E21 | The Stories I Told Myself Before I Met God | Healing Lies About Worth, Love & Purpose

Before I met God, I had a whole library of stories I believed about myself.

Stories about rejection. Worth. Being overlooked. Being too much and somehow not enough at the same time. Stories about love, purpose, identity, and whether I was chosen at all.

In this episode of The Living Story, we’re talking about the quiet lies women carry for years — the ones repeated so often they stop feeling like stories and start feeling like truth.

If you’ve ever struggled with:

•  low self-worth 
•  overthinking relationships 
•  feeling unseen 
•  people pleasing 
•  fear of rejection 
•  comparison 
•  identity confusion 
•  heartbreak 
•  or believing you missed your purpose… 

this conversation is for you.

We explore:

•  how false narratives are formed 
•  why emotional wounds become internal beliefs 
•  the stories women silently rehearse 
•  what happens when God interrupts those narratives 
•  and how healing begins through truth, surrender, and renewal of the mind

Free Resource:
Download “The Story She Keeps Telling Herself,”  a truth-and-lie reflection guide designed to help you identify the narratives shaping your life. My gift to you!

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

The stories that kept you smallest were not the loud ones. They were not the things people said about you out loud in a room full of witnesses. Those hurt differently. Those you could point to. Those you could name and process and eventually set down. The ones that kept you smallest were the quiet ones, the ones you told yourself alone. The ones you rehearsed in the dark so many times that they stopped feeling like stories at all and started feeling like the truth about you. Like facts you had discovered rather than narratives you built. Those are the ones we're talking about today. And I'm going to tell you mine, because I think some of yours might sound familiar, And because the moment I understood where those stories came from and what it took to interrupt them, everything changed. Not overnight, but permanently. Stay with me There were three stories I told myself for most of my adult life, but before I name them, I wanna tell you where they came from, because they didn't arrive fully formed. They were built slowly, quietly, one small moment at a time. You know the kind of moments I mean. The time you weren't picked for the team and everyone else was, and you stood there trying to figure out what that meant about you. The time the girls made a group, and you weren't in it, and you told yourself, "It's fine," and it was not fine. The time the guy you liked, liked someone else? Yeah. And instead of thinking he had, he just had different tastes, you thought there was something about me that is not quite right. Not getting called on in class when your hand was raised, not being asked to sit at the table, not being given a job, not being invited, getting it wrong in front of people and replaying it for days afterward, being the one who was different from everyone in her family because she loved something they didn't understand about her. For me, it was books. For you, it might be something else entirely. But she tried to explain it and couldn't, so she internalized that too. Another piece of evidence for the case that she was building against herself. Each one of those moments felt small in isolation, a single page in a story. But those pages start to accumulate. They start to gather and build. And somewhere along the way, I stopped reading those moments as random experiences that happened to me and started reading them as evidence. Evidence for a story I was quietly writing about myself, and that story said this: something is wrong with me. Not with the situation, not with the other people, with me. I made it about me when it could very well have been about them, their own wounds, their own limitations, their own stories that had nothing to do with my actual worth. But I wasn't thinking about that. I was building a case, and I was the defendant and the prosecutor at the very same time And here is what I did with that story I didn't let it stop me. I built a strategy around it. You built a whole strategy around a story that was never true. If I show them how great I am, how helpful, how kind, how fill in the blank, they will choose me. If I change, if I get better, if I get closer to perfect, they will want me, they will pick me. All of it in service of a narrative, of a story I didn't choose, but I made it my own, and the cost of that strategy was everything I had. I was doing everything in my power to be chosen by rooms and by people and by relationships, and in the middle of all of that choosing, I was not choosing myself. I was outsourcing my worth to every situation I walked into And waiting to see if it would be handed back to me. That is an exhausting way to live, and I lived it for a long time. So when I tell you the three stories I told myself before I met God, I want you to understand they weren't abstract ideas. They were built from specific moments, stacked one on top of the other over years until they felt less like stories and more like facts. The first story was about my worth. I'm not enough. Not quite, not yet. Maybe after I accomplish the next thing, after the next degree, after the next promotion, after