Is my story really enough?

Don’t join the comparison Olympics team.

There’s a belief most women carry when they think about writing their story. It has to be big. Dramatic. Resolved with a neat redemption arc that feels Hallmark complete. Then they think: Mine isn’t any of those things. So maybe I don’t have a story to tell.

Or even worse, they start competing in the comparison Olympics. My story isn’t as [fill in the blank] as hers.

Here’s what I actually know. What actually makes a story worth telling has nothing to do with scale.

It has to do with what you learned—the transformation for the reader, something they can take with them, or something that makes them feel less alone. It’s actually not even about you.

If you’ve felt something deeply, that’s enough. If you’ve learned something about yourself or the world that shifted how you move through it, that’s a story.

What counts as a story? A marriage that looked fine from the outside but wasn’t. Loving someone through mental illness. Living with addiction. Becoming a caregiver. Developing a better way to deliver a service that people actually need. Infertility. Miscarriage. A health scare that changed everything. Growing up with something nobody talked about. A friendship that saved you. Career wins and failures that taught you something real. Living inside a system that stopped serving you and choosing to leave it. An encounter with a stranger. A trip that revealed something unexpected.

The women I work with all have stories worth telling. What they’re missing is this: If someone needs to hear that they’re not the only one, they’re your reader. And your story is exactly what they need.

What you bring is the detail. A small, true moment that evokes emotion. The words that were said. The color of the waiting room. The way your hands shook. That’s what makes someone reading it feel like you’re speaking directly to them. Not because your story is big, but because it’s real and specific and textured in a way that is yours.

What if it’s not about your story being big enough? What if it’s about being specific enough? Feeling enough? Mattering to the one person who needs to read it?

That’s enough. You’re enough.

This originally appeared on my Substack.

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