identity is just narrative waiting for evidence

on choosing better stories about yourself and letting reality catch up

Roses (P. S. Krøyer, 1893)

I've been playing with this idea that some stories are worth believing not because they're capital-T True, but because they make life more interesting and generative.

It's a strange thought at first, that we might choose to believe something not because it's absolutely true. But I prefer to think of it as: it’s not absolutely true yet. We forget that all the stories we tell about ourselves start small, and only then are they reinforced with our actions over time. Strange how we demand absolute truth when, really, truth is just a seed waiting for time and attention.

The fascinating thing about these stories is how quickly they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. When you start telling yourself you're someone who takes action, you begin noticing opportunities for action everywhere. When I was journalling, I called it narrative bootstrapping: the story creates its own evidence.

As a kid, I radiated energy, and trained that intense beam on any activity that fell into my way. That included sports: I never considered myself super athletic, mostly because as a kid you don’t consider yourself at all. In hindsight, I wasn’t particularly good, but that didn’t matter because I hadn’t learnt yet that it was supposed to matter. That’s the thing about being a kid: you haven’t et learned to narrate yourself into corners.

As I grew older—and I can’t really pinpoint exactly when the shift happened—I started becoming the person who ‘wasn’t into sports’. I once went on a long-weekend getaway with friends, and casually mentioned thinking of going for a morning run, if anyone wanted to come with. “You? Run?” one friend scoffed. That was a year ago. And then last Saturday, I woke up and joined a run club with total strangers, ran a 4k, and was completely caught off guard when someone said “you didn't have a tough time, right? You seem like you've run before”.

It’s funny how so many of the stories I carry around came from throwaway moments that warped into load-bearing pillars in my mental architecture. We’re such selective archivists; we think we need mountains of evidence before believing something about ourselves, but let a single casual comment become gospel. We filter out anything that doesn’t fit a story we’re currently telling ourselves, and selective evidence-gathering creates a kind of confirmation spiral. But I’m learning: the same double-edged sword can be reverse-engineered, sharp and precise.

The whole running thing made me realise that we can actually “level up” just by deciding to change what we count as evidence in the first place, and identify with a new narrative. The first time I realised that, it sounded too simple to be true. We tend to think of identity as this sacred, unchangeable thing, especially if you’re like me—always the “reliable” and “constant” one. But you know that feeling when you do something totally "out of character" but it feels surprisingly... right? That's what I'm talking about. The opportunities are always there, but well beyond your peripheral vision because you didn’t think they apply to you. But when you decide to be that person, you start seeing more ways to do that. Changing the story about who you are changes what you see as possible. Our ability to see future paths of execution is tied to the amount of things we believe apply to us.

At this point, you might run into this wall like I did: I wasn’t the only one who’d been telling a version of my story. I remember my friend S telling me that our identity was like “this collaborative Google Doc that’s commented on and revised by everyone we meet”. Depending on the size of the change, updating your story also involves hoping others will update their version of you, too. “You? Run?” wasn’t just a comment about my athletic ability; it was about my friend maintaining his story of who I was in relation to him. It’s funny, but strangers became my best allies when I was shifting some of my stories precisely because they were reading me with fresh eyes, without all the tracked changes and revision history.

When you’re up against all this, it’s easy to feel like you need others’ permission first to make any changes. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to let people know what we’re doing, to feel validated and more confident about it. But it serves us to remember that, ultimately, we get to choose. We can just… do the thing. The world has this wonderful way of shifting slightly on its axis to make space for your new dimension. Even better, you start attracting new people to whom this side of you is completely natural. They haven't gotten the memo about who you're "supposed" to be. It’s super liberating; you can almost feel your sense of self warp and stretch to accommodate this new version. 

Of course, there’s a baseline for this experiment to really work: you have to have a certain amount of self-trust. I think it’s both the foundation and the reward of story-shifting. You need some amount of trust in yourself to try on new stories, but each successful shift builds more trust, creating this beautiful feedback loop. Sometimes stories feel too big to try on not because we can't do the thing, but because our self-trust muscles aren't quite strong enough yet to handle the potential outcomes. I hack this by asking myself: "what could possibly go wrong?". It’s not to spiral into over-planning, but just as a quick reality check. But the clarity it brings you—that even at their worst, things won’t turn out like the scary stories in your head—is a freedom I hope all of us get used to.

Your current story isn’t the only possible truth. You shape the story. The story shapes you. And slowly, that new version of yourself emerges, one ecology of personhood.