built precisely to close this gap — or at least that was the ambition. Bandler and Grinder modelled people who were demonstrably transformative: Milton Erickson working through trance and metaphor, Virginia Satir rearranging family systems through the sheer quality of her attention, Fritz Perls cracking open something in his clients that more conventional therapy had not touched. The founders of NLP watched what these people did and tried to extract the pattern. Strip out the personality, the style, the ritual, isolate what actually produces change, then replicate it.

What they captured was real. The patterns they identified — the structure of how people represent their experience, the way submodalities of internal imagery encode emotional charge, the role of language in maintaining or dissolving limiting states — these are genuine discoveries. NLP works. I have used it for two decades and I can tell you it works.

But here is what I think got lost in the translation from modelling to method. Erickson’s meandering stories, his elaborate metaphors, the particular quality of the trance he induced through the cadence of his speech — these were not decorations over a mechanism. They were the mechanism. They worked because they bypassed the analytical mind and spoke directly to the part of the self that lives inside stories. The part that does not respond to argument, to framework, to correctly identified cognitive distortion. The part that responds to narrative. To image. To symbol. To the felt sense of being located inside something that is going somewhere.

When you extract the pattern and remove the participation, you get a technique. Techniques are useful. They are not transformative in the way the original was transformative.

The alchemists had a phrase for the movement they were tracking: solve et coagula. Dissolve and coagulate. The work of transformation requires that whatever currently exists be broken down before anything new can form. The problem with purely explanatory frameworks is that they describe the composition without initiating the dissolution. You understand yourself more clearly — and the structure that needs to change remains intact. Knowledge of your cage does not open the door.

What narrative alchemy is trying to restore is the participation function. Not to replace the explanatory frameworks — the typologies, the coaching models, the neuroscience — but to add back what they leave out. The story you are living inside is not just a description. It is a set of instructions. Change the story and you change the instructions. Change the instructions and the behaviour shifts — not because you have finally analysed yourself into clarity, but because you are now inhabiting a different narrative. The self does not respond primarily to argument. It responds to the story it finds itself in.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur spent decades making this case, quietly and precisely, in a body of work that is still underread outside academic philosophy. His argument: all self-knowledge is interpretive, and narrative is the primary medium of interpretation. We do not stand outside our lives and observe them neutrally. We are inside a story, and the story is inside us, and the two are not fully separable. Change the narrative frame and you change the interpretation. Change the interpretation and you change what is available to do.

This is not mysticism. It is not woo. It is a claim about how minds actually work — about the fact that we do not experience raw reality but always a mediated version, and that the medium of mediation is story.

Which is also why the mythic frameworks worked as well as they did. They did not give people better explanations. They gave people better stories to be inside. The hero goes into the dark not because they understand the dark but because the story requires it. The descent has meaning because the story gives it shape. Without the story, the descent is just loss. Just difficulty. Just the period in a life when everything went sideways. With the story, it is the part of the arc that precedes the return — the necessary dissolution before the new form can coagulate.

Psychology stripped out the story in its ambition to be scientific. What remained was the mechanism without the meaning. The mechanism is valuable. But people do not live in mechanisms. They live in stories. And the stories they are living in, the ones telling them they are not enough, that they missed their moment, that the best of their life is probably behind them, that who they are is fixed and known, those stories are running at full volume underneath every framework, every insight, every accurately identified pattern.

The question is not whether you understand your patterns. The question is what story you are living inside. And whether that story has the shape that growth actually requires.

That is where the work begins. Not with better analysis. With a different story.

Your self-story keeps updating in the direction of …

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Your self-story keeps updating in the direction of what it already believes.

If the story says you have a problem with authority, then every exchange with a boss, a teacher, a system, or even a strong personality gets filtered through that frame. You don’t just experience the moment. You interpret it through the story. And that interpretation feeds the story right back to itself.

The loop gets stronger.

After enough repetition, it starts to feel unquestionable. This is just who I am. Look at the pattern. Look at the evidence. I’ve been living this for years.

But a lot of what feels like evidence is really narrative confirmation. A story rehearsing itself until it hardens into identity.

But that doesn’t make it truth. It just makes it a closed circuit.

The work is learning how to break the seal. Not by destroying the story all at once, but by creating a little space inside it. Enough space to ask: is this still the version of me I want to keep animating?

The Story You Call Yourself

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story
story

You have never met yourself. Not directly. What you have met is a story about yourself, told so many times and with such conviction that it started to feel like the ground you stand on rather than the narrative you constructed to explain where you are standing.

This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is a metaphor, but it is also the most literal description of what is happening inside you at any given moment. The self you experience as solid, as continuous, as obviously you, is a curated selection of memories, interpretations, emotional habits, and inherited scripts, assembled into something that feels coherent mostly because coherence is what the storytelling mind does. It fills gaps. It smooths contradictions. It takes the raw chaos of lived experience and shapes it into a protagonist with motives, a trajectory, and a character arc that appears to go somewhere.

