The Story You’ve Been Holding

I have been thinking about the stories we carry—and how tightly we grip them.

How stories can define us.

And how stories can limit us.

Researchers studying communities often use the term “narrative flexibility.” They describe this as a community’s capacity to adapt, expand, or even rewrite its shared story as their circumstances change.

The most resilient communities are ones that don’t cling to a single version of who they are. They hold foundational truths close—such as their shared values or a sense of belonging—but allow the story of who they are to continue to evolve.

I have been thinking about what this looks like for us individually.

Because we all know a one-story Sam.

Have you met people like that? People who hold a single story about themselves?

I’m not good with money. I can’t sit still. I’m not creative. I’m too sensitive.

These stories often start as honest observations. They may even be partly true. But somewhere along the way, we can stop describing one particular moment and instead start describing ourselves that way.

But once that happens, the story starts to do the steering.

The tricky thing is that a well-worn story like this feels like truth. You tell it so many times to yourself and to others that it becomes lore. It carves familiar pathways in your brain. And you even fall into confirmation bias, now scanning for all situations that reinforce your story and quietly ignoring everything that doesn’t.

But what if that story is just one version of you?

It’s not that the story is wrong. It may even be partially true. But it’s just one angle, one frame, one limiting belief—not the full picture.

Ever have a memory from when you were a kid that turns out to be held very differently by someone else who was there? A sibling, a parent, or someone who lived those same events took away a completely different story?

This is not a glitch in memory.

This is how stories work.

They are always partial.

Being open to this—to the possibility that there are many versions of a story—doesn’t have to be disorienting.

It can be an opening.

When we hold our own narratives a little more loosely—not abandoning them, but also not white-knuckling them either—something interesting happens.

We become more curious.

We start asking questions instead of making declarations.

We can sit across from someone whose story looks nothing like ours and genuinely interested rather than openly defensive.

Nigerian author and storyteller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—whose TED talk on this subject has been heard by millions around the world—put it plainly: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Adichie says we can flatten other people and cultures when we hold a single story about them.

I think we do the same thing to ourselves.

Remember Flat Stanley? Stanley Lambchop was a boy in a 1964 children’s book who got flattened to half an inch thick when a bulletin board fell on him while he slept. The funniest part is that a rich, complex, three-dimensional person had been reduced to something you could slide under a door.

We do this to ourselves all the time.

We take the fantastic, complicated human beings that we are—full of contradictions and surprises and growth—and flatten ourselves into one or two dimensions.

And then we stop looking for who else we might be.

Narrative flexibility doesn’t ask you to rewrite your whole story. You don’t have to abandon your values or lose your core sense of self. You just make room enough for other versions of you to come forward too.

What story are you holding so tightly that it may have stopped being useful?

And if you loosened your grip—just a little—what else might turn out to be true about you?

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