The Stories I Tell Myself

(Or, How to Stop without an Excuse)

Starting in high school, I used to imagine throwing myself down a flight of stairs so my ankle would break, just enough to make everything stop.

Stopping for no reason never felt acceptable.

(It terrifies me that I use cancer as an excuse to stop. And because the cancer in me tends to come back, I will keep using it as one.)

That doesn’t mean I didn’t (or don’t) fake my way through things. I earned more than a few grades through charm, creativity, and memorization. Sometimes I wonder how much learning I actually did.

This isn’t a criticism of the teachers. They taught what they knew. It was up to me to learn, and too often I didn’t.

Take chemistry, for example.

I knew I would fail Chemistry II because I barely survived the first one. It all bored me to meltdown. Now I know that most of that intolerance came from dopamine seeking.

(Maybe all my decisions have been based on dopamine. That might be true, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.)

Back to chemistry. I knew I wouldn’t absorb what the class was trying to teach me, so I asked my science teacher, who was also my track coach, if I could design a self-study instead. Something I could actually finish.

He agreed.

The course was a mix of meteorology and reading a book I no longer remember. Whatever it was, I got an A minus. I am not using the word earned on purpose.

Here’s where my memory starts to blur. I remember the ask. The approval. The weather readings. The vague satisfaction of finishing something. But I can’t remember if I made the ask before or after walking in on something I wasn’t supposed to see.

I didn’t see anything specific. Nothing I could ever describe. But I felt something, unmistakable.

The teacher and another student athlete, younger than me. An interruption. An energy shift.

Years later, they married and had a child. Maybe more. I heard her parents attended the wedding and gave their approval. I wasn’t close enough to either of them to be invited, but others from my class were.

The teacher had been married at the time. I always liked his wife. She helped coach track sometimes. Their daughter, a year ahead of me, was kind. I liked her too.

I never told anyone about what I saw or felt, or what I thought I felt. I convinced myself there was nothing to tell. What would I have said anyway?
I think I felt something strange between two people?

It wasn’t my story.

But lately, what keeps circling in my mind is whether I used that interruption to my advantage. Did I ask for the self-study before or after? Did I use someone else’s vulnerability as leverage?

Maybe. Maybe not. But possibly.

And if I did, what does that say about me? That when I see an opening, I take it? That I go to great lengths to avoid real work? That I have more in common with the people I judge than I want to believe?

Or maybe it is another chance to forgive myself. To love the part of me that did what I needed to do to get through, even if it makes me uneasy in hindsight.

Maybe it is also an invitation to let go of the stories I tell myself and remember that even in those, I am not an entirely reliable narrator.

(Maybe I can stop, just because, and trust that in the stopping, I make room for peace and abundance.)