What remains...
...when the stories change?
Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if I’d stayed with civil engineering.
I can still remember standing out in the cold one January day, taking notes from survey equipment and thinking, with unusual clarity, I really don’t like this.
Around the same time, I was taking an introductory psychology class to satisfy a humanities requirement. It intrigued me in a way engineering never had. By the end of that semester, I changed majors. I traded CAD labs for neurons, statistics, and psychometrics. In the span of a few months, I stepped out of one story about who I was supposed to be and into a new one.
It sounds clean, but it wasn’t. It never is.
When we leave one story behind, parts of it come with us.
The early architecture of my life never really disappeared. It just got folded into a new narrative.
I stopped designing bridges and roads and started exploring what it meant to help people make sense of themselves. In some ways I’m still doing a version of the same work. I’m still interested in how things hold, where they break, and what it takes to rebuild.
Every now and then, when I feel life shifting, I catch a glimpse of that earlier version of me. I wonder what might have happened if I’d stayed on that engineering track.
Not because I think I chose wrong.
But because identity is built from stories, and stories tend to layer rather than erase. We don’t trade one for another. We carry old narratives with us, even when we’re trying to outgrow them.
Paying attention to those stories is as much archaeology as it is psychology. It means noticing what lies beneath the story we’re telling now. It means listening for the older structures still holding things up or getting in the way.
When I look at my own practice and ethos, I can see places where the foundation feels older, sturdier, and strangely familiar. My stories have changed, but some early ones still echo through the present.
Maybe that’s what core narratives are. Not some deep or true self waiting to be uncovered, but instead the stories that stuck. The engineer. The introvert. The one who’s not good with people. The one who starts strong and fades out. Those are some of my stories that have outlived their usefulness yet still echo from time to time.
They aren’t false. But they are incomplete.
They’re old enough that what remains is often less a memory than an emotional imprint. There’s no scene, no full relationship. Just the echo of embarrassment, anxiety, awkwardness, or shame.
The stories I’m trying to live by now are gentler. I’m trying to make room for complexity rather than simplicity, openness rather than defensiveness, curiosity rather than certainty.
And still, those old stories show up.
Maybe that’s the work. Not getting rid of them. Not pretending they never mattered. But learning how to listen without mistaking them for the final word.
We all have stories like that. Stories we’d rather forget. Stories that surface at inopportune times. Stories that still know how to tug on the present.
And there’s hope in that, because stories change. But before they do, we may need to recognize the ones that still speak with far too much authority, those stories that act as if they own us.