When My Mother Turned My Private World Into a Joke

A blue pottery box. A newspaper clipping of a boy from a movie. A twelve year old who thought she had found a private corner of herself and hidden it somewhere safe. The moment a parent opened that box and turned it into a joke, three things happened at once. The private space was taken. The feeling was mocked. And a quiet message landed: you are not enough for what you want. To the adult in the room it was nothing. A passing moment, a bit of teasing, forgotten before she left the room. To the child it became the architecture of how relationships would feel for years afterward. How safe it was to want something. How wise it was to hide. How likely it was that being seen would end in humiliation. That is how stories form. Rarely through the events that look significant from the outside. More often through the small, unremarkable moments that land at exactly the wrong time, during exactly the right stage of becoming, when the self is still deciding what to believe about the world and about its own place in it. You do not know these moments are shaping you while they are happening. There is no signal. No sense of weight. The belief forms underneath awareness and then runs quietly, informing every choice that follows, without ever announcing where it came from. The foundation being described here is myth. The personal myth. The story a person builds, without knowing they are building it, from the accumulation of experiences and the beliefs those experiences produced. Your myth is running whether you are conscious of it or whether you are. The question is whether the story it tells is one you would choose. The archetype attached to this is the Magical Knightmare, where nightmare is spelled with an i, because every experience that looks like a nightmare is also, in the right light, something that was keeping you safe or showing you your own strength. The magic is in what you do with it once you can see it clearly. Reflection is how the story becomes visible. And once it is visible, it becomes a choice. You can carry the belief forward or you can examine it, hold it up, ask whether it belongs to you, and decide to write something different. The life around you is a reflection of the story held within. Change the story and the reflection shifts. That is the whole thing. That is the foundation. Recorded and first published 15 May 2026. __ I’ve burned through enough identities to stop believing in a final version of myself. For a long time, I stood in the middle of reality demanding answers. Reality laughed, lit a cigarette, and left me holding the blueprint. Now I trace the patterns in identity, belief and human behaviour, and talk about what I find. My Ego Says Hi holds all my old podcasts, alongside whatever comes next. Different versions of me speaking from different points in the same life. My books, Money Surge, Body Surge and Love Surge, explore the patterns, beliefs and behaviours that shape our relationships with money, our bodies and love. Together they form the Surge Trilogy, three 21-day protocols available as full audiobooks on Spotify. Money Surge https://open.spotify.com/show/0MnVWHQgPQiaQLgzWADVRd Body Surge https://open.spotify.com/show/1wyLX50IhCOaRMeuncGd6Z Love Surge https://open.spotify.com/show/14jYtxSRLHrd8cfOmDtvNU I write about identity, belief and human behaviour on Substack. My website brings together my writing, art, portfolio and systems. Writing & Essays https://annachitticksego.substack.com Portfolio & Systems https://annachittick.com