Opening: The Full Stop
Sometimes life doesn’t just nudge you; it grabs you by the collar and pulls the emergency brake.
For me, the “full stop” came hard—a crisis, a collision, the kind of event you don’t plan for and can’t quite rehearse. Suddenly, all the usual noise fell away. There was no audience left to play to, no script to follow, no quick phrase or borrowed wisdom to patch over the silence. Just me, four walls, and the long, unsparing company of my own thoughts.
It was in that stripped-down quiet that I started noticing the background hum of my language—the things I said to myself and others, the idioms and clever turns of phrase I’d always leaned on. It became painfully clear how much of my inner and outer voice was not actually mine at all.
Words inherited from family, metaphors copied from mentors and books, attitudes absorbed through a kind of cultural osmosis. I realized I was less a singular author and more an editor, patching together a story from other people’s lines, barely aware I was doing it.
The shock was total. There was a kind of humility—almost embarrassment—in seeing how much of my so-called self was assembled by habit, imitation, and accident. I wasn’t just wearing hand-me-down clothes; I’d built my entire inner wardrobe from things left behind by others.
This was the “copy-paste” human moment—seeing, for the first time, that the person I’d been presenting to the world (and even to myself) was at least half collage, only half creation.
That was where the real work began: not just surviving the pause, but starting the long process of stripping things down to what was real, what was mine, and letting the rest fall away.
The Personal Audit
When you hit the pause hard enough, you start to hear echoes—some familiar, some not. In those first 18 months of my personal transformation, locked in with nothing but notebooks, a dictionary, and a synonym book, I found myself forced into a daily ritual of questioning.
Every word I scribbled down, every phrase I reached for, was suddenly up for inspection. “Is this truly me?” became a kind of mantra, half accusation, half invitation.
It’s strange how talking to yourself on the page can be more honest than talking to anyone else. My journal wasn’t a record for posterity; it was a mirror I couldn’t turn away from.
Each entry was a conversation with a future self I didn’t know yet—a kind of breadcrumb trail out of the old forest of borrowed language.
You’d think, after years as an MC and radio host—after a lifetime of using words to spin rooms and pull in listeners—that language would be second nature. And in a way, it was. But there’s a world of difference between performing language and inhabiting it.
I could fill hours with talk, hit every beat, drop every metaphorical punchline, keep the crowd with me right up until the last commercial break. But when the crowd disappears and the lights go out, what’s left isn’t applause—it’s the echo of phrases I’d picked up without ever testing their weight.
The truth was uncomfortable: much of what had always felt “natural” was, in fact, mimicry. Scripts absorbed from parents, borrowed lines from culture, postures learned by watching what “worked” for others. My mouth knew the shapes, but my mind and heart were often miles behind, playing catch-up with the truth.
It was only when everything else was stripped away—when I had no one to impress and nothing left to prove—that I began to see the difference between a language that lives through you and a language that lives on you, like a borrowed coat.
This was the audit. Not a tidy accounting, but a slow, relentless questioning—an act of taking back ownership, one word at a time.
The Anatomy of Borrowed Metaphor
Metaphors, sayings, old attitudes—they seep in quietly, like radio static in the background of an ordinary day. You hear them so often, from so many mouths, that you start to mistake them for your own.
There’s a kind of social magic at work: the right metaphor dropped at the right time signals that you belong, that you “get it,” that you’re fluent in the secret handshake of the room.
Sometimes it’s just survival. Other times, it’s about sounding wise, or at least not sounding lost. And, let’s be honest, sometimes a good metaphor is a quick patch over the places you don’t yet understand—masking uncertainty with a flash of language.
But once I began to really dig, I found that the metaphors I’d inherited—those handy, off-the-shelf phrases—were rarely as simple or as solid as they first seemed.
Some were like worn tools I’d never actually used for myself. Others turned out to be placeholders for real thinking that I’d never bothered to do.
Early on, the Norwegian trinity—kropp, sjel og ånd (body, soul, and spirit)—haunted me. What did these words actually mean? Were they just placeholders for things I’d never really met inside myself? And what about sinn—mind—or sjel—soul? Was there even a difference, or were these just inherited distinctions, repeated because they sounded important?
I found myself wrestling with these terms, not as abstract philosophy but as living questions. I had to push past what I’d been told, past the easy metaphors, and ask: have I actually experienced the thing I’m talking about, or just repeated the formula?
Another phrase that dogged me was the old chestnut: “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” For a long time, it felt true. It is true, in one sense. But over time, I started to see how easily it could become a shield—a way to judge others, or sidestep the real work. In spiritual circles, it’s a favorite for keeping questions at bay: “Well, you may know, but do you walk?”
At some point, I realized this saying had become a kind of spiritual bypass—a place to hide from both the pain of ignorance and the challenge of embodiment.
So, I reframed it: “When walking the path and knowing the path come together, make sure it’s your path.”
That shift came straight out of my own lived experience. It wasn’t about cleverness or originality; it was about taking back the ground under my feet. If the path isn’t yours—if you can’t defend it, or at least inhabit it honestly—then all the metaphors in the world won’t keep you from feeling hollow when the questions come.
And that moment—when someone calls you on a metaphor, asks what you really mean, or you find yourself unable to explain it even to yourself—that’s a sharp, exposing kind of emptiness. It’s the feeling of standing in borrowed shoes and realizing you don’t know the way home. That’s when the real work begins, again.
