the stories you tell about yourself

Dear Reader,

A woman I worked with told me she was terrible at keeping in touch with people. A few months later, in a completely different conversation, she said it again, and I noticed she used exactly the same words both times. Not the same idea, the same sentence. It came out smooth, the way a line does when it's been said a lot.

Most of us have a few of those. Short descriptions we reach for when we need to explain ourselves quickly, and they tend to be about our limits. I'm not a morning person. I've never been good with money. I'm the one who takes a while to warm up to people. They arrive fully formed because we've said them so often, and after enough repetitions they stop sounding like opinions and start sounding like information.

They also shape what you notice, which is easy to miss. Once you've settled on being bad with names, the times you blank on one stand out and the times you remember don't register. The story keeps gathering support for itself, and we're the ones doing the gathering without much awareness of it.

The useful thing about these lines is that you can actually catch yourself saying them. So much of what we've been looking so far has to be pieced together from the outside, but this one comes out of your own mouth, usually in the middle of an ordinary conversation, and if you're paying attention you can hear how practiced it sounds.

So this week, just listen for yours. The sentences about yourself that come out smooth, that you've clearly said before. Whether they're accurate is a question for another time. For now it's enough to hear how quickly they arrive, and to wonder how long you've been saying them.

Yours in the journey,

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borrowed beliefs

Dear Reader,

A couple I worked with once spent a good ten minutes of a session on whether you're supposed to bring something when you go to someone's house for dinner. He thought showing up empty-handed was fine with close friends. She thought that was unthinkable. What got me was how much heat there was in it, and that when I asked where each of them had picked up their position, neither one could tell me.

I think a lot of what we believe came to us without us ever really choosing it. We took a position from whoever was around at the time, and it settled in, and now it doesn't feel like an opinion at all. It feels like just how things are. That's why we get so worked up when someone does it another way. It doesn't seem like a difference between two people. It seems like they're doing it wrong.

A belief you actually worked out has some history to it. You can remember the conversation that shifted your thinking, or a stretch of years when you believed the opposite. A borrowed belief has none of that behind it. You've just always been sure, and when you go looking for a reason, there's nothing there.

So it's worth catching yourself the next time you feel that flash of certainty about something small. The right way to load a dishwasher, when a thank-you note is required, what counts as being on time. See if you can trace it back. Some of it you'll be able to. And some of it will turn out to be a rule you've been following for thirty years without ever once asking who made it.

Yours in the journey,

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what you present

Dear Reader,

A client mentioned once that she'd been the reliable friend in her group since she was about nineteen. She said it as a passing detail, but I kept thinking about it afterward. Nineteen. She was in her forties. Whatever she figured out back then about how to be around people had worked well enough that she'd never had much reason to look at it again.

I think a lot of how we come across got settled earlier than we realize. Most of us found something that went over well, usually before we had much say in it, and it kept going over well, so we kept doing it. You can usually spot the result in what people come to you for. Someone calls you when they need a calm voice. Nobody expects you to be the one crying at the wedding.

So maybe just notice what you tend to put out, and how long you've been doing it that way. What people count on you for. What would surprise them. Whether you'd make the same choices now that you did back when you first landed on them.

A lot of it probably still fits, and there's no sense pulling apart something that's working. But some of it might be a call made by a nineteen-year-old who was doing the best they could with what they knew.

Yours in the journey,

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the pace you keep

Dear Reader,

A lot of the people I sit with describe their life as unusually busy at the moment. Not busy in general, but busy right now, as though I've caught them during an unrepresentative stretch. Sometimes I'll hear the same description from the same person two years later, and both times it's offered as a temporary condition.

That's what makes pace hard to see clearly. We tend to treat it as a phase we're passing through rather than a pattern we're living inside.

You can feel the gap on the first days of a vacation, or at least I can. I've arrived somewhere with nothing required of me and found myself unpacking a bag that could have stayed packed, checking email one more time, restless by late morning. It takes me a couple of days to actually settle, and by then the trip is half over. The calendar says the week is off, but something in me hasn't gotten the message and keeps running at the old speed. Whatever that is, it isn't coming from my schedule, because my schedule is empty.

Our pace is one of the most visible things about us. The people around us could describe it in a sentence without much effort. But it's also one of the first places we can feel something else moving underneath, because nobody arrives at their speed by accident. Somewhere along the way it got set, and it's been running quietly ever since without checking in with us.

So the question isn't whether things are busy right now. They probably are. It's whether right now has been going on long enough that it's just called your life.

Yours in the journey,

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what your habits say about you

Dear Reader,

A man I work with told me recently that he's never been much of a planner. Then, a few minutes later, he walked me through his morning. The coffee maker starts at the same time every day. He sits in the same chair, reads the news in the same order, and empties the dishwasher before he lets himself do anything else. When I pointed out what he'd just described, he laughed. He'd never thought of any of it as planning. It was just what he did.

Last week we noticed the versions of ourselves that show up in different rooms. Habits are a different kind of clue. They follow us from room to room without asking who's there. Whatever role we happen to be playing, we still check the phone the same way, still take the same route home, still put off the same conversation. Our roles adjust to whoever's in front of us. Our habits don't bother.

What I've come to appreciate about habits is how much they remember. Every habit began as a choice that worked, and over time the choosing faded while the doing remained. So your habits hold a record of what you've needed and what you've been practicing without meaning to practice it. Read together, they say something about you, and it doesn't always match the story you tell. The man in my office calls himself unstructured while living one of the most ordered mornings I've heard described. 

Your habits have been telling your story all along. This week, try listening.

Yours in the journey,

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