In this incantation, I awaken to the ways others try to cast me into roles that diminish my presence and agency, what I call the influence of “story goblins.” I expose how seductive, disempowering narratives circulate like emotional drugs, distorting my sense of reality and leaving me feeling small, reactive, and disconnected from the present. But with awareness, I reclaim my part as the author and central figure of my life, resisting these mythic traps by grounding myself in presence. I choose not to be drawn into the trance but to remain fully alive in my own unfolding.
Some characters in my awakening are what I call story goblins—people who try to rope me into their disempowering narratives, where I am made small, passive, or lost in someone else’s myth. Once I’m cast, I am no longer the central figure of my own unfolding—I become the background.
But over time, I’ve come to see that these stories aren’t just scripts. They’re dense, sticky, emotionally charged drugs that are passed around like sacred knowledge. But the effect is always the same: intoxicating detachment from the present.They distort the proportions of reality. They invent villains and systems so vast and invisible that I cannot possibly respond to them in any meaningful way. All I can do is believe. Or fear. Or wait. They’re designed to entrap. To draw in. To hold the listener in a loop of suspicion, outrage, urgency, and helplessness. They begin with hidden knowledge, but always end in the same place: disempowerment.
And like any drug, they come with a high: a jolt of certainty, a rush of importance, the feeling of being in the know. But what follows is always worse—doubt, agitation, resentment, paralysis. The more I consume, the less I feel like the one who chooses. The less I remember that I am already here, already awake, already whole.
So when I sense the effect beginning—when I feel myself getting drawn into something that makes me small or far away—I pause. I close my eyes and ask the question that never fails: How close is this to me, here, now? If it’s not close, I let it go.
Because if I believe that these hidden forces rule everything, then what does that make me? A shadow. A prop. Marginal and powerless. And I am none of those things. I am the one who is always here. The one awake on this stage. The one with lines to speak and choices to make. The main character of this story—not theirs. So I don’t take the drug. I don’t enter the trance. I stay with what is mine and what I know: Me, Here, Now.
…