Metaphor as a Tool for Truth
There’s a moment in every real transformation where you stop decorating your sentences and start building your shelter with them. Metaphors, once just clever turns of phrase, become beams and supports—load-bearing parts of your inner structure.
It’s not about being original, or sounding profound. It’s about finding words that don’t collapse when you lean on them in the dark.
Moving from borrowed metaphors to those I’d actually earned wasn’t some tidy, spiritual upgrade. It was more like gutting a house while you’re still living in it. Every time I let go of a metaphor that didn’t fit, there was a real risk: the risk of silence, of not knowing, of standing in an open space with nothing but raw experience.
Sometimes I missed the ease of the old slogans—the way they could smooth over the rough places. But if I was honest, they were more like wall coverings than walls. They hid the cracks, but they didn’t hold anything up.
When you finally own a metaphor—when it’s survived your audit and still feels real—it changes everything. It stops being an ornament and starts becoming architecture.
There’s an “inner thrust-worthiness” to it; you can put your back against it, and it doesn’t move. It’s not about defending it against others, but about knowing you can live with it, that it can stand the weight of your own questions. Sometimes, the metaphors that survive aren’t the grand ones—they’re simple, sturdy, a bit weathered by doubt.
Some metaphors deepened as I tested them. “Light and shadow,” for instance, became less about duality and more about the interplay that creates depth—without shadow, there is no shape to light. “Walking the path” shifted from a hero’s journey cliché to a simple truth: the path is made by walking, and every step is a negotiation with the unknown.
But the cost of truth is always there. For every metaphor that survived, another had to be put down. There were stretches where I had nothing to say at all—where silence was more honest than any phrase I could reach for. Those silences, uncomfortable as they were, became the clearing where new, truer language could eventually take root.
That’s when you realize: a real metaphor isn’t just something you use; it’s something that remakes you, every time you return to it.
Inspiration & Resonance: Where Thoughts Bend
Not long ago, I came across an article by Ajay Deewan called “The Curved Mind: How Metaphor Shapes the Edges of Reality.” It was published in the aptly named Where Thoughts Bend.
Every now and again you stumble on another person’s words and feel that electric click—like two signals suddenly overlapping on the same frequency.
Deewan writes,
“A metaphor is not a decoration. This is architecture. … Metaphors are not labels of thought. These are the shapes that the mind takes when the world does not want to be flat.”
That hit home for me. For a long time, I treated metaphor as a kind of poetic extra—nice, but not necessary, something to spice up a sentence or soften a hard truth. But the longer I lived inside my own audit, the more I saw that metaphor wasn’t surface; it was structure.
Like Deewan, I learned that the real work of language, the bending and reshaping of thought, happens in the places where straight lines fail—where the logic grid gives way to the curve.
He points out that,
“Logic sets boundaries. The metaphor bends them. And somewhere on this curve the meaning begins.”
There’s a resonance here with my own lived experience. Where Deewan bends the line, I broke it down to the studs—tearing out borrowed metaphors, keeping only what could stand up to the weight of my own questions.
His image of thought curving away from the rigid grid feels true to what happens when you stop performing language and start inhabiting it: meaning isn’t always found in the sharp corners. Sometimes, you have to follow the curve into territory that can’t be mapped or explained in straight lines.
I didn’t come to this by theory, or through elegant phrases passed down. My approach was forged through the hard, sometimes painful, confrontation with my own voice. Where thoughts bend, I had to learn to bend with them—not just for poetry’s sake, but for survival.
The Unwritten Library
Everyone on the inner path ends up building a kind of unwritten library. It might never see print, and no one else may ever read it, but it exists—a body of work stitched together from all the words, metaphors, and insights you’ve actually lived.
This isn’t a shelf full of borrowed wisdom, but a slow accumulation of pages you’ve written with your own hands, sometimes in ink, sometimes in sweat, sometimes in silence.
There’s a world of difference between performing wisdom and living it. Performing is about echo and effect: reaching for the lines that get a nod, the metaphors that fit the moment. But living it means letting your language rub up against real experience, letting it get battered, letting it sometimes fall apart. In the library you build for yourself, there are no guaranteed bestsellers—only drafts, edits, and the occasional sentence that rings true enough to keep.
You don’t need to write books, start a site, or have an audience. You don’t even need to have the answers. The only requirements are honesty and the willingness to interrogate your own words.
Sometimes that means sitting in the discomfort of not knowing, or tearing up a line you once thought was gold. The unwritten library grows not by what you collect from others, but by what you’re brave enough to test, refine, and—when needed—discard.
This is how the language of self evolves from echo to authorship.
Closing: The Curve as Portal
The path of self-authorship is rarely a straight road. More often, it bends—sometimes gently, sometimes sharply—into places that can’t be mapped ahead of time.
It’s in these curves, these uncertain stretches, that the real work happens. The language we build for ourselves, the metaphors we choose or discard, aren’t meant to lead us to a fixed destination.
They are more like a compass—offering orientation, pointing toward possibility, but never laying down a single, unchanging track.
Spirit, too, isn’t a finish line; it’s the sense of direction that animates the journey.
Metaphors, when honestly earned, function much the same way. They can’t take you all the way there, but—if you’re willing to trust the bend, and listen for your own inner voice—they can help you move when the way forward is unclear.
Maybe that’s all we ever get: A compass, not a map. A phrase that fits for a while, then gets outgrown. An intuition that nudges us onward, never settling, never quite letting us walk in a straight line for long.
So, what metaphors live in you—and which ones are just passing through? The question doesn’t need an answer