The interesting question is not whether this is true. It is almost certainly true. Neuroscience, philosophy, and depth psychology have been converging on this point for decades now, from different directions and with different vocabularies, but arriving at the same territory. The interesting question is what you do with the recognition.

There are broadly two responses, and they could not be more different.

The first says: if the self is a story, then the self is an illusion. Dissolve it. See through it. Recognise the arbitrariness of the narrative you have been mistaking for reality, and let it go. This is the classic move in much of Eastern philosophy, and it is a powerful one. There is genuine liberation in seeing that the person you have been defending, promoting, worrying about, and organising your entire life around is, at bottom, a pattern of thought rather than a fixed entity. The Buddhist tradition has been making this case for two and a half thousand years, and the experiential depth of that insight is not something to wave away.

But the second response is the one I find more interesting, more honest about the way human beings actually work, and more useful in the lives of the people I spend my time with.

If the self is a story, then the self can be rewritten.

Not dissolved. Not transcended. Not seen through and abandoned. Rewritten. The way you rewrite any code that is no longer producing the output you need.

I have spent over two decades working with people in rooms, on calls, and in coaching conversations where the presenting problem is almost never the real problem. Someone says they want to be more confident in presentations. Someone says they want to stop procrastinating. Someone says they need a better leadership style. And underneath every one of those requests, without exception, is a story. A story about who they are, what they are capable of, what is permitted to someone like them, and what the consequences would be if they stepped outside the lines their own narrative has drawn.

The story is invisible to the person living inside it. That is the whole point. A story you can see is a story you can question. A story you mistake for the ground beneath your feet is one that runs your life.

NLP understood this from the beginning, even if the language it used to describe it was often more clinical than poetic. The core insight of neuro-linguistic programming is that internal representations shape experience. Change the representation, change the experience. The stories we tell ourselves, the images we construct, and the internal dialogue we run on loop are not reflections of reality. They are the architecture of subjective reality. They are the code.

Depth psychology got at the same thing from a different angle. Jung talked about the persona, the mask we wear, the constructed face we present to the world. But the deeper Jungian insight is that the persona is not a deception. It is a necessity. We need stories about who we are in order to navigate a world that is far too complex to engage with in an unmediated way. The problem is not the story. The problem is mistaking the story for the whole truth, forgetting that it was constructed, and then defending it as though your survival depends on it. Which, psychologically, it does. Or at least it feels that way. And in the domain of inner experience, feeling that way and it being that way are functionally identical.

This is where the philosophy of “as if” becomes genuinely useful, not as an abstract philosophical position but as a practical tool for living. Hans Vaihinger argued that we operate constantly on the basis of useful fictions, frameworks we adopt not because they are ultimately true but because they serve us. The self-story is the largest and most consequential useful fiction any of us will ever construct. And the pragmatic question is not “is it true?” The pragmatic question is “is it still serving you?”

The story updates itself constantly, but it updates in the direction of its own assumptions. If the story says you are someone who struggles with authority, you will interpret ambiguous interactions with authority figures through that lens. The interpretation reinforces the story. The story shapes the next interpretation. The feedback loop tightens. Over years, over decades, the story calcifies into something that feels so obviously true that questioning it seems absurd. Of course that is who I am. I have evidence. Years of it.

What you have is years of confirmation bias running inside a narrative framework you never consciously chose. That is not evidence. That is a closed loop.

Opening the loop is the work. Not dissolving the self. Opening the loop. Recognising that the story is a story, which means it has an author, which means the author can revise it.

I work with psychometric profiles in my coaching practice. Lumina Spark and Clarity4D are personality frameworks that map out how a person tends to think, feel, communicate, and relate. These instruments are useful not because they tell you who you are but because they give you a map of the story you have been living inside. The numbers on the profile are not your identity. They are a snapshot of your current narrative, rendered visible. And once it is visible, you can do something with it. You can notice where the story has calcified. You can see where overextended strengths have become limitations. You can ask: is this the version of me I want to be running?

The existentialist in me finds something deeply satisfying about this. Sartre insisted that existence precedes essence, that we are not born with a fixed nature but instead create ourselves through our choices. The story-as-code lens says something compatible but more specific: we create ourselves through our narratives, and those narratives can be revised at any point. Not easily. Not without resistance. The old story fights back. It has momentum, emotional charge, and the weight of years behind it. Rewriting is not a weekend workshop. It is an ongoing practice, a discipline of attention and honesty about what is actually running underneath the surface.

But it is possible. That is the part that matters. The code is not read-only.

