The Story You Grow Up Inside

There is the world you live in, and then there is the world that teaches you how to see it. We all experience this.

For most of us, that second world arrives early. It comes through television, books, films, and people's opinions seen through their prism. These are stories that repeat themselves until they begin to feel like a fixture in our minds rather than a passing narrative. Going about your daily life, you don’t question them. You absorb them. They influence you. The seeds planted grow into something foreign, an invasive species in your psyche.

What I noticed growing up was not dramatic at the time. We had one channel, ABS. It showed Cooking Magic, a Friday 6:00 PM cooking show with Gwen Tonge, and other things like Debate, Top of the Form, a random interview, and the news. The rest were often foreign shows. It was quieter then. Later, we had satellite cable, and the Internet brought us global access. Our patterns changed. The heroes looked and behaved a certain way. The center of the story was always somewhere else. There was snow and daffodils. Even when the settings were imagined, the logic of who mattered remained consistent.

You learn, without being told, where you belong in that arrangement. You heard foreign accents tell you about you.

Years later, I watch my nieces and nephews take in their own versions of these stories. The production is better now. The range is wider. But the underlying architecture still reveals itself if you pay attention. Who is complex. Who is peripheral? Who gets to change, and who exists to support that change. Which character dies early? Who gets screen time? How are they portrayed?

There is research on this — the impact of representation, the cognitive imprint of repeated narratives. It is not abstract or imagined. It shapes confidence, expectation, and even the sense of what is possible before a person has the language to articulate it. Even as adults, we still can't articulate it. Self-esteem is ruined, and you can never tell why.

I remember hearing Malcolm Gladwell on Trevor Noah's What Now talk show, speaking about his young sponge of a daughter and the stories she was surrounded by. He was not outraged, but with a kind of measured concern, he noted a constant he could not shake. An awareness that what children consume does not simply entertain them. It builds the frame through which they understand themselves.

That is the part that lingers. It's there that the seed was planted.

Because the question is not only what is present in those stories, but what is missing. What never appears. What remains outside the frame entirely.

And what it means to grow up inside that absence.

If the stories we inherit help define the edges of our imagination, then what happens to the parts of ourselves that never see themselves there at all?