we become the stories others tell about us

words shape us as much as they describe us

“Call a boy a gentleman and watch his shoulders straighten. Call a girl a lady and watch her spirit turn graceful. Humanity was brought into existence by God speaking words into the void of the universe. We tend to become what we are called.” - The Medicine of Hope

I keep returning to that idea: we tend to become what we are called. Think of the words you reach for when you describe yourself: quiet, funny, rude, gentle. We wear these words as if they were entirely our own, but how many did we actually choose? How many were smuggled in, slipped to us through a passing comment, a stranger’s glance, a lover’s remark? The self, I’m reminded again and again, is a story written in collaboration, drafted from the words others use to name us.

This piece can be read as a continuation of my earlier essay, Some Parts of You Only Emerge for Certain People. There, I explored how relationships draw hidden facets of us to the surface. Here, I want to go further: we are revealed by others, but also actively authored by their words. To be named is to be seen and to begin becoming.

We tend to become what we are called, and just as easily, we drift away from what is no longer named. When I stepped into the full-time corporate world, writer was no longer one of my words. At work I was acknowledged as a “stakeholder manager” and “client collaborator,” but never a writer. The word itself vanished from how others described me, and so it slipped from how I described myself. What brought it back a few months ago were my friends, asking casually, “Have you been writing?” or nudging me to try my hand at essays. Their faith kept the flame alive just long enough for me to claim it again.

words lighting up who we are

I think of it a bit like light falling across a face. Under butterfly lighting, Rembrandt lighting, or rim light, the same person looks entirely different, each angle pulling out certain features, exaggerating some, softening others. Words work like that. The labels and descriptions others use act as different lighting setups: one word sharpens you, another softens you, another casts you in dramatic relief. None of them are the whole picture, yet together they shape the image you come to recognise as yourself.

Or think of a diamond: its surface refracts differently depending on where the light strikes. From one angle you catch blue fire, from another a sudden flash of red or gold. Words are like that too. Each description lands at its own angle, drawing out a different facet of who we are. Called stubborn, we gleam one way; called resilient, another. No single word captures the whole, yet together they refract the many colours of our presence.

Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon

We know this truth already when we talk about parents. The ones who notice a child’s spark and fan it into flame, or the ones who crush it with neglect. Sometimes we witness the opposite extreme: parents who insist their child is flawless, an angel beyond reproach. That kind of blindness helps no one. Maybe, I’ve come to believe, what matters is something more like an encouraging clear-eyedness. The faith that we are not yet who we could be, paired with the grace to assume our intentions are good and our trajectory still unfolding. This is far from dishonest praise, but more like a knowing, loving smile that says, I know you’ll get there.

our fragile architecture

For fiercely independent people, it can feel like a betrayal to admit that your sense of self rests on something as fragile as another’s glance, yet perhaps this is simply the condition of being human. None of us fully escape the architecture of others’ belief.

There are extremes, of course: those who cannot act without validation, who wait for permission before taking a step. But even the most grounded and self-possessed still need someone in their corner, a clear-eyed friend or lover who can remind us of what we forget in the fog. Sometimes it takes another’s description to steady our own, to hold up the mirror that shows us who we are and who we might yet become.

expectation as prophecy

The Greeks told this story first. Pygmalion, a sculptor, carved an ivory woman so beautiful he fell in love with her. He treated the statue as though she were alive, dressing her, kissing her, whispering devotion. And when he prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love answered by bringing the statue to life. Belief animated stone.

Psychologists later borrowed the myth to describe what happens when we hold high expectations for someone: they often live up to them as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers who expect brilliance from certain students unconsciously give more attention, patience, and feedback, and those students, in turn, perform better. This is the Pygmalion effect.

Its shadow twin is the Golem effect: when low expectations drag someone down. Tell a child they’re lazy often enough and you’ll watch their will erode. Describe someone as careless, and soon they will start to see themselves that way. We live inside the prophecies cast upon us.

This is why early encouragement carries such disproportionate weight. Many of the people we call “greats” can trace their trajectory back to a teacher, professor, or mentor who paused long enough to say: you have something special. Sometimes that single moment of recognition plants a seed that grows for decades. As economist Tyler Cowen notes, you can “significantly raise a person’s ambitions when they are young”, often with nothing more than a few words or a gesture of belief. He argues this might be one of the highest-return investments we can make in another human being. A single nudge, well-timed, can alter the entire arc of a life.

Maya Angelou often spoke of how a teacher’s belief in her voice sustained her through years of silence. Albert Einstein credited a single geometry textbook, placed in his hands by a family friend, with awakening his sense of wonder. Again and again, the pattern repeats: someone notices, names, and nudges, and a life bends in a new direction.

Our self-belief can be more like candlelight than flame, fragile, flickering, easily snuffed out by indifference or dismissal. In those early stages, affirmation is oxygen. A few words of belief can steady the hand that carries the candle, shielding it from the winds long enough for it to catch and grow.

I also know this because I’ve felt it myself. In my first year of university, my favourite political science professor, Dr. Boisen, lingered over one of my essays and told me I should apply for a summer writing fellowship. I never applied, but her belief had already done its work. In that brief exchange, she handed me a mirror I hadn’t known I needed, and in it I glimpsed a version of myself I hadn’t yet dared to imagine. Her words quietly rewrote my sense of self.

the loops we live inside

Once you see that words shape us as much as they describe us, two questions emerge.

First: how do you describe those around you? Do you choose to magnify the traits you want to see more of, or do you fixate on the parts you dislike? The difference is often in the framing. Every trait has many lenses. Stubborn can also be resilient. Naive can also be hopeful.

Second: How do those close to you describe you? Are you being shaped into the person you want to be? Because we live in loops of feedback, rewards, reinforcement, growing in the direction our milieu permits.

coevolution

Friends, lovers, family sculpt us as they walk beside us, through the words they choose to emphasise. We are reflections that don’t exist until the mirror tilts, catching the light just so, showing us facets we couldn’t see alone. One person draws out your voice, another your daring, another your steadiness.

The language we use is far from neutral. Each description tilts the mirror, sets the lighting, decides which colours will glint to the surface. We are written into being by what we call ourselves and also what others call us. In turn, the words we offer those around us play a quiet role in the authorship of who they are becoming.

At times this can feel fragile, even fickle, am I only what others see in me? What remains at the core if I am nothing but a house of mirrors? Walk through such a house and you’ll notice: some mirrors flatter, some distort, some stretch you taller or smaller than you feel inside. Yet each reflection, however partial, is still you. Perhaps this isn’t something to be solved, but simply part of being human: gathering these shifting reflections, becoming real in the eyes of others, and returning the favour in kind.

We become what we are called. The stories we inhabit are collaborative fictions, mirrored back to us again and again, shaped by shifting lights, yet no less true for that.

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“You didn’t construct the image you have of yourself, it was handed to you. Constructed layer by layer, built out of glances, comments, expectations. Like a mirror made out of other people’s thoughts. From the moment you are old enough to speak, you are told who you are.” -Alan Watts

Goethe: “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

One of my favourite quotes about friendship is this by Albert Camus written in a letter to his friend René Char on 17 September 1957, translated from French:

The more I age the more I find that we can live only with beings who liberate us, who love us with an affection as light to carry as strong to experience. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too weakening, for us to suffer more new servitudes coming from those we love. It’s as this that I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom.

Jeanette Winterson describes the same phenomenon in The Passion, where Henri says of love: “It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself.”

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love, whether we call it friendship or family or romance, is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. - Maria Popova