The Stories We Tell Ourselves

A weekly letter to warm your soul

Welcome to the first issue of Love Aktually, aptly named by the queen of puns, Suga ☕️

This feels a bit strange for me because I never thought I’d start a newsletter. I also said the same thing about my YouTube channel. It turns out, there’s a lot of things that I never thought I'd do, yet ended up starting within the last year. If I'm being completely honest with you, I’ve wanted to start a personal blog or a YouTube channel for years but I always thought I wasn’t likeable or confident enough to put myself out there. It's a story I kept telling myself.

So my question to you is this: what stories do you tell yourself? 

Do you tell yourself you’re not a runner, so you never train for that 5K? Do you tell yourself that you’re not a good communicator and avoid leading conversations? Do you tell yourself that you're bad in relationships and shy away from any of the healthy ones?

You may not know it, but in the depths of your mind, you've been holding a pen this whole time, writing countless stories which serve as the scripts for how you live. Those stories and narratives act as comfort blankets, bundling us up in safety and protecting us from our real fears (failure).

Now let me tell you about another story I used to tell myself. When I was at school, I told myself that I was only good at maths and science, not any of the humanitarian subjects. Meanwhile, one of my best friends was amazing at English, and I looked at her in awe, thinking that could never be me. Telling myself that story over and over again meant that I focused more on science experiments than reading my copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm. At least, that was until my English teacher gave me such in depth feedback about how I could improve, that I couldn’t help but try. And I did improve. English and English Literature ended up becoming two of my best subjects at school, I even did the latter as one of my A levels, and years later, here I am writing this newsletter.

This newsletter may have never come into existence if I still told myself the story of being good at only maths and science.

So what stories can you rewrite?

Love,

Akta

Words of the week

“some people will not like the version of you that you are becoming because the older version of you is more comfortable for them, more understandable to them, more resonant with them. if your growth intimidates them, you’re not obligated to keep making space for what shrinks you.”

Youtube video

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