There’s a story you’ve been telling to others, maybe for years. You know the one. It has a beginning, a middle, and a tidy lesson tucked neatly at the end. The rough parts have been smoothed over and the embarrassing details have been quietly removed. The moment you fell apart completely is only mentioned briefly, then moved past.
That story is clean and presentable, but it’s not the whole truth.
Here’s the thing about editing your own stories: we do it out of instinct and we do it out of fear. We trim the jagged edges not because they’re unimportant, but because showing them feels dangerous. What will people think? What if they judge me, feel differently about me, or worse, pity me? So we sand down those jagged edges until they’re smooth and in doing so, we sand away the very texture that would have moved someone. Sometimes the jagged edges are what allow people to connect with us or feel seen.
Authenticity can be scary. I’m not arguing that point. I get it, I promise. But it’s this same trait that makes us more approachable, that helps us build connection with others, and honestly, can also feel very freeing.
The Two Versions of Every Story
Every experience you’ve lived has two versions. There’s the exterior story which includes the sequence of events, what happened in what order, the obstacle you faced and what you did about it. It’s very “job interview-esque.” (Remember the STAR method of how to answer interview questions that many of us learned – Situation, Task, Action, Result? Handy in interviews, less handy in showing up authentically in real life). This is the version most of us tell. It’s organized, the narrative makes sense, and we show up like capable, strong, wise humans..
And then there’s the interior story that’s less about what happened and more about what it felt like to be inside it. This is the specific, often unglamorous texture of living through something in real time. It’s not the smooth, glossy cover of a book or magazine, it’s the dog-eared pages inside, the notes in the margins, the coffee stain just inside the front cover. Yes, “it was an incredibly difficult period” but what did it feel like in the moment you sat in your car in the parking lot and couldn’t make yourself go in. The Sunday night dread that arrived before you had a name for it that devolved into just wanting to give up?. The conversation you replayed on a loop for three weeks and you never ended up having the courage to have?
The exterior story tells people what you went through. The interior story makes them feel like they were there with you.
Most of us default to the exterior not because we’re dishonest, but because we’ve been trained to present ourselves cleanly. We summarize, contextualize, and get to the lesson efficiently. But every time we do, we leave out the very material that would have made someone else feel less alone.
What Makes a Story Irreducibly Yours
The events of your story are almost certainly not unique to you. As my mother used to say while I was growing up, “Nobody ever died of terminal uniqueness.” Plenty of people have been laid off. Plenty of people have failed publicly, lost a business, gone through a divorce, faced a diagnosis, questioned everything they’d built. If the events alone were what made a story powerful, every story would land the same. But they don’t, and here’s why.
What makes your story irreducibly yours is more than what happened, it’s the interior monologue. Someone else may or may not have experienced the same events. They connect through the texture of your story. That’s the alchemy of authentic storytelling. We feel it in the specific feeling of being in over your head, the exhaustion of pretending you have it together, or the strange grief of realizing you’ve been living someone else’s version of your life. I’ve felt every single one of those things. I think so many of us have. Specificity, it turns out, is what creates universality. The more precisely you describe your interior, the more someone else sees themselves in it. The more you resist the urge to smooth it over, the more it lands. So when you’re telling a story, and you go beyond the cover, you stop telling your story and start telling the story — the human one that runs underneath all of our particular circumstances.
Why We Edit — And What It Costs Us
We edit our stories for reasons that feel completely reasonable in the moment. We don’t want to seem self-pitying. We don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. We’re not sure the hard parts are “relevant.” We’ve told the story enough times that we’ve unconsciously streamlined it into something more palatable.
But there’s another reason, one that’s worth naming directly: we edit because we haven’t fully made peace with what happened. The parts we skip are often the parts that still sting. And when we gloss over them in the telling, it can feel like we’re protecting ourselves. We’re also protecting our audience from the very thing that would have connected them to us.
Believability gets lost when we edit. A story with no rough edges impresses at best, and bores at worst. It reads like a highlight reel rather than a lived experience. People can tell, even when they can’t quite name it.
The goal isn’t to make your audience uncomfortable, or to unpack every painful detail indiscriminately. It’s to include enough of the interior that they can inhabit the story with you. One specific, honest, undefended detail does more work than three paragraphs of context.
Where This Lands in the CHART Framework
In Sparking Greatness, I write about authenticity as the third element of an inspirational story — the A in the CHART framework: Courage, Hardship, Authenticity, Resilience, and Transformation.
Of all five, authenticity is the one that most directly lives in the interior.
Think about it this way. You can describe courage from the outside — here’s what I did, here’s the risk I took. But courage only becomes felt when you go inside: what were you afraid of, specifically? What were you telling yourself in the moment? What would it have cost you to walk away? The interior is what makes courage visible rather than merely declared.
The same is true across the whole framework. Hardship without the interior sounds like a summary. Resilience without the interior sounds like a bumper sticker. Transformation without the interior sounds like a sales pitch. Authenticity is what makes all four of the other elements real, because authenticity lives precisely in the territory we’re most tempted to edit out.
When you tell the story only you can tell — the interior version, with the specific details intact — all five elements get to be true at once and it’s the architecture of how inspiration actually works.
Your Turn
You have a story you’ve been telling a cleaner version of. Maybe it’s how you left a career. Maybe it’s a season of doubt you’ve been framing as a footnote. Maybe it’s something smaller — a decision, a failure, a version of yourself you haven’t quite let anyone see.
What would it look like to tell the interior version?
Not to perform vulnerability or bare everything for the sake of it, but to include the specific, true, felt experience of living through it (the part you keep editing out because you’re not sure it belongs.)
It belongs.
What’s the story you’ve been telling a different version of?
Share Your CHART Story
I’m pretty positive that every single one of you reading this blog has a story that fits within the CHART framework. I’d be honored if you’d share it with me. Just send me an email at danielle.b.baldwin@gmail.com if you’re willing to share.
