Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

Some of what we carry as truth was given to us before we were old enough to refuse it. The story of who we are. The story of who hurt us. The story of who we are not allowed to be. We received these stories the way children receive everything...without checking the box. And then we built a life on top of the inheritance, never quite noticing that we had not chosen it.

At some point, if we are lucky, life hands us a moment that asks us to open the inheritance and look at it honestly.

I had one of those moments at a high school reunion.

“ We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. — Anaïs Nin

From My Chair to Yours

I walked up to her at a high school reunion and she did not speak to me.

I had cast her as one of the mean girls in my private mythology for forty years. I had built a small piece of my adult identity around the certainty of her rejection. And there she was, decades later, in a room arranged exactly so that we could speak and she did not.

For most of my life, the story went like this. There was a group of girls in school. They had not let me in. I had carried that not-letting-in into adulthood (quietly, the way most of us carry these things) and used it as evidence for a larger story about not being chosen, not fitting, not belonging, feeling rejected.

I just did my thing. That was the brave-girl line I had been telling for forty years. The version of the story that let me survive my own adolescence and walk into the next decades upright.

And then I walked up to her at the reunion and she did not speak.

What surprised me was not her silence. It was the question that arrived in me as I stood there. What kind of person comes to a reunion if they don't want to speak to anyone? And then, half a beat later, the harder one. What kind of person walks up to someone they've cast as mean for forty years and expects warmth?

Standing there, I had to let two things be true at once. Maybe she was still that person. And maybe I had been a mean one too. Maybe both of us had been carrying a story neither of us had ever actually examined. Maybe the in-crowd brought out something in me I'd been too busy nursing my hurt to look at honestly. Maybe the cruelty had been mutual. Maybe the rejection had been reciprocal. Maybe the whole architecture of who-hurt-whom was a script we had both inherited at fifteen and neither of us had questioned since.

I did not say any of this to her. I do not know if I will ever see her again. The reckoning was not for her. It was for me.

The Lens

For those familiar with Brené Brown's work, this construct will be familiar. She returns to it often: in Rising Strong, in Strong Ground, on her podcast Unlocking Us, and from the stage. When we tell a story about a conflict, we almost always cast the people in it into three roles. The Victim. The Villain. The Hero.

Most of us have a default. And most of us cast ourselves as Victim or Hero, almost never Villain. The Villain is the role we hand to someone else.

The reckoning Brené names, and the one I stood inside at that reunion, is this. We have probably been the Villain in someone else's true story. Not because we were monsters. Because everyone in any story is a more complicated character than the role they have been assigned by the people who loved them or the people who were hurt by them.

The girl I had cast as mean had probably cast me as mean too. And she was probably not wrong.

This does not mean the wound was not real. It means the wound was also something I had a hand in. It means the version of the story in which I was only the wounded one was always going to be too small to carry me into the next part of my life.

Healing the old story is rarely about being more right. It is about being willing to be more complicated.

The mature move is the willingness to let someone you have cast as Villain be a person and to let yourself, in their version of the same events, be one too. To let the triangle dissolve into something quieter. Two people, both fifteen, both doing the best they could, both wrong in ways they did not yet know how to see.

That is what was waiting for me at the reunion. Not an apology. Not closure. Just the dissolving of a triangle I had been standing inside for forty years without noticing it was a triangle.

Reflection

Three questions to sit with this week:

• On the role you default to: In your own conflict stories, the ones you have told yourself for years, which role do you tend to play? Victim, Villain, or Hero? Notice without judgment. Most of us have a default. The default itself is not the problem. The unexamined-ness of it is.
• On who you might have been to someone else: Pick one old story you have been carrying. Now pick the person in it you have cast as Villain. Imagine, just for the length of this question, that they have been telling the story too, and that in their version, you are a more complicated character than you are in your own. What might they be right about? What would it cost you to let some of that be true?
• On what the story is ready to become: What old story have you been carrying that is ready to be more complicated than the version you have been telling? Not rewritten. Not abandoned. Just allowed to grow up alongside you.

I do not know what I will choose to keep from the inheritance. I am still going through it, one story at a time. What I know now is that going through it is its own form of growing up. Late, maybe. But not too late.

Until we see each other again, I hope you have a powerful day.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight

P.S. For those of you who want to go deeper with this concept in her work: Brené Brown podcast about her latest book Strong Ground she discusses the Victim/Villain/Hero construct in the "Above and Below the Line"... a concept we'll talk through soon.