Why you're not who you claim to be

Stories help us make sense of the world, but they too are just patterns.

During a team dinner a few weeks ago, my coworkers and I found ourselves sharing stories about how we navigate social situations: our proclivities and intolerances, our competencies and blindspots.

“I’m bad at picking up on context clues.”

“I tend to be overly logical.”

“I’m sensitive to [x] talk.”

These self-narratives were familiar territory—a kind of meta-analysis that my different friends groups over the years have often indulged in. My own narratives were well-worn refrains. There’s some comfort in sharing these—being seen through them and accepted for them, time and time again.

After dinner, my coworker and friend

Nick Reshetnikov

shared his objection to our collective meta-analysis:

"We are like whirlpools. We hold patterns, but those patterns aren't us."

This shattered something for me. Despite my increasingly regular application of mindfulness practice throughout my daily life, I’d somehow never put this habit of self-description under mindful scrutiny. I could suddenly see my narratives as constructions—artifacts from before I started mindfulness practice.

Still, I found myself suspended between knowing they were untruths and still desiring to engage with them. I happily conflated what I tended to do with what I was, even though I hadn’t drawn that equivalence in years. “I like to veer people towards talking about X, Y, Z.” But “like” here was just a description of a default mode tendency. It was just a pattern of reflexive behavior that had been deeply conditioned into me.

It feels good to talk about things that interest me, and so I do it more.

But I don’t exist anywhere in that flywheel. And so I spun in this weird vortex of seeming intellectual dishonesty, and no amount of mindful attention to the emotional signature could quite extract me.

In hindsight, I finally understand why this experience felt so captivating: I was so used to telling stories about myself that it had inconspicuously become automatic. And so traditional mindful attention to my thoughts and existence came too late. I was able to create space from the vortex, but I couldn’t figure out how I got there in the first place. I was blind to my conversational reactivity—there was some well-worn neural pathway that had led me to compulsively regurgitate the same old stories.

And stories are curious things. The stories we tell have a tendency to solidify around us. Stories yearn to become verdicts—permanent declarations of being. On the one hand, this can be quite alluring. Stories offer understanding, justification of our mindless or more base behaviors. But they also simultaneously bring constraint. And these stories, which start as calcifications too light to be felt, eventually become narratives too strong to be broken¹.

Of course, it's not that stories are evil. We tell them to make sense of the world and our place in it. At their best, they provide clarity—stories are patterns, and patterns have remarkable explanatory power. But they also possess a gravity that draws us to them. They solidify, and our minds begin to treat them not as useful tools but as objective truth.

In mindfulness practice, early progress often comes when we stop internal narration—the incessant story we tell ourselves about what's happening. But just like our muttering self-talk, the stories we tell others about ourselves deserve the same level of scrutiny. For we exist beneath these stories. They are powerful instruments for understanding, but taken too far, they become vehicles for self-deception, caretakers of deep-etched automations in our neural pathways. And in this sense, resisting their gravitational pull deserves our mindful attention.

We are not static beings, defined by unchanging stories. We are dynamic currents—whirlpools of consciousness, and transient flow patterns are not the same as the water that comprises us.

1. A wonderful phrase ripped from Charlie Munger, on addiction.