There is a tendency in certain philosophical circles to treat the recognition that the self is a story as the end of the journey. You see through the illusion, and that is the insight. Full stop. I think this mistakes the beginning for the destination. Seeing the story is the prerequisite. The real work is what comes after: deciding what to write next.

Not from some position of unlimited freedom, as though you can become anyone by thinking hard enough. The story you are rewriting is embedded in a body, a history, a set of relationships, a culture, a nervous system with its own patterns and preferences. You are not writing on a blank page. You are revising a manuscript that already has a structure, characters, subplots running in the background. Revision respects what is already there while changing the direction it is heading.

This is what I mean when I say stories are code. Not as a slogan. As a description of how the inner world actually operates. The narratives running inside you are producing your experience of being alive, right now, in this moment. They are shaping what you notice and what you ignore, what feels possible and what feels closed off, who you believe yourself to be and who you believe you could become.

The question is not whether you are living inside a story. You are. The question is whether you are going to keep running the version that was written by accident, by inheritance, or by the unexamined accumulation of years. Or whether you are going to pick up the pen.

What Is a Personal Myth?: And Why You Might Be Living Inside One Without Even Realising It

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Somewhere between memory and meaning, between dream and dialogue, there lives a story. You didn’t write it—not exactly. But it’s been writing you for a long time.

I’ve been reading The Stories We Live By by Dan McAdams—a quiet gem of a book that sneaks up on you like a ghostwriter of your own life. McAdams argues that we are, all of us, living inside personal myths. Not just telling stories, but being told by them. These myths are the internal scripts that make sense of our past, shape our choices, and quietly predict our future.

But here’s the strange part: Most of us don’t even know what story we’re in.

And if you don’t know the myth you’re living… you can’t change it.

So what is a personal myth, really?

It’s not just a biography. It’s not your LinkedIn profile or your résumé. A personal myth is the narrative architecture beneath your identity. It’s the story you tell yourself (and the world) about who you are, what life means, and where you’re going.

It answers questions like:

Who am I?
Where did I come from?
What am I here to do?
And why does any of it matter?

It’s part origin story, part worldview, part future script. And it lives in the shadows of your language—your metaphors, your memories, your dreams, and the patterns that keep repeating themselves in your life.

We Don’t Always Write These Myths Ourselves

Some we inherit.
Some are gifted.
Some are survival strategies that calcify into identities.

You may be living a myth handed down by your family. Or by your culture. Or by a younger version of you that had to make sense of the world with the tools they had. Maybe you’re carrying the weight of the “Rescuer.” Or the “Outsider.” The “One Who Must Prove Himself.” The “Good Girl.” The “Fixer.” The “Wanderer Who Never Lands.”

These aren’t just roles. They’re rules—unspoken laws about what’s allowed, what’s forbidden, and what must be sacrificed.

Here’s the good news:

Myths are made.
And they can be remade.

The soul doesn’t want to be trapped in a story that no longer fits. It longs to rewrite the tale—to step into a new chapter, a new archetype, a new voice.

But first… you have to see the story for what it is.

How to Spot Your Personal Myth in the Wild

You can’t always look it up. But you can start listening.

Try this:

  • What’s the recurring pattern in your life you can’t seem to shake?
  • What’s the emotional theme that underpins your decisions—guilt, duty, fear, freedom, longing?
  • If your life were a myth or fable, what would it be called? What role would you play?
  • What story did the world hand you? What story are you now choosing to live?

These aren’t just journaling prompts. They’re lanterns. They light the path to the story beneath your story—the one you’ve been telling even in your silence.

Your Myth Is a Mirror

And here’s the thing: if you can see it, you can shape it.

You’re not doomed to live inside someone else’s story. You’re not required to perform the same chapter over and over.

You can choose a different myth.

A truer one.

A myth where your wound becomes the opening.
Where your exile becomes the origin.
Where the life you’ve lived becomes fuel for the life you’re about to write.

Final Thought from the Campfire

I won’t pretend to know what your story is. That’s not for me to decide.

But I can hold up the mirror. I can offer the question beneath the question. And I can invite you to listen—not to the loudest voice, but to the quieter current flowing beneath it all.

The one that’s been whispering a different myth.
One that doesn’t perform. One that doesn’t please.
One that remembers who you are—and dares to begin again.

So I’ll leave you with this:

If your life were a myth…
What’s the theme trying to emerge?
What story are you ready to stop telling?
And what happens in the next act—when the pen is back in your hand?

—

If this sparked something for you, feel free to drop your story fragment in the comments or start a conversation around your own personal myth. Let’s keep the digital campfire burning.

Uncertainty is not a barrier

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In times of heightened uncertainty, the external world—often chaotic and unpredictable—seems to close in on us. It’s easy to feel like the familiar pathways of decision-making, routine, and control have dissolved. This can feel unsettling, even threatening. But in these moments, there’s an invitation, though often subtle: to turn inward. We’re forced to seek a key within ourselves, a guide to navigate what feels like an ever-shifting landscape.

