The Gold Is Already In You! Time to Let It Shine!
Welcome to my Monday Morning Message
We all have a story. And for many of us, that story comes from a difficult childhood, a broken home, loss, money struggles, or circumstances we never chose. Those experiences were real. The pain was real. Nobody gets to tell you otherwise.
I recently read an article about the alchemy of pain. It got me thinking about my own story.
For a long time, the one I repeated to anyone who would listen was that when I was 15, my dad left my mom with nine kids and took most of the money. It did make life harder in so many ways.
But it happened when I was 15. Not yesterday. And yet I told it like it happened yesterday. It became the reason I didn’t ______. Fill in the blank.
Have you ever noticed how when a group of friends gets together, one person shares their pain story and then another chimes in — until everyone is reliving and cementing old wounds?
You start to realize you’ve heard these stories before. Because some people have been telling them for decades.
Pain has a sneaky way of becoming an identity. “I am the way I am because of what happened to me.” Understandable — but also, quietly, a cage.
Putting down that story can feel like a loss. The victim narrative can feel safe — it explains things, protects us, keeps us from doing the things that scare us.
Letting go and forgiving your past can feel disorienting, like losing a crutch you forgot you were leaning on.
But on the other side of that discomfort is something extraordinary.
A life no longer defined by what happened to you, but by what you chose to do with it.
The alchemists believed they could transform base metal into gold. Reframing your narrative does exactly that. The difficult childhood becomes the source of your empathy. The struggle becomes your grit.
The broken pieces become what makes you relatable, credible, and real. Some people channel that pain into a career as a doctor, a therapist, into art, music, or writing — turning emotional energy into something lasting and meaningful.
You get to be the author. The pain gets to be a chapter but not the whole book, and certainly not the ending.
Hooray! You made it through. Now let that be your headline.
With warmth,
Colette