The Stories We Tell Ourselves

One of the hardest parts of betrayal wasn’t just what happened.

It was what I didn’t know.

I wanted answers.

I wanted timelines.

I wanted every conversation, every decision, every missing piece.

My mind became obsessed with trying to make the story make sense.

I replayed memories.

Analyzed text messages.

Reconstructed conversations.

Filled in gaps.

Over and over again.

Rumination became its own full-time job.

I wasn’t easy to be around during that season.

That’s simply true.

I was angry.

Demanding.

Suspicious.

Exhausted.

And honestly…

I wasn’t easy for myself to be around either.

Not only was I heartbroken…

I was disappointed by how heartbroken I was.

I had imagined how I would respond if something like this ever happened to me.

The real version of me looked nothing like the imaginary one.

That surprised me.

Eventually I realized something important.

I wasn’t disappointed because my emotions were wrong.

They weren’t.

Every emotion made sense.

I was disappointed because suffering introduced me to a version of myself I’d never met before.

Healing often begins there.

Not by judging that version…

but by getting curious about her.

Before I could begin healing, though, I had another problem.

I needed closure.

And I wasn’t going to receive it from the person I wanted it from.

So I did what I think all humans do.

I built a story.

I took the facts I knew…

and filled the empty spaces with my best guesses.

Some of those guesses came from logic.

Some came from memories.

Some came from intuition.

Some came from fear.

Eventually I had a complete narrative.

It helped me move forward.

The problem was…

parts of it were almost certainly wrong.

We all do this.

Far more often than we realize.

Our boss makes a decision.

We explain why.

A friend doesn’t call back.

We explain why.

Someone leaves.

Someone stays.

Someone seems distant.

Someone looks annoyed.

Our minds hate empty spaces.

So we fill them.

The difficult part is this:

The stories we create almost always favor us.

We become the misunderstood one.

The abandoned one.

The victim.

And the other person slowly becomes flatter and flatter until they’re reduced to one role.

The villain.

I understand why we do it.

It’s protective.

It helps us survive.

But survival isn’t always the same thing as truth.

I realized this in a surprising way.

Years later, I found myself on the other side.

Someone had created a story about me.

Some parts were true.

Some parts weren’t.

The missing pieces had been filled with assumptions.

The assumptions painted me as an even worse person than I actually was.

Did I make mistakes?

Absolutely.

Did I hurt someone?

Yes.

I have apologized for that.

But reading the version of me that existed inside someone else’s narrative…

hurt in a way I wasn’t expecting.

It reminded me how easy it is to become a caricature in someone else’s story.

And then something uncomfortable happened.

I realized…

I was doing the same thing.

Not with the facts.

The facts were real.

The betrayal was real.

The hurt was real.

But the parts I didn’t know…

I’d quietly filled in with the worst possible explanations.

Because my brain wanted certainty more than complexity.

The truth is…

people are rarely only one thing.

Someone can love you deeply…

and still hurt you.

Someone can betray your trust…

and still not be entirely defined by their worst decision.

Someone can fail you…

without becoming entirely evil.

The same is true of me.

I’ve hurt people too.

I’ve failed my own standards.

I’ve become someone else’s painful story.

I don’t want to live in a world where one decision defines an entire human being.

Because eventually…

that world will define me the same way.

These days, when I notice myself filling in missing pieces, I try to pause.

I remind myself that I know what happened.

I don’t necessarily know why.

And maybe…

I don’t have to.

Maybe peace isn’t found in knowing every detail.

Maybe it’s found in leaving a few blank spaces where grace can live.