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I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn__ matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong.Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted.If you tell yourself you__e a winner, you know what kind of story you__e telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you__e a loser, you__e made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser__ story as in the winner__ story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything.Here__ the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn__ the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname _ Heidi _ to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again.Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero__ journey.