The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I remember the first time I had a shot. It was the summer I graduated from eight grade. We were on a ten-day holiday with my family, marked by my sisters’ fights every fourth night. My experiences were never the same as theirs. They would go out with their friends at night, leaving me sobbing as they got ready in our shared room, talking about how excited they were to go bar hopping and meet new people. I even had a curfew back then, which felt especially restraining for someone who always thought of sleep as a barrier between me and the next day.

On the nights my sisters went out, I was both excited and not for breakfast the next day, hearing about these adventurous nights of all sorts. Growing up with two sisters a decade older than me made my fear of missing out inevitable. I learned how to walk before my first birthday just to catch up to them. When I realised my lack of mobility wasn’t the only issue causing the gap between me and my sisters, I started betting on my intelligence. They would often tell me about their love lives. While I barely understood what loving any man other than my father meant, they kept telling me I was really good at giving advice. I assume I was just nodding and saying,

“Yes, you are right.”

Still, that wasn’t enough to grant me an invite to their secret sisters’ club meetings. I would often try to open the locked door with a spoon while hearing the giggles that turned into laughter as I sighed at the same time. Around three days before this holiday, they decided I was old enough to be a member of their club. My smile didn’t grow tired of sitting on my face until we took off for our holiday, because I managed to keep the discussion topics of the meeting hidden, granting myself the right to stay in their room at the hotel. Up until then, I had always stayed with my parents, and that felt like an insult.

I was forced awake one night when they stormed into the room. I first heard my older sister’s voice as she screamed at the top of her lungs. There were no signs coming from my younger sister until an arm wrapped itself around me, whispering,

“Don’t be afraid. She is just drunk.”

My younger sister, İrem, was the compassionate one, until her temper flipped. Some people’s tempers are like wild flames. They ignite easily, burn everything close enough, and then go out as quickly as they started. That was İlke, my older sister. Her shouting had the same impact as a jump-scare scene in a horror movie: startling in the moment, but never lingering. The kind you react by reflex, not because you are truly afraid. As I like to call it, the silent-tempered type are the ones who are hard to anger, yet once they are, they know exactly what to say to hurt you. Words aren’t just thrown around; they strike a chord.

I belong to that category too.

I kept compromising deeply for those I loved, stretching my limits endlessly while remaining indifferent to what I wanted. Truthfully, the happiness of others always equalled mine, marking the biggest desire of my life.

I met that mindset in my childhood.

For a long time, I was the only girl in our kindergarten. Then came Maya. A resurrection for the little Imi who had grown tired of playing with boys all the time. We had fun together until she told me she wouldn’t talk to me if I didn’t let her sit on the pink chair. I obliged.

Wednesdays were ice cream day. Maya and I were both excited, but we were too caught up playing with our dolls and ended up being the last ones to arrive at the cafeteria. There was one chocolate and one vanilla ice cream left. As the cafeteria lady handed me the chocolate ice cream, I caught Maya’s expression. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her mouth was wide open. I frowned and walked toward an empty table to sit down.

As I peeled the cover off my ice cream, Maya’s face suddenly appeared right in front of me.

“You can’t eat that,” she said.

“Why not?” I replied.

“That’s the last chocolate ice cream,” she said.

She didn’t say anything after that while I looked at her.

My eyes watered as I handed her the chocolate ice cream I was holding.

Sartre once said that we are free to define ourselves. Even so, he did not soften the weight that comes with it: the endless demand to justify who you are to others, as if being were never enough.

If you don’t give people what they expect, you end up alone.

That became one of the strongest influences on my people-pleasing side.

In time, I developed a threshold for every person I loved and deeply cared for. Even when it hurt most of the time, whatever they did was fine. Yet, my threshold still had limits. When it was crossed, I would stop caring all at once.

That didn’t refrain me from positioning myself as the victim most of the time. Blame runs in our family. As far back as I can remember, my father always blamed my mother for everything. Once, when he missed a flight, he called her from another city to say it was her fault.

Every time I thought my father was the source of blame, I denied the same voice that echoed in me.

From an evolutionary perspective, blame is desirable for emotional survival. When accountability appears, fingers turn outward, and desire quietly disguises itself as necessity. We grow up feeling forced to develop a certain identity. Yet it is the very idea of identity that invites rigid thinking, because everything you claim you are turns whatever falls outside that definition into a potential existential crisis. Blame offers a mental shortcut, diminishing accountability while allowing us to position ourselves as victims of fate.

I can hear the universe roaring with laughter, because fate, in this sense, simply refers to our experiences with the external world.

We were never victims of fate or other people’s actions, but of our own interpretations.

For a long time, I placed the blame on my father, telling myself it must have been his perfectionism that turned proving my sufficiency into a lifelong quest.

Yet why it was me, and not my sisters, who adopted this hunger for excellence like a second skin?

The answer revealed itself with an analogy I was taught in Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy training where I was challenged with the phrase I kept humming within:

“My father made me feel insufficient.”

The question that followed was simple:

“If there were 100 other people in your shoes, would they feel insufficient in the same circumstances?”

At first, I said yes.

But what if there were 1,000? Or 10,000?

In the end, it always circles back to one thing.

I never felt insufficient because my father made me feel that way.
I didn’t become a people pleaser because Maya made me feel threatened with the loss of her friendship.
It wasn’t my sisters who made me fear missing out.

In truth, no one has the power to make you feel anything. How you feel is shaped by the beliefs you hold about what happens.

Accountability, in Stoic terms, begins with knowing where your power begins and where it ends. Our thoughts, beliefs, intentions, values, and actions had always belonged to ourselves. Taking responsibility for them is not a loss of freedom, but a return to it, because the one thing that has never been within your control is other people’s actions.

“It isn’t the things themselves that disturb people, but the judgments that they form about them,” says Epictetus.

More often than not, what unsettles us most is not what is happening, but the stories we kept telling ourselves about them.

Author’s note:

I write at the meeting point of storytelling, psychology, and philosophy, sitting with language long enough for meaning to surface.

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Thanks for reading! If my words spoke to you, let them travel.