When I was in high school I remember my dad telling my siblings and me a story about David in the moments before he fought Goliath. The Israelite King Saul met with David, who volunteered to fight the giant, and, in the haste of preparing for the unlikely turn of events Saul was watching unfurl, he gave David his armor to fight the giant. He clad David from head to toe in warrior gear, except that when David took the first step, the whole get-up just didn’t work.

The armor had been made for Saul, a man described as being a head taller than the tallest men, and at that time, David was just a teenager. Clearly, Saul’s armor wouldn’t protect David, only hinder him. So David shucked the armor, went to the stream to gather smooth stones and armed himself with the skill he knew how to wield best—sling-shooting.

At the time we heard that story, I thought it would be another spiritual reflection he was sharing with us. But after he was done telling the story, my dad looked my brother straight in the eye and confessed that he felt he had often done the same with him. He had often tried to put his armor on my brother, and he realized that was hindering my brother’s growth more than helping it. My dad had learned that instead of expecting my brother to grow up into my dad’s mold and stature, he needed to let my brother grow into his own personhood and character.

For some reason, that moment took root deep inside of me then, but I did not remember it until this week.

Growing up is a strange thing. Sometimes I feel like a specimen trapped in solid amber and tree sap that slowly opens its eyes as the amber thins and it realizes it has a choice to go somewhere, anywhere, away from what it’s always known. Many people often talk about millennials like we are opinionated hot air balloons rising and rising to our own stratosphere—as though we had somehow made and shaped ourselves outside of the crucible of human interaction.

But as I mindfully and intentionally analyzed my daily routine, I realized that’s not the case. We may just be, as millennials, more enmeshed in the crucible of human development than any other generation in history.

We are living in scattered epicenters of globalization. We wake up and in a single swipe of our fingertips, we have access to what’s going on in the world at large. If we so chose, we could single out any news headline and learn more nuanced information on the minutiae of the event by delving into pieces and articles online. Trends and patterns that begin on the other side of the globe can hop over to us effortlessly and before we know it we’ve internalized what we’d like to be identified with and made it part of who we are. We have all kinds of internalized identities—based on food choices, fashion, religion, political views, and education that originated in places far-removed from us.

And because we are very much the product of globalized cultures, we have revealed just how prescription-oriented we are as humans. My bookshelves are full of authors whose memoirs, essays, and novels have shaped who I am; with the click of a button or the swipe of a card, I have chosen their influence on me—so many of the words I write are the chemical product of their words sloshing around in my brain. My favorite show hosts, activists, authors, vloggers, and educators have their fingerprints all over my internet tabs, all over my thought-space and my imagination and my career dreams. And the people we surround ourselves with are similarly saturated by all their respective influences, and they feed into us—and thus we are constantly pruning our brain circuits and habits through the choices of who and what will shape us.

It should, then, be of no surprise to us to find that many people are trying to fit their armor on us. And as prescriptive human beings who subscribe to the storytellers we revere, we crave a narrative that makes sense, that fits with who we want to be (and not necessarily with who we are right now).

Whichever storyteller or narrative we turn to becomes the thing that shapes us. Whichever narrative or storyteller captures us has tremendous power over us.

Not to say we are not autonomous beings—but our choices extend to, and are limited by, giving this power away to what influences us.

And sometimes we do not choose the narrative because it is chosen for us. Now, I know the word "narrative" can seem superfluous and pretentious compared to the pain of reality, but narrative truly does translate into reality.

One of the ways that I have seen the power of an unchosen narrative becoming reality is through internalized prejudice and racism.

When you grow up seeing yourself as inferior for something you cannot change, like the color of your skin, but the dominant narrative, whether spoken with words or through economic inequality, marks you as inferior, it’s hard for you to counter that dominant narrative when it’s all you’ve ever known. The storytellers in our lives—be it leaders or parents, teachers or friends, TV shows or books—have so much power over our identities. What we believe about ourselves and the world around us alters human lives, economic systems, the entire infrastructure of societies. The narrative reaches far and runs deep.

The same applies to sexism, which is alive and well today as it's ever been. When fathers, the men who are supposed to be first in a woman’s life to value and empower her, give away their daughters as child brides and walk away without looking back, what is the narrative being internalized by the daughters? What do they continue to believe as the rest of their lives consists of being a man’s object and target of abuse? And if we think for one second this narrative only proliferates in countries where child brides and child widows exist, we are deluding ourselves. The narrative of sexism is alive and well in our own neighborhood where sexual abuse and domestic violence abounds.

Once again, narrative shapes us.

In his book, The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall explains just how much. He gives an example of how our existence—from our psyche to our physiology—is story-centered when he talks about memory. We trust our memory more than we should because we are so confident on its capacity for storage, but our brains deceive us. They are so wired to make sense out of the world that when we don’t remember gaps in memories, our brains will make things up to fill in. They will tell us a story and we will believe them because we don’t know any better. Like missing gaps in our field of vision and our blind side, our brain gets images from our surroundings to fill the gaps even if those images aren’t actually being projected into our retinas through light.

John Lennon may have sung about a world without religion and politics, but those are also narratives that shape us—and even Lennon had a narrative he craved, his utopia of untroubled perfection.

Going back to the bizarre specimen-trapped-in-amber analogy, what I mean to say is that growing up requires taking a step back and analyzing the narrative that is shaping you and the person you are becoming. Going away to college, for me, has meant stepping away from the tight network of stories that raised me; it has meant gaining enough distance to differentiate what the stories my parents told me were and what I actually believe and live by. It has often been a painful disengagement, like a child transitioning from womb to world—learning to breathe a new atmosphere, waking up to airborne sound.

But this discovery has also meant that I’m no longer hearing the storyteller through my mother’s voice. I’m no longer breathing the oxygen of my family’s words. I’m learning to breathe by myself. I’m learning to hear the storyteller with my own ears.

The narrative of God turning into a human being and saving us from our brokenness doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, and frankly, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to me. But I resonate with the psalmist who sang “your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.” Clearly he/she understands that they will be shaped by something, and they are wanting the person who made them in the first place to keep molding them into the people they need to become.

There are many destructive narratives in my life that I also need to overcome. Narratives of internalized prejudice, sexism, anxiety, depression, and defeat. Things I do not want to be defined by. In the words of poetess and artist Rupi Kaur,

trying to convince myself
i am allowed
to take up space
is like writing with
my left hand
when I was born
to use my right

And this brings me to one last thing. Just like there are narratives I know, both good and destructive, there are many I don’t know. And then there are narratives that were supposed to be good, but have turned harmful because people tried to force them, like an armor that doesn’t fit, on someone who was meant to wear a different armor.

Good storytellers speak with as much humility as they do with courage. Good storytellers listen first and ask lots of good questions.

This is why I welcome people and stories and authors and artists who come and speak into my life like street prophets stirring up a revolution inside of me, waking me to a reality I’ve been blind to. This is why I need to be reminded—often to my discomfort and grief—that being teachable is often more important than being knowledgeable.

There are people right now laying down their comfort and their lives to fight the deadly dominant narrative of oppression —whether in the middle of a crowd defending the worth of black lives, or being tear-gassed by police as they fight for their rightful land; these fighters have understood how destructive narratives favor some people at the expense of others and are attempting to rewrite history. And this revision of history has had its victories, slow and painful ones, but victories nonetheless, giving us hope to wield the pen and press on.

Because in the end, the more we understand the narratives that shape us the sooner we can start making changes, listening to a different storyteller, and becoming more truthful storytellers ourselves.