I figure out the right version of myself to present to the world, then I'll be, then I'll be enough. The second story was about love And this one's a hard one I'm not chosen, not consistently, not in the way that stays. People come close and then they leave, or they change, or they find a reason to go, and I'm left trying to figure out what I did wrong. The third story was about purpose. Am I on the wrong path or I missed the right one? Or everyone else seems to know exactly what they're doing, and I'm still trying to figure it out, and It must mean that something is fundamentally wrong with me. Three stories, all false, all running simultaneously underneath the surface of a life that looked put together from the outside. Can you hear yourself in any of those? Because those stories don't just sit quietly on the shelf. They loop, they replay. No matter how badly you want things to be different, no matter how much you grow and work and try, you come back to the same whisper in the dark. You are not enough. You are not chosen. You are not on the right path, and the loop keeps running until something interrupts it So Selah. And I'm gonna take the pause because I myself, after just talking about it, need a pause. So if you've been here before, you already know what this means. If this is your first time, we're gonna take a moment to pause and breathe and write down one word or one thought to the question that I'm gonna pose in a second. Selah comes from Psalms and in the Bible, and it comes to a section where you pause and you take a moment to truly take in what is being presented. So the question that I have for you, which one of those stories has been on the loudest loop in your life? And if you're driving or walking right now, hold that word or thought in your mind. Come back to it. Write it down when you can, because what you name, you can begin to question, and what you question, you can begin to release So you know that moment when you weren't picked and everyone else was, and you stood there trying to figure out what that meant about you? That wasn't a small moment. That was the beginning of a story you've been telling yourself ever since I spent a long time trying to figure out where those stories came from, and what I discovered is that they didn't come from anywhere or from nowhere. They came from seasons of rejection that taught me I was not quite enough to be chosen. Seasons of loss that taught me love didn't stay. Seasons of comparison that taught me everyone else had figured something out that I was still missing They came from moments, the kickball team, the girls group, the guy who looked past me, the family dinner where my love of books made me the odd one out. Small moments, ordinary moments, moments that probably meant nothing to the people who created them and meant everything to me because I was busy building a case. I tried to change those stories through every resource available to me, brilliant books, real therapy, honest conversations, and that work helped. It gave me insight and language and tools, but it couldn't tell me who I actually was at the foundation. And before I continue And go any further, I wanna say something clearly and with love. My podcast isn't meant to replace therapy or support that, professional support that you might need during this time. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a counselor. I'm a woman who has been in the middle of her own story and found something she couldn't stop talking about. What I share here is not a substitute for professional support. If you're in a season where therapy is what you need, please go Please take that seriously. That work is sacred, and it is not in competition with anything I'm going to say today. what I'm offering is something different. One woman's testimony and the voice that changed everything for her So going back There was still a question underneath all of it that nothing I was reading could answer. And I read countless books. And not to say that it didn't help, because it did, but I kept coming back to the question, am I actually known by something larger than all of this? By someone who was there before the kickball team and the girls group, and every moment that Adding another page to the story. That is a question that brought me to the edge of something I had been circling for a long time, and then God sent someone. I wanna be careful how I say this because the story is layered, and it is not mine alone to tell. But a man walked into my life and walked me toward a church I never would have found on my own. A primarily Spanish-speaking church I had no idea existed. I wouldn't have chosen it myself. My Spanish is okay, but it's not great. At that time. It's gotten a lot better since I've started going to this church. And yet, there I was, Sunday after Sunday, sitting in a row of chairs in a room that became the place where something in me began to crack open. Not because the location was comfortable, because God is not always in the comfortable option. Sometimes he sends you to the specific one. And what I found there was not just God. I found people, my pastor, my mentor, my dear friend who became my Bible study teacher. People who were placed on my path with intention Who spoke truth over me when I was still mostly fluent in the language of the old stories. Who reinforced what God was