Beware the Story You Didn’t Write

“Beware the Ides of March.”

A banger line we’ve been repeating for more than 400 years. Not because we collectively read Plutarch in our spare time, but because a playwright took a momentous event, zhuzhed it up, and the rest is history. 

"Et tu, Brute?" also made up. No one knows Caesar's actual last words, but most accounts say he pulled his toga over his head and said nothing. Just the dizzying, devastating grief of a man murdered by someone he loved. I made that up, too. That’s the meaning I ascribed.  Now it’s in your head. 

Reenactment of Caesar's death, photo by Photo Gruppo Storico Romano

Royal Shakespeare Company, Julius Caesar

That’s the thing about a story. It doesn’t just describe what happened. It decides what it means.

And we do this with our own lives constantly.

We are simultaneously the author, the protagonist, and the reader of our own lives. We write the story, we live it in real time, and we interpret it as we go and after the event. We take the raw material - the rejection, the detour, the relationship that ended, the job that didn’t pan out the way we imagined - and we make it mean something. We build a narrative around it. We cast ourselves in a role.

The question is: are you the one writing it? Or have you outsourced the narration?

This is not a toxic positivity piece. I am not about to tell you to reframe your hardest experiences as hidden gifts or secret blessings or the universe conspiring in your favor. The protagonist doesn't get to skip the difficult chapters. But you do get to decide the meaning of your story and write the next chapter accordingly.

This month’s reflection workshop was on “the mythology of you”. Attendees examined the stories they have been telling themselves, sometimes for decades. Narratives handed to them by families, by culture, by relationships, by the voice in their own head that learned a long time ago what kind of character they were allowed to be. 

We didn't blow those stories up or bypass the feelings. We read them carefully, the way a good editor does. Is it true, is it borrowed, what's been there so long it feels like fact but is actually just an old draft that never got revised? Whose voice is narrating this moment?

What happened in that room was authorship. Not rewriting the hard parts out of the story, but deciding, perhaps for the first time, what those parts actually mean.

Almost like pulling a sweater out of the back of a closet and asking:

Is this still mine?

Does this still fit?

Did it ever?

Most people struggle with trusting themselves because they’re listening to the wrong narrator.

This week, a client I’ve been working with said something that made me want to do cartwheels.

“I want to be the main character of my life and own my decisions rather than react to everything around me.”

Simple sentence. Massive shift.

What got her there wasn’t a lightning bolt of certainty or a perfectly aligned set of signs from the universe. It was the doing. The person who started with me 7 weeks ago barely knew what she wanted, and was looking to me to tell her. But she listened to something inside of her and began. She examined her beliefs and values. She got honest about what she actually wanted. She took action, imperfect and sometimes before she fully believed she could.

The clarity and confidence arrived through motion, not before it. And somewhere along the way, she became the author.

I got this wrong for years - I thought confidence came first then action. But it’s usually the other way around.

So instead, we take a poll. We ask friends, mentors, partners, coworkers. We triangulate advice until we arrive at a diluted, consensus version of our own life. Or are so confused, we do nothing at all.

We outsource the narrative and then wonder why our story doesn’t feel like it belongs to us.

So what does this have to do with William Shakespeare and your high school English class? Shakespeare wasn't rewriting history, he was processing the unthinkable. An almost incomprehensibly powerful man, taken down by the senator he'd pardoned and his own inner circle. Rome absorbing it and moving on to the destiny the murder was designed to avoid. Shakespeare needed to make meaning of something too large to hold raw (and sell tickets to The Globe). So he shaped it, sharpened it, gave it a line people would repeat for four hundred years. That's exactly what we do.

Every single day, you get to choose.

You are always the author. You are always the main character.

Even on the days it doesn’t feel that way, perhaps especially on those days, the pen is still in your hand.

The Ides are a reminder: story is power, and it belongs to whoever decides to own it. Might as well be you.

If You're Open To It...

Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. Think of one story you’ve been telling yourself.

What are the facts? Write them down on the left.

What is the meaning given to those facts? Write them down on the right.

Where did that narrative come from?

Does it still serve you?