The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Dear younger me, who thinks a good life is built on flawless arguments and perfect logic, I see you now, hunched over your desk at 2 a.m., rewriting the same lecture notes for the third time. You believe your worth is measured by how elegantly you dissect ethics, not by how you hold a trembling friend’s hand when they lose their job. You’ve built a story: I am the thinker, not the feeler. I am the one who has it figured out.

Here’s what I wish you’d known, and what I’ve learned too late: the stories we tell ourselves are not facts—they’re maps we draw, and they can either lead us home or trap us in a maze. You spent years believing vulnerability was weakness, so you dismissed your wife’s quiet worry about your exhaustion. You called it “intellectual rigor” when it was just fear. The philosophers called this narrative identity—how we stitch our past, present, and hopes into a single story. But you didn’t realize the stitches could be undone.

Your biggest mistake wasn’t failing to be perfect. It was believing the story you’d written was you. When your father died, you buried grief in a paper on Kant, thinking feeling would make you less of a philosopher. But grief isn’t a flaw in your logic—it’s the human condition. The day you finally let yourself cry in the kitchen, watching coffee drip from the pot onto the counter? That was the moment you learned: stories aren’t fixed. They’re lived.

So, younger me, I’m telling you this gently: You were already enough. Not when you published the perfect article, but when you sat with the messy, unpolished truth of being human. Your worth isn’t in your arguments—it’s in your willingness to say, “I don’t know, and that’s okay.” The world doesn’t need a flawless thinker. It needs a person who’s learning, stumbling, and still showing up.

You’ll spend decades teaching others to question their assumptions. But the hardest question you’ll ever face is the one you ask yourself: What story am I telling myself right now, and is it true?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about: The philosophers called this the art of living. But what does that actually mean for how we live? It means choosing a story that lets us breathe.

— Ray Bates, still asking questions