My father told me I would always have a car payment.
Not as a warning. Not as a lesson. Just a comment, passed along the way a neighbor passes along a recipe, casual, certain, not particularly meant to stick. Son, you’re always going to have a car payment, so you may as well drive something you enjoy.
No context about percentages. No conversation about what reasonable looks like. Just that. And I took it.
For decades I carried it. Trading vehicles. Chasing something that felt like freedom but looked a lot like ego, including a sports car my arthritic knees couldn’t actually get in and out of without a quiet negotiation between my body and my pride. It wasn’t until my mid-30s, working through a budgeting program, that I paid off a car for the first time.
I would have liked to ask my father about it. He passed before I thought to.
Some stories come from people we can no longer reach. And we keep living inside them anyway.
The Stories Running in the Background
Every person is walking around with a narrative about who they are and what they’re capable of. Most of it was written a long time ago, by a parent, a teacher, a moment, a comment that was never even specifically meant for them.
The story doesn’t announce itself. It runs in the background, quietly deciding which opportunities are for someone like you and which ones aren’t. It shapes decisions you don’t even know are connected to the moment that wrote it.
That’s the part that’s worth looking at.
I’m Not Dead. And I’m Not 25.
Sixth or seventh grade. A teacher making a generalization about a demographic in the classroom, a demographic I was part of. The comment wasn’t directed at me by name. It didn’t need to be.
You’re not going to live past 25.
I didn’t walk out of that classroom and write it down. I didn’t think about it consciously for years. It just went somewhere, into the background, into the catalogue the brain keeps of the things it decides are true about the world and about you.
And then Iraq. 2004. A rocket. A metal structure. A traumatic brain injury.
Weeks later, somewhere in the processing of what had happened and what almost hadn’t, I was past 25. I had lived past what she said.
And looking back from that point, I could see moments where I hadn’t valued my own life the way I should have. Where I put my body through things that weren’t necessary. Took risks that didn’t need to be taken. Made choices that, in hindsight, look less like living and more like something else.
Was I trying to prove her right? I don’t know. I can’t say for certain. But the story had been running, quietly, in the background, shaping decisions I didn’t know were connected to a classroom I hadn’t thought about in fourteen years.
I’m not dead. And I’m not 25.
That’s the moment everything shifts. Not a dramatic revelation. Just a clear look at what had been running, and the recognition that it was time to look at it directly.
The work on ourselves never ends. It changes as we move through life. But it starts with finding the stories. Both of them, the car payment and the classroom, were forward progress and got me closer to where and who I wanted to become.
The Sugary Purple Drink
Here’s the teaching moment. Pay attention to this one.
A child at a birthday party. The kind with the little barrel drinks, aluminum foil lid you peel back, the burn in the throat, the specific sugar rush that only exists once a year at someone else’s house. The child goes back for a second one.
Someone in the room calls them greedy.
One word. One moment. Nobody in that room meant to write a story that would last thirty years. But now that child is an adult, and they give everything to everyone, and they have no boundaries, and they feel deeply uncomfortable sitting in their own peace, because somewhere in the background, greedy is still running. Still deciding. Still costing them something every single day.
Go get two of them. Throw in an otter pop, straight out the freezer. Make yourself some tea. Get back to your book.
The story was never true. It was just old. And it was written by someone who did not have the authority to define you.
Go Looking
Not all background stories are negative. Some of us had a latchkey afternoon and a nature documentary and curiosity that wrote something worth keeping. The brain does what it’s designed to do: it catalogues the scary things, keeps you in the box, protects you from the risks that once felt like threats.
But the box was built on incomplete information. We took something that happened at ten and applied it at thirty without ever stopping to ask whether it still fits.
Some things will never change. That is not entirely true.
When you look at the stories, really look, with the same curiosity you’d bring to any other problem worth solving, most of them don’t hold up. The evidence is thinner than you thought. The source had less authority than you gave them. The comment was never meant to last this long.
I still have stories running in my background I haven’t found yet. I know that. The work on ourselves never ends.
But I know what it looks like to go looking. And I know it’s worth it.
If you want a partner for that, someone willing to go down every rabbit hole, examine the evidence, and sit with what actually holds up, that’s what the discovery call is for. I’ll tell you this: the stories aren’t true. Not completely. Not anymore.
LaSchwann Killens is an ICF-trained life and executive coach and the founder of VALADD Coaching. He works with people who are ready to stop living inside a story they never chose.