To reclaim the story of your life is an act of devotion and defiance.
Especially if you were taught, like I was, that visibility invites shame and silence ensures approval.
As a child growing up with an Indian mother, I was no stranger to the evil eye. My mother would dot my cheeks and forehead with thick black eyeliner to ward off envy and protect me from the sharp gaze of those who might wish us harm. Even now, she insists I dress my daughter in black threads tied around her wrists, inherited talismans against misfortune. When her car was stolen or a shelf collapsed at home, her first instinct was to trace it back to someone who may have looked at her life with jealousy.
She hails from a culture where superstition governs life. Cutting your nails on the wrong day can invite disaster. To be praised, a curse. To flaunt your joy is to risk having it ripped from you unceremoniously. So, instead, you keep your victories quiet. You speak of plans only after they’ve passed. You never share an exact date. You learn to shrink your light to protect it.
And so I grew up with a quiet, persistent fear of being seen.
Of being different.
Of being real.
My cultural inheritance told me that to say small was to be safe,
to play by the rules would guarantee social belonging.
Perhaps that’s why I spent much of my life on the move—travelling roads where no one knew me, where I could shape-shift into whatever I desired. Far from familiar eyes, I could live without fear of being measured or envied. I mistook this wandering for freedom. But even in faraway places, the fear traveled with me.
I held shame for not conforming to my matrilineal culture’s expectations, to the conservative ideals passed down like heirlooms.
Hide your bra strap.
Never cross your legs in front of elders.
Do not be a sexual being.
But I also wasn’t willing to buy into it completely. It just sat there for years, like an inconvenience to my authenticity, stopping me from becoming the truest expression of myself. But deep within I always knew that to inhabit my soul calling as a storyteller, I would have to write stories, make art and beauty from all the love, sex, travel, and heartache I’ve experienced without apology or disguise.
My truth, like all truths, required risking the lie and facing the possibility of losing social approval to be expressed.
Stone Babies
Years ago, I watched a documentary called The 46-Year Pregnancy. It told the story of a 75-year-old Moroccan woman who gave birth to a "stone baby" a fossilized fetus that had died in her womb and calcified, silently, over decades. Medically, it’s called a lithopedian—from the Greek lithos, meaning stone, and paidion, meaning child.
What science presented as rare biology, I saw as metaphor. A symbol for what happens to the parts of ourselves we do not express.
What dreams turn to stone inside us when we silence our truth?
What stories fossilize in the womb of the soul, unspoken and unborn?
There are parts of me that eventually silenced. Stories I never told. Desires I buried so deep I forgot they were once alive. But when we withhold our truth, when we silence our creativity, those parts don’t disappear. They calcify. They become burdens we carry unknowingly, until their weight begins to ache from the inside out.
That documentary carried a message I heard loud and clear:
Speak. Write. Choose your truth—The words you withhold do not disappear. They harden. They wait. They burn until they are made into verse.
Living Myth
Human life is governed by story.
We live by myth, whether we realize it or not. Our ancestral roots hands us narratives: who we are, what we’re worth, what we’re allowed to become. Our families shape those stories too, each person a different character in our tale.
But really, we came here to find and live our unique destiny and that is ultimately shaped by our self-authorship.
To ditch the limiting scripts that keep us stuck in lives that are not truly ours, we must question our stories about ourself, the world, and our relationships. We must be willing to write a new story of love, joy, and possibility. The cost for this alignment is the old story, the old us, the old way we settled for less than our truths.
In the book Personal Mythology by David Feinstein Ph.D, and Stanley Krippner, I found words that support this idea.
“When we learn to become aware of the way we see the world and how it makes us feel about ourselves, we can confront distortions that put us out of sync with the natural law that tends towards abundance.”
Reading that, I felt something shift. I had been inhabiting a story that wasn’t truly mine—a myth shaped by fear, shame, and ancestral memory. A myth out of sync with the possibility of bounty my truth could bring. Within, I heard the rumblings of another story yearning to be told.
Would I live the myth I inherited or the story I came here to tell?
We don’t always choose the story we’re born into. But somewhere along the way, we’re offered a choice:
To transform the ancestral threads into self-authorship or stay woven in a pattern that no longer fits.
(This story is a re-invention of a similar story I told years ago on my website. Read it here.)
Ritual & Reflection
Journalling Prompts for Further Exploration
How have I traded my genuine self for social acceptance?
If I express myself truthfully, whose approval will I lose?
What truths have I swallowed to keep the peace?
What old story about myself do I need to grieve?
Which new story is ready to birth?
Sacred Assignments | Invitations for Deeper Embodiment
Write a Letter to the Stone Baby.
Write a letter to the part of you that never got to speak. The creativity that was silenced. The child who swallowed their truth.
An idea to start with, “Dear one, I know you’ve waited inside me all these years…”
New Offerings: Soul Thread Sessions
1:1 Guidance to Help You Reconnect with Who You Are and What You’re Here to Offer
Each of us is born with soul gifts—personal signatures of essence—that we are here to remember, embody, and offer. But these gifts don’t always arrive with clarity. They come wrapped in the language of symbols, metaphors, and dreams. They speak in archetypes and images, not in instructions.
Soul Thread Sessions are one-on-one conversations designed to help you reconnect with your identity, inner truth, and the deeper meaning behind your life experiences.
Thank you....I may be that woman!
Powerful 🙏❤️