The Story That Kept You Alive Is Not Who You Are
There's a version of me that kept me alive.
He checked his voice before he spoke. Checked his stance before he walked into a room. Dressed straight when the room felt straight.
He did his job. He got me here.
But he is not me. And I keep noticing — in clients, in friends, in whole communities — how many of us are still letting that guy drive.
The survival identity
I see it all the time. People living from the story they built to get through. The story of what happened. What might happen. What happens to "people like us."
That story was smart once. It kept you safe. Then somewhere along the way it stopped being a strategy and quietly became your identity.
I live in a marginalized, minimized, discriminated-against minority. That's real. But my identity isn't "how to survive that." It isn't built on what might happen — even when the threats to my wellbeing are real.
Don't get me wrong. My PTSD from past trauma still sits in the shadows, keeping one eye on my decisions. It doesn't stop me. It doesn't define me.
Well. Mostly.
Nine investment bankers walk into a chakra clearing
Recently I was booked to guide a group experience at a high-end resort. No brief on the cohort. Just a time and what I'd be doing.
I arrive. It's a group of white, straight investment bankers on an overnight rah-rah trip.
Cool. Cool cool cool.
I adjusted. Voice deeper. Approach more masculine. Attendance at my chakra clearing journey was optional, and I'll be honest — I was quietly hoping nobody would come.
I heard myself say to the event coordinator, "I doubt any of a group of straight white male investment bankers will come to a chakra clearing journey!"
That wasn't an observation. That was a prayer.
And in that moment I felt it. The old survival identity trying to climb back into the driver's seat.
Nine men showed up.
So in my deepest, most masculine voice, I set the tone and we jumped right in.
As I expected, only a few of them really got something out of it. That's fine. That's every room.
What I didn't expect? Zero homophobia. Zero judgement. Zero disrespect. In fact, six of them thanked me and shook my hand.
The harm I'd braced for wasn't there. That muscle memory was an illusion — and I let it shift my identity. Shift my power. Shift my energy right back into the old version of survival. I let memories of old experiences decide how I showed up. And I showed up powerless.
The call was coming from inside the house
Here's what really landed when I sat with it.
When I look back at the moments of radical discrimination I've felt over the last ten years... most of them came from me. Aimed at me. Out of survival.
Check your voice. Check your stance. Dress straight.
Nobody had to say a word. I'd already said it to myself.
Yes, I hold a conflicting privilege that a lot of people aren't afforded. I know that. It doesn't change the point.
My identity doesn't rule my power. Unless I let it.
This isn't denial
Let me be really clear, because this matters.
The harm is real. There are frightened people out there (the perpetrators), brainwashed by control and greed, doing horrendous things to minorities. (And let's be honest — those extremists are the actual minority. They just use fear to rule). But the harm is real.
I have lived experience of harm against me in my community. In the town I currently live in, a serial killer targeted my community and men in it — drugging them, at times r*ping them, before killing them. Three times in one year.
Nobody attracted that. That's on the killer. Full stop.
The threat is real for a lot of communities. So caution? Yes. Awareness? Absolutely.
But there's a difference between being cautious and being caged. You can keep your eyes open and still stand in your power. What I'm talking about is people reliving the entrapment of their old story — or the old story of their people — in a way that stops them from living their actual lives.
We have a choice. We can cower to our fears. Or we can be cautious while still standing in our power, and let who we are as energetic beings be our identity.
The fear you were handed
Here's where it gets slippery.
There's the harm that's actually in front of you. And there's the harm you were handed.
A lot of us didn't learn fear from our own experience. We learned it from someone else's. A parent who lived through something brutal. An elder who watched friends disappear. A community that buried too many of its own. Warnings whispered across kitchen tables. The news on a loop.
Those experiences were real. The harm was real. The grief is real.
But somewhere in the handing down, something got swapped. What should have been passed on as caution got passed on as fear.
Caution says: here's what happened, here's what to watch for, now go live.
Fear says: here's what happened, it'll happen to you too, so make yourself small.
Caution is information. Fear is an instruction.
