You Are Not Broken. You Are Stuck in a Story Someone Else Wrote.
There is a difference between being broken and being stuck. They feel identical from the inside. They are not.
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It is not a loud thought.
It does not arrive as a declaration or a crisis. It is more like background noise — a low, persistent hum underneath the day. Something is wrong with me. Not quite right. Not quite enough. Not quite the way I should be.
You function. You manage. You show up for the people and the work and the life that needs you. And underneath all of it, quietly and almost continuously, that hum.
I have lived with this hum for years. Not every day, and not always loudly. But reliably there — in the moment I said the wrong thing, in the decision that did not go as planned, in the comparison that arrived uninvited and stayed too long. The conclusion was always the same: something about me is fundamentally off.
What took me a long time to understand — and what I am still working with — is that this thought is not a diagnosis. It is not a fact. It is a story. And stories, unlike broken things, can be examined. Questioned. Slowly, carefully, rewritten.
Being broken has no exit. Being stuck in a belief does. The difference between those two things is everything.
Where the Story Comes From
The something is wrong with me story is almost never self-generated.
It is absorbed. From the early environment that shaped what received approval and what did not. From the family dynamic where certain versions of you were welcomed and others were treated as too much, too sensitive, too difficult. From the culture that communicated, consistently and in a hundred small ways, what a woman should be — and what she should not.
We absorb these messages before we have the language to question them. They arrive when we are small enough to mistake other people's discomfort with us for truth about us. They settle in, over years, until they feel like bedrock. Like just the way things are.
I can trace my own version of this — the people pleasing, the over-explaining, the waiting for permission to be myself — back to early lessons about which parts of me were safe to show and which needed softening. I did not choose those lessons. I did not even consciously receive them. They simply became part of how I understood myself.
The story was written before you were old enough to hold the pen. That is not your fault. And it does not have to be permanent.
The Difference Between Questioning a Belief and Positive Thinking
When I say the story can be rewritten, I do not mean replaced with a better-sounding one.
Positive thinking says: swap the negative thought for a positive one. Think I am enough instead of I am not enough. Repeat it until it feels true.
This almost never works for deeply held beliefs. Not because the words are wrong but because the approach is. You cannot overwrite a belief by layering another belief on top of it. The original is still there, underneath.
What actually creates change is something quieter. Not replacing the thought but creating distance from it. The ability to notice I am having the something is wrong with me thought — to see it as a thought, a pattern, a story — rather than being inside it without knowing it is happening.
That distance is not achieved through affirmations. It is achieved through a different quality of attention — one that can observe the thought without immediately believing it.
The goal is not to think better thoughts. It is to stop confusing your thoughts with the truth about who you are.
Sitting With It
I have been sitting with a course called There's Nothing Wrong With You, offered through Mindful.org. It works directly with the belief that something is fundamentally broken — not through reframing or positive thinking, but through something closer to what I described above: learning to see the belief clearly, from a slight distance, so that it loses some of its authority.
What I have found in it is the kind of approach that does not ask you to become someone different. It asks you to see what you have been carrying — honestly, without adding a new layer on top — and to recognise that the carrying is a choice, even when it has never felt like one.
If you feel drawn to explore it, you can find it here. If you decide to enrol through my link, I may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.
A Different Question
The question most of us have been asking — consciously or not — is: what is wrong with me?
It is not a useful question. It assumes the premise — that something is wrong — and asks only for the inventory of what. It points inward with accusation rather than curiosity. And it has no good answer, because it is not actually the right question.
The question that opens something is different.
What have I been believing about myself? Where did that belief come from? And is it actually true — or is it a story I absorbed so early, and have carried so long, that I stopped being able to tell the difference between the story and the self?
These questions do not produce instant clarity. They produce something slower and more valuable: a loosening. A small but significant gap between you and the narrative. The beginning of the recognition that the story and the person are not the same thing.
You are not broken. You are not fundamentally wrong. You are a woman who absorbed a belief about herself — and who is, perhaps for the first time, beginning to question it.
That questioning is not the end of anything. It is the very beginning.
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The Self-Trust Starter
for the woman who has been trusting everyone else's knowing more than her own
10 questions to come back to yourself. No right answers — only honest ones.
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