Mythmaking in the Aftermath

How narrative construction became both my compass and my crutch in navigating identity, grief, and self-reinvention

There are times when my mind feels like it’s splintering under the weight of memory. Not because the memory is too heavy, but because it refuses to sit still. It writhes, reshapes, mocks my understanding of it. And so, I write.

What begins as confusion becomes narration. What was once a wound becomes metaphor, metaphor becomes theme, and theme becomes meaning. The chaos is stitched together, not by truth in its empirical sense, but by coherence–emotional, philosophical, internal coherence. This is the logic that governs my internal world. This is how I survive: through story.

But the longer I do this, the more I see the cost. Each narrative brings comfort, but also risk. When I hang too much of my identity on a version of the story, I become vulnerable to its collapse. If I say: I am the girl who overcame, then failure dismantles me. If I say: I am the person who learned, then re-injury embarrasses me. What was supposed to be healing turns brittle. What began as integration threatens to become entrapment.

On Narrative as Meaning-Making

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." But what do we make ourselves out of, if not memory, myth, and repetition? My entire personality—my philosophy, even—is built on the act of recollecting and re-narrating. I reframe each moment with the intensity of a chronic overthinker and the hope of someone still trying to turn pain into something beautiful.

This isn’t a conscious act of manipulation; it’s reflex. When something hurts, I reach for language. But the language doesn’t just name the experience, it reshapes it. Suddenly, I am not just grieving; I am also performing grief, analyzing grief, giving it narrative form. And in that form, I gain temporary agency over it. Not control, exactly, but structure.

This is how I’ve written about love, about loss, about being neurodivergent, about ambition, failure, and burnout. These aren’t just topics to me–they are terrains I map with words in order to feel like I’m not drowning in them.

The Power of Mythologizing Pain

There is something sacred about turning suffering into language. I think of it as alchemy. What cannot be undone can still be recontextualized.

The pain of disappointing a friend I loved becomes a chapter in my long reckoning with people-pleasing and the search for unconditional love. The collapse of a relationship becomes an echo of a childhood script I’m still trying to rewrite.

This act of mythologizing makes pain legible. It lets me speak it aloud without crumbling. It gives me tools to articulate the ineffable. More than that, it gives me distance from the immediacy of raw emotion and from the parts of myself I’m still too ashamed to face directly.

But myth can also lie, justify, and calcify.

When Stories Collapse

The fragility of this coping mechanism becomes evident when the story I’ve been telling myself stops making sense. When someone I thought would stay leaves. When I fail in the same way, I promised myself I never would again. When I recognize that I was the villain, not the misunderstood protagonist.

These are not just painful moments; they are existential threats. Because if the story falls apart, then so does the identity built on top of it. And I’m left asking: Who am I now that I’ve outgrown the myth? Who am I when I can’t explain the hurt?

This is the terror of the narrative builder: that meaning itself is conditional, provisional, and always at risk of being disproven by a single rupture in reality. And yet–I still write. Not to find truth, but to survive the gap between then and now.

The Grief of Outgrowing Yourself

There’s a specific kind of mourning that comes not from loss, but from evolution. When I look back at the girl who needed to believe certain things to stay afloat—about love, about success, about redemption—I feel both tenderness and embarrassment. I understand her. I admire her. But I can’t be her anymore.

She had to believe that healing was linear. She needed to think that apologies could fix everything. That if she just reflected enough, wrote well enough, and understood deeply enough, she could undo the harm.

Now I know better. I know that some wounds stay open. That some forgiveness never arrives. That insight doesn’t always save us from repetition. That sometimes writing the story isn’t enough to live it differently.

And still, I honor her. She is part of the myth. Not the final version, but an essential one.

The Double-Edged Sword of Self-Awareness

To write is to witness yourself. But too much witnessing becomes surveillance. It’s the paradox of high self-awareness: you are too fluent in your own patterns to believe in real change, too skeptical of your own motives to take comfort in hope.

Every time I try to feel proud of myself, a voice goes, Yes, but you’re just curating that narrative, aren’t you? Every time I admit guilt, another voice counters, Do you mean it or are you just trying to seem self-aware? This is what I mean when I say the story becomes fragile. It starts to fold in on itself.

Self-awareness is supposed to be redemptive. But when it lacks compassion, it turns into self-dismantling. I can name all the ways I sabotage, and still feel powerless to stop it. I can analyze every interpersonal pattern, and still feel hollow inside.

So I write, not just to understand, but to forgive myself. To find a version of the story that lets me be imperfect and still human. Still worthy of love.

Between Myth and Reality: The Liminal Self

I live in the in-between: not the person I once was, not yet the person I want to become. It’s a liminal space where grief and imagination cohabit. I am constantly drafting the next self—through letters I don’t send, through newsletters like this, through reflections I scribble into the margins of books.

But I’ve learned not to trust the fantasy entirely. Not because the fantasy is wrong, but because it’s not the whole story. I am not just the brave girl who turned pain into purpose. I am also the avoidant one who ghosted a friend when she got too close. I am not just an ambitious designer. I am also the one who spiraled into burnout and barely showed up for my own life.

The stories I write need to hold both. Otherwise, they are just branding. And I am not trying to brand myself. I am trying to know myself.

Writing as Both Question and Answer

This is not a resolution. This is not a neat bow on a messy process. If anything, this is another attempt to write my way into coherence. Another gesture at survival.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop needing to narrativize my life. I don’t think I want to. But I’m trying to hold the stories more loosely now. To let them breathe. To let myself contradict them without shame.

Because if I have learned anything, it’s this: healing isn’t always about arriving at the right story. Sometimes, it’s just about making enough meaning to get through the day, and being kind enough to let that be enough.