And so we take someone else's wound and wear it as our identity. We shrink in rooms we've never been hurt in. We brace against people who've never laid a finger on us. We hide parts of ourselves to dodge a blow that landed on someone else, decades ago, in a different town.
That's what was really in the room with me at that resort. Not those nine men. Every story I'd ever absorbed about what men like them do to men like me.
None of those stories were about them. None of them were about that day.
That's the fine line. Real exposure to harm asks you to stay aware. Self-created suppression asks you to disappear. One protects your life. The other quietly takes it from you.
So next time you feel yourself shrinking, ask:
Is this happening to me, right now?
Or am I reacting to something that happened to someone else, somewhere else, some other time?
Is this fear even mine?
Here's the part people don't like to hear. Carrying the fear doesn't honor the people who were harmed. It just adds you to the list of lives it took.
The most powerful way to honor those who suffered isn't to keep suffering in their name. It's to live the full, loud, unshrunk life they were denied.
And saying any of this out loud to someone still carrying that fear? That's a whole other minefield. I'll talk about that more in another post called "The Suppression Starts Within."
What we radiate, we attract
This is where the laws of radiation and attraction come in.
What we radiate out, we attract back in.
Keep telling yourself you'll have a shit holiday because the last one was shit, and the universe will happily book you a shit holiday. Walk into a room braced for rejection and you're broadcasting it before you've opened your mouth.
I walked into that event radiating "please don't come." Imagine if I'd walked in radiating who I actually am.
You are not your old story
Some of the greatest voices of the last century knew this.
Maya Angelou: "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them."
Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a day when his children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Desmond Tutu: "My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together."
And Nelson Mandela, on walking out after 27 years in prison: "As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison."
Read that Mandela line again. Twenty-seven years locked up, and he knew the old story could keep him a prisoner long after the doors opened.
Our heritage, our culture, our skin colour, our sexuality — beautiful, important, worth honouring. But as energetic beings, none of it is the whole of who we are.
Scripture said it long before any of us:
"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." — 2 Timothy 1:7
Fear was never the assignment.
The science agrees (annoyingly well)
Psychologists have a name for what I caught myself doing at that resort.
Ilan Meyer's minority stress model splits the hits we take into two kinds. External ones — prejudice, discrimination, rejection. And internal ones — expecting rejection, hiding who you are, turning society's judgment inward on yourself. The internal ones grow out of the external ones, and both wear down our health over time. Researchers have found you don't even need the bad thing to happen. Anticipating it is enough to cause distress and push people into hiding.
Check your voice. Dress straight. That's not a quirk. That's literally in the model.
Then there's rejection sensitivity, a concept from Columbia psychologist Geraldine Downey: the habit of anxiously expecting rejection, spotting it everywhere, and reacting to it hard. Her research found that people who anxiously expect rejection end up responding in ways that bring about the very thing they feared.
Science calls it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I call it radiation and attraction. Same law, different lab coat.
And here's the good news. It can be released.
At Yale, John Pachankis built a program called ESTEEM specifically to target these internal survival reactions in gay and bisexual men — the negative beliefs, the fear-driven behaviours. In trials, it reduced depression and alcohol use, and it's since been adapted for sexual minority women, Black and Latino gay and bisexual men, and gay and bisexual men in China.
Ten sessions of skills-based work shifted the survival story enough to change people's health. Now imagine what happens when you clear the emotional charge holding that story in place at the root.
Put it down
At some stage the old story has to be released. Not because it was wrong — because it's done.
It kept you alive. Thank it. Then put it down.
Because until you do, it isn't protection. It's entrapment.
And on the other side of it is your vibration. Your power. Your actual identity.
Who are you when you're not surviving?
Go find out.
Sources
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin. Overview: Frost & Meyer (2023), Minority stress theory: Application, critique, and continued relevance — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10712335
Downey, G., & Feldman, S. I. (1996). Implications of rejection sensitivity for intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(6), 1327–1343.
Pachankis, J. E., et al. ESTEEM trials — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9446477
2 Timothy 1:7, King James Version.
