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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I thought that I had gotten over so-called “imposter syndrome,” in which a person feels like a fraud, poorly qualified to do the things they’re doing (or want to do).

I remember when I could not — could not — create a website for my music. It felt totally phony to write a third-person bio (“Casey is a singer-songwriter who labors in obscurity…”) and when I went to write a first-person bio instead, I shut down completely. Years later, I felt grateful not to be there anymore. I could now start things and follow through on them. I could do the work that needed to be done (including writing bios) easily and without angst.

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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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I was playing outside with one of my nephews (because I am an exceedingly lucky person, I have five of them). We were throwing poorly inflated balls back and forth, following the kind of arbitrary and unfair rules favored by young children.

In other words, he made the rules, and I followed them.

We threw our balls in the same direction, where they landed side by side in the wet grass. “You lost that time,” he said. “You say, “Darn!”

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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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