Carl Jung spoke of this very dynamic in terms of the individuation process—the journey towards self-realisation. When the outer world presents confusion, the psyche is compelled to reach inward, to face the deeper layers of the self. It’s no coincidence that in moments of global or personal crisis, we often encounter a surge of dreams, synchronicities, or a calling to explore the spiritual realm. The uncertainty becomes the catalyst for an inward pilgrimage.

If we think about uncertainty symbolically, it can resemble the Tower card in Tarot—a sudden upheaval, destruction of what was once stable. The Tower is frightening because it strips away the illusions of control and security. Yet, what often follows is not just destruction but revelation. When the old structures fall, we’re confronted with ourselves, raw and vulnerable but also ripe for growth.

As we’re forced inward, we might encounter the Hermit archetype. The Hermit carries his lantern in the dark, walking a path that only he can walk. It’s a deeply personal journey, and the light of his lantern comes not from outside, but from his own soul. In uncertain times, we become our own Hermits, seeking out the light within to guide us forward. That key, the one we search for in times of crisis, is rarely found in the external world. It’s forged in introspection, in confronting our shadows, and in embracing the unknown parts of ourselves.

The process of turning inward also invites us to question the narratives we’ve built. Much like we’ve explored before, the stories we tell ourselves shape our reality. In uncertainty, these stories may feel inadequate and brittle. But this is where transformation occurs. We’re given the chance to rewrite the narrative, to choose new metaphors that reflect our evolving understanding of ourselves and the world. We’re asked to look at our inner myths—those personal myths that guide our sense of purpose and meaning.

What happens when we allow ourselves to be inwardly focused, to hold space for not knowing? We begin to cultivate a different kind of vision. One that is not about predicting the future or controlling outcomes, but one that trusts in the process of becoming. Uncertainty, in this sense, is the fertile ground for transformation. It strips away the distractions and demands of the outer world, forcing us to confront the self and, in doing so, to encounter new layers of wisdom, creativity, and depth.

Much like the seed buried in the soil, there is a period of darkness and stillness before growth. That key, which we seek so desperately in moments of uncertainty, may not unlock the doors we expect. It might instead unlock a door we didn’t even realise existed—a door leading to a deeper sense of authenticity, connection to the soul, or a new path altogether.

As we are inwardly focused, we realise that uncertainty is not a void to be feared, but a space where the imagination and soul can rise to meet the unknown. We may stumble upon unexpected insights, creative sparks, or new levels of self-awareness. Like the Magician in Tarot, we discover that all the tools we need have been with us all along; we just needed the chaos to reveal them.

Uncertainty, then, is not a barrier—it is an opening, a liminal space, where we meet ourselves in a new way. The key we find within unlocks more than just survival. It unlocks growth, expansion, and the deepening of our personal mythology.

what myth are you living?

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Here’s the audio version of today’s blog post:

“This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he is telling a story.”

Jean-Paul Satre, Nausea

Carl Young said that the most important question we can ask ourselves is “What myth are you living?” That seems like an odd question to ask, considering most of us probably think of myths as make-believe or associate myths with Greek and Roman mythology. We consider ourselves too enlightened for myths. Instead, we put our faith in the scientific method and reason to answer our questions about life. And we trust that technology will give us the power to change or destroy what we don’t like.

But how do you answer the question of ‘what is the meaning of my life?’

via GIPHY

As Joseph Campbell said:

“The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today…must face alone…This is our problem as modern, “enlightened” individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalised out of existence.

What are myths?

Myths are:

“An intricate set of interlocking stories, rituals, rites, and customs that inform and give the pivotal sense of meaning and direction to a person, family, community, or culture.”

If you view myths in this light, then myths are all around us. We just chose simply not to recognise them as such.

To examine the myths operating in your life, ask yourself why you do the things you do in the way that you do them. This might be a hard question to answer because, when you are living the myth, it is nearly invisible to you. Our myths become “truths,” reinforced by cultural consensus.

Here’s and example:

“Most Americans would consider potlatch feasts, in which Northwest Indian tribes systematically destroy their wealth, to be irrational and mythic but would consider the habit of browsing in malls and buying expensive things we don’t need (conspicuous consumption) to be a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday afternoon.”

Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey

What we hold as “truths” is somebody else’s myth.

So, back to Carl Jung’s question, “What myth(s) are you living?” Is it a narrative you’ve created or are you simply buying into the prevailing cultural consensus? Do you have any personal myths you would rewrite to make them more empowering?

Last thing I’ll say about myths for now and then I’ll leave you to rummage through your personal myths (“truths”).

Think of myth as:

The software, the cultural DNA, the unconscious information, the meta program that governs the way you see “reality” and the way you behave.