already doing in the quietest parts of my life. the story wasn't just cracked open by a moment. It was tended by a community, by specific people who were put there on purpose, and that matters because coming to faith is not a solo intellectual decision. It is a relational journey. God uses people. He puts the right voices around you at the right time, And those voices say things that the old stories cannot survive I can't tell you exactly when God interrupted the narrative. It was not one moment. It was a series of moments. What I know is that at some point, I stopped being the girl who was waiting to be picked and started being the woman who understood that she had already been chosen, not by the room, not by the relationship, not by the approval of anyone whose opinion I had been collecting like evidence. By the one who was there before the kickball team, before every moment that added a page to the story That I've been telling myself in the dark. He didn't wait for me to fix the stories before he showed up. He showed up in the middle of them while I was still fluent in the language of not enough, While I was still performing worth for rooms that were never meant to be the source of it, he interrupted, not with a lecture about what I was doing wrong, with a persistent, quiet sense that the story I had been telling about myself was not the story being told about me. That there was a voice I had not yet fully heard that had been speaking a different narrative over my life for longer than I had been alive, and that voice said, "I knew you before the kickball team. I knew you before every moment that made you feel like you weren't quite enough. I knew you, and I chose you, and my choosing of you has nothing to do with whether the room or the people in it agree." That is the interruption. And I want to sit here for a moment in what it means that the question of your worth has already been answered. Not after you get it together, not after the story stop. Right now, in the middle of telling them, he said, "Enough. I know who she is, And I'm going to settle this so she never has to earn it again So what narrative has God been interrupting in your life that you keep picking back up? Hold that. Really hold that because the interruption is not a one-time event. It is a daily invitation to choose the true story over the familiar story. And every time you choose, and every time you choose it, the old story loses a little more of its grip And here's where I have to share that the stories didn't disappear overnight. I still catch myself in the worst story. Still catch myself in the love story on the days when the heartbreak is louder than the healing. Still catch myself in the purpose story when I look at someone else's chapter and wonder, "What am I missing?" Old narratives do not evaporate. They loosen slowly with intention, with practice, with a consistent returning to what is actually true. But here is what changed. I now know the difference between a story I'm telling myself and a story that is actually true. I now know to ask, "Where did this come from? Does this sound like God or does this sound like fear?" And I know where to go when I need to hear what is actually true. That is what changed, and that is what I want to help you build So if you heard yourself in any part of this episode, the next step is not more listening. It is doing the work on the specific story you've been running. That is why I built something called The Story She Keeps Telling Herself. It is a truth and life finder, a guided tool that takes you through the exact narratives you've been telling yourself about your worth, your love, and your purpose, holds them to the light, and helps you identify what is actually true, and what is fear that has been wearing the costume of a fact. Not to dismiss what you lived through, not to minimize the, the moments that built those stories, but to separate the experience from the conclusion you drew about yourself because of it. Because the moment that hurt you is not the same thing as a story you wrote around it, and you've been living inside that story. The link to the download is in the show notes. It's free, and it's my gift to you. And if this episode found you at the right time, that tool is exactly where you go next. Take it, Work through it slowly. Let it help you do what the episode started. And if you wanna go even deeper, the next series we're stepping into is going to take everything we've been building here and push it further. We're moving from why and to for what. And if you've ever asked God why something happened and never felt like you got a satisfying answer, that series was built for you. More on that soon So to close I wanna thank you for spending this time with me. The stories you've been telling yourself in the dark are not facts. They are narratives, and narratives can be interrupted. The question of your worth has already been answered by someone who was there before the first moment that made you doubt it. His answer hasn't changed. It will not change, and it has nothing to do with whether the room agrees or not. You are not the story you built around the hard moments. You are the woman he was forming inside of them. And as always, I want you to know that you are seen, you are loved, and your story is still being written in God's hands. Until next time, grace and peace