“I have a hard time talking to new people,” says a seventh grader. “I have social anxiety.”

“I’m such a procrastinator,” says another. “I know what I’m supposed to do, but I will avoid it until the last possible moment. I feel terrible about it.”

It’s not a bad thing that this generation of kids is very self-aware. It beats the cluelessness of my own cohort -- we didn’t have the Internet to help us figure out what was going on or find people who shared and validated our weird traits. But I worry sometimes that all the labels these adolescents give themselves will prevent them from seeing that they always have the possibility of changing their habits and disrupting their patterns, even if their personality remains fixed.

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On one dark morning, forty minutes after sunrise, the streetlights came back on.

The clouds were so heavy that they convinced the light’s sensors that it was night.

We humans can be fooled, too. The contrast between a bright sunny day and a moody, cloudy one — or stormy one — is stark. When you’re in one, it’s hard to imagine, from the evidence, that another is possible.

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The first time I went to Charleston, South Carolina, I was angry.

Despite Charleston’s notorious role as the busiest American port in the slave trade, I saw no evidence of its dark past as I strolled the cobblestone streets.

There’s a building dedicated to the Daughters of the Confederacy. There’s a major street named after John C. Calhoun, who defended slavery to the last and put up roadblocks to any initiatives to curtail it. There’s also a towering statue of him, right downtown.

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The stories we tell ourselves can help us our hurt us. The ways in which we measure ourselves can reinforce the awful story or help us to build a new one.

We keep the awful stories out of habit. There’s something comforting about clinging to the story that reinforces what we’ve always believed, even when it makes us feel terrible.

A story like, “I keep thinking I’ll be good at things, but I’m always bad at them.”

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So much of the vast array of self-help literature boils down to this:

If the story you’re telling yourself is making you unhappy, tell yourself a different story.

Our stories come from many places: Family, church, school, and that all-purpose scapegoat, society. Some stories seem to be our own creations. Believe it or not, even very young children already have a narrative that is helping them (or perhaps not helping them) to make sense of the world.

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