"Man is not disturbed by things, but by the view he takes of them." — Epictetus
I was twelve years old the first time I understood I was too much. A tomboy who was too tall, ungraceful, and loud.
Not in a way anyone said outright. It came quieter than that, in a glance held a half-second too long, in the way a room rearranged itself when I walked in, a misfit among the quiet girls in pretty pastel dresses.
I learned to make myself smaller. I learned the geography of a room before I crossed the threshold. I learned that my job was to be lovely, which was a different thing entirely from being real.
I was a Smith. And Smiths had an image to protect.
What I didn't know then, what took me decades to understand, is that I had inherited a story. A fiction. And I was living inside it as if it were fact.
We All Do This
We live haunted by narratives stitched into us by careless words, absent glances, moments of shame that baked into belief before we had language to question them. They arrive wrapped in a mother's doubt, a father's frustration, a religion's insistence that you were born broken and must earn your way back to whole. Society's quiet smirk at the flower unlike all the others in the bed.
And we carry them as if they're gospel.
Albert Ellis, a founding father of cognitive-behavioral therapy, called these irrational beliefs — the invisible architecture of emotional disturbance. Most of us live by musts: I must be approved. I must succeed. I must be enough.
These are the bones beneath the flesh of our daily thinking. But here is the question no one taught me to ask: Where did these musts come from?
The Story I Performed for Decades
I spent years performing goodness inside a faith tradition that measured worth by compliance. As a descendant of Joseph Smith's original family line, the stakes felt mythic. Legacy. Covenant. Bloodline. These were not metaphors in my house — they were requirements.
My worth was constructed entirely outside myself. Outsourced to a God I couldn't question, a prophet I couldn't critique, a family I couldn't disappoint.
When I finally began to deconstruct, when the architecture of belief started to crack and I could see daylight through the fractures, I didn't feel free.
I felt empty. Because I had never learned who I was without the story.
The Slow Work of Seeing Clearly
I'm walking alongside a woman I'll call Margo, a brilliant, articulate former Mormon in her own deconstruction. She believed, with her whole chest, that she was too much. A man she dated said she made everything heavy. A teacher once asked, "Why do you always take things so personally?" as if depth were a flaw, as if caring were the problem.
So she learned to edit herself. Smile when she felt rage. Nod when she disagreed. Disappear just enough to be liked.
We traced it back. To a childhood home where her mother shut down every tear with a tight-lipped You're fine. An inheritance, passed quietly through the women in her family, of shrinking as a form of love.
The reframe came slowly. First she named the belief: I'm too much. Then challenged it: According to whom? Is emotional depth a flaw, or a gift?
She practiced. Said what she felt without apologizing. Cried in front of a friend.
No one ran. Some leaned in.
The belief lost its power. Not by force. By letting it into the light
Five Ways to Begin
Reframing isn't toxic positivity. It's a slow, honest interrogation — a shift from this is who I am to this is what I learned. And I get to unlearn it.
Belief tracking. When shame or fear surges, ask: What am I believing right now? Where did it come from? Is it still true?
Self-dialogue. Write a conversation between your inner critic and inner advocate. Let them argue. You might be surprised who wins.
Compassionate contradiction. Meet the old belief with something kind and precise: I am doing the best I can. That is worthy.
Re-authoring. Write your story from a different vantage. Not the victim — the survivor. Give yourself the narrative you were denied.
Viktor Frankl, forged in the horror of Auschwitz, wrote that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance. Reframing isn't soft therapy. It's existential revolt.
The Spell Is Just a Story
A friend believed she was cursed. Every plane delayed. Every winter, the flu. Layoffs. She arrived at a spiritual retreat hollowed out, desperate.
They told her: You're not cursed. You're carrying someone else's story.
They sat her by a fire. Name every belief you carry. Ask: Who gave this to me? If you can't name the giver, throw it in.
She came back days later. Eyes clear. Something loosened.
Sometimes the spell is just a story we forgot we had the power to end.
Many of these beliefs were never yours to begin with. Your mother's fears, handed down like heirlooms. Your church's control, spoken in the language of love. Your culture's preferences, mistaken for your identity.
Reframing is threefold: a reckoning with the stories absorbed when you were too young to refuse them, a remembering of who you were before the world decided, and a return to the self that was always there, underneath the performance.
Worth is not earned. It is revealed.
We stop outsourcing our value. We stop waiting for permission from people who never had the authority to grant it.
We build from here. The story isn't finished. Write the ending you deserve.
With Love,
Lyn
