Stepping Out of Your Story
By Neale Donald Walsch
Posted on June 15, 2025
My dear friends…
Each of us has a “story” that we’re living. It is the story that we tell ourselves (and others) about who we are and how we got to be this way and how we wish life to be from now on. Every time we get our feelings hurt, or find ourselves disappointed in something that someone else has done or said (or not done or not said), we are getting into our “story.” Every time we set ourselves up with expectations or requirements (of ourselves or others), we are getting into our “story.” Every time we find ourselves reacting and responding to another (or to ourselves) from a place of hurt or damage (real or perceived), we are getting into our “story.”
Our “story” can literally run our lives. Indeed, for most people it is the only thing that does. We come from our story when we face incoming data, and we go to our story when we send outgoing data. Take our “story” away and we all but disappear.
Here is a typical example of a “story”: Marilyn was eight years old when she was molested by her stepfather the first time. It happened again, until she turned 14, when it finally stopped, for reasons about which she was never clear. She kept her stepfather’s behavior a secret from her entire family, and especially her mother, until she was 16. Then, she quietly and tearfully took her mother aside and told her everything.
Her mother didn’t believe her.
Her mother called Marilyn a liar and a dirty little tramp who was just so angry at her stepfather for the rules he was laying down around the house that she was willing to stop at nothing, at no allegation or exaggeration, to hurt him, to get him out of the house and out of her life.
Marilyn has been “coming from” this “story” ever since. How this shows up in her life is a deep disregard and distrust of all males, and also as a continual wariness about confiding in or trusting anybody. She looks to all people who are close to her (that is, if she can even allow herself to get close to people) to betray her sooner or later, and this mars and terribly complicates her relationships with everyone.
She also feels and relives the damage from the original offense, and soothes the unhealed places in herself with various kinds of “acting out,” including drug and alcohol abuse and, ironically, a kind of sexual addiction that has her enter into all sorts of liaisons with men, allowing them to fall in love with her, only then to drop them like hot potatoes, leaving them reeling with hurt and anger — all as a “pay back” for their being “male.”
This is just an example. Everyone has a story they are coming from as they encounter the world. Some stories are more serious in their ramifications than others, but all stories play their effect on the day-to-day living of individual lives…until they don’t anymore.
The time comes when people simply decide that they no longer wish to identity themselves with their “story,” but now wish to “come from” a new set of data when they engage life itself. This process of “dropping their story” is not an easy one, but it can be done. It is a matter of stepping aside from the story and realizing that “that was then, and this is now.” It is a matter of actively choosing to never again mortgage a future moment to a past one.
The trick to stepping outside of your story is to drop the need for any story altogether. This could only occur if you were completely clear about Who You Are and Who You Choose to Be. You would have to understand that you are, indeed, a local manifestation of Divinity. You would have to understand that there is no disconnection between you and God. You would have to be aware that you are a Soul traveling through life with your body, but that you are not the body itself.
Once you identify yourself in this fashion you will easily see that there is nothing you need to be perfectly happy, completely at peace, and embracing always the joy and the wonder of your True Self. Then you will have no need to continue living inside of your story, because you will see clearly that it is bringing you emotional rewards and psychological content that you no longer need or require. This will create a huge shift in your ground of being and will alter your experience of life forever.
Home with God in a Life That Never Ends, says that death is a process of re-identification. It also says that one does not have to wait until death for this process to begin. You may undertake the process whenever you wish during your lifetime. The process starts with the dropping of your personal story. One reason that some people have great trouble in letting go of their past data is that they have created an entire persona around that data. Everyone thinks and assumes that this is “who they really are,” when, in truth, it has nothing to do with their True Identity at all.
Here is a little exercise that you might enjoy: start off tomorrow morning by entering your day as if you had no prior data about any aspect of your life whatsoever. Pretend that you know nothing about your past — especially any aspect of your past that you once perceived to have caused you injury or damage. Move through the day as if nothing that is happening Right Now has anything to do with anything that happened Before. Even if something that is occurring right in front of your face reminds you greatly of a previous encounter with life, ignore the Old Data and move forward through the present moment without judgment or any reaction to the prior experience. See if this is possible for you to do. If it is, you have learned Detachment, and that is a very good skill to acquire.
Every sunrise, indeed, every new moment of every day is truly a New Beginning in which you may, just as the book says, re-create yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about who you are. You may begin life over again Right Now, and nothing is stopping you from doing that except yourself. The process is actually easier done than said!
With Love,
Neale Donald Walsch
