Everything Is About Story

How the stories we tell shape who we become—and who we might still be.

By Nick Holt
July 16, 2025

Everything is about story.

Not just about the stories we share, but the ones that shape how we see ourselves and the world. The ones we inherit. The ones we swallow without knowing. And if we’re lucky—or desperate—we get the chance to rewrite them before they bury us.

For years, I operated under a script I didn’t write—but I lived by it all the same. It worked by implication: that I was late to my own life, constitutionally lacking, and somehow already disqualified from the things that mattered.

That kind of narrative doesn’t ruin you overnight. It wears you down by repetition—until you begin to confuse its voice for your own. It shapes how you measure your worth, how you enter rooms, how you camouflage discomfort. Eventually, the performance becomes second nature.

It’s not a collapse so much as a slow, grinding attrition of energy and belief. What some might call burnout was, in truth, the failure of a story that was never mine to begin with.

I wasn’t broken. I was miscast.

The problem wasn’t me. It was the plot.

Identity Is a Story

The notion of a fixed self is a relatively recent superstition—one of the Enlightenment’s less examined leftovers.

Descartes gave us cogito, ergo sum, and ever since, we’ve confused thought with being. But I’ve found the inverse to be more faithful: I narrate, therefore I become. Consciousness, after all, is not a state—it’s a story in progress.

What we call the self is a collage of remembered moments, emotional through-lines, and self-mythologies—stitched together like a living draft. William James called this the “stream of consciousness.” Carl Jung called it “persona.” Whatever name we give it, it isn’t fixed. It’s a narrative act.

A story is not a fact—it is a frame. And like any frame, it shapes what we see. When I discard the tired script of failure and begin to regard those years as a descent—uninvited, but instructive—the narrative recalibrates. I no longer speak as one who collapsed, but as one who is emerging. Scarred, but less deceived. And that, in the end, is self-authorship.

Memory Is a Story

We think of memory as a recording. But it isn’t. It’s a reconstruction—fragile, fluid, shaped by meaning more than fact.

St. Augustine said, “Time is in the mind.” What he meant was that the past does not exist outside us—it exists within us, folded into consciousness, shaped by how we carry it.

Time isn’t a sequence of events; it’s a narrative we reconstruct from emotional imprint and interpretation. We don’t recall moments—we recall what they meant. And meaning, like memory, is always under revision.

Trauma isn’t just what happened. It’s what we believe it meant. Viktor Frankl saw this with brutal clarity in the concentration camps. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that those who survived did so not through strength, but through story—through the ability to frame suffering inside a purpose.

I know what it is to be trapped in a looping narrative of pain. The same images, the same conclusions, rehearsed until they feel inevitable. But I also know what it is to interrupt the loop—however briefly. Not by forgetting, but by assigning new meaning to the same events. The facts stay the same. It’s the story that changes—and with it, the self.

To suffer without story is to drown in chaos.
To suffer with story is to endure transformation.

Relationships Are Shared Stories

We don’t just relate to people—we co-author realities with them. Martin Buber called it I–Thou: the sacred bond where each person is not an object, but a fellow subject in the story.

When a relationship ends, it’s not just emotional pain. It’s narrative collapse. The shared myth—“we are building something together,” “I am loved,” “this is who I am with you”—disintegrates. And with it goes the version of ourselves that only existed in that story.

Shakespeare understood this better than most. In Othello, it’s not merely the fear of betrayal that undoes the protagonist—it’s the fear that the story he believed in was never real. The mind cannot abide a broken plotline. It needs coherence. And when coherence is lost, so too is the self.

Culture Is a Story

Everything around us—money, government, nationhood, even law—is sustained by narrative.
Yuval Harari calls these “shared fictions.” We believe in the value of a dollar because we all agree it has value. That agreement is a story.

Religion is one of the oldest and most powerful narrative systems ever devised. The Bible is not a textbook—it’s a library of stories that form the backbone of Western thought.

From Genesis to Revelation, the arc is narrative: fall, exile, redemption, return. It’s no coincidence that Christ taught in parables. Narrative was the only form that could hold truth without reducing it to formula.

When Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” he wasn’t mocking belief—he was mourning the loss of a shared story. The Enlightenment gave us reason, but it couldn’t give us meaning. And so we drifted into ideologies, nationalism, technocracy—new stories, often worse than the ones they replaced.

Remove the story, and the soul fragments.

Jung warned us: without myth, modern man becomes a shell. All persona, no center.

Healing Is a Rewriting of the Story

At its core, all therapy is about rewriting the story we tell ourselves.

Henri Nouwen once said that healing isn’t the removal of wounds but the transformation of them into sacred scars. That’s exactly what I’ve experienced. My healing didn’t come from fixing what happened—but from renarrating what it meant.

Jung taught that wholeness comes from facing the parts of ourselves we’d rather ignore. I’ve found that to be true. Healing isn’t about erasing pain—it’s about placing it in the story where it belongs, so it no longer controls it from behind the curtain.

My faith became real not because it gave me a doctrine, but because it gave me a story.

Descent, death, burial, resurrection. That arc—echoed in mythologies from Osiris to Odin—is not just symbolic. It’s universal. And personal.

In the absence of story, faith was a posture—an argument rehearsed in the vacuum of abstraction. But reason, for all its light, could not illuminate the pit. When the floor gave way, I didn’t need proof. I needed myth.

I needed a narrative that could hold pain without collapsing under it. I needed a Christ who had descended first—before asking anyone else to follow.

We do not descend to be destroyed. We descend to be altered—disfigured, perhaps, but reformed.

So Yes—Everything Is About Story

Not metaphorically. Existentially.

We are made of narrative.
We are unmade by the wrong ones.
And we are remade by the act of reclaiming authorship.

I don’t mean this in some self-help sense. I mean it in the deepest, most theological and philosophical sense possible.

To be human is not to escape the story. It is to know that you’re in one.
And to fight—with everything you have—to tell it well.

It’s the story of who you were, the story of what it meant, and the story of what you became because of it.

That’s not just recovery. It’s theology, literature, and the shape of salvation.

And it begins, always, with one realization:

Everything is about story.