The First Story You Tell Yourself

Written before your feet even hit the floor

For most people, the story starts before 6am.

Before coffee. Before a single word is spoken to another human being. You step onto a scale, in the dark, half awake... and a number tells you a story.

You don't question it. You don't fact-check it. You just believe it.

And here's the part that gets me. That story doesn't stay in the bathroom. It gets dressed with you. It rides in the car with you. It sits in on your meetings, shows up at lunch, and follows you into every conversation you have for the rest of the day... even the ones that have nothing to do with a scale.

By the time your head hits the pillow tonight, you'll have made a hundred small decisions based on a story that started before sunrise and that you never once stopped to ask... is this even true?

I know this story because I've been living inside it, and studying it, for fifteen years.

But something happened to me recently that I didn't see coming, even after all this time.

I'm an early riser. Always have been. And I'm an early writer... most of what I've built came out of me before the world woke up, in that same quiet hour when everyone else is stepping on their scale.

For years, that early hour was where I worked on other people's stories. Helping them question theirs. Helping them find the truer version.

Then I finished my own.

I wrote the last word of the manuscript in that same early quiet. Hit send. And just like that, it was gone... off to be printed, bound, made real, on its way back to me as an actual physical proof I could hold.

I didn't expect what came next. Not pride, exactly. Something closer to recognition.

I realized I'd spent fifteen years asking other people to question the story their scale tells them each morning... and I'd never fully turned that question on the story I told myself, every single early morning, about who I still was and what I still had to say.

The manuscript didn't just leave my hands. It handed something back to me first.

So here's what I keep coming back to, sitting in that same early quiet, waiting for a printed proof to arrive in the mail.

Whatever story shows up for you first thing tomorrow morning... on a scale, in a mirror, in that first thought before you're even fully awake... it doesn't get the whole day. It only gets to keep it if you let it.

You get to ask the same question I finally asked. Is this the whole story? Or just the first draft?

be your best self now… - J.

The Tale of Your Scale available on Amazon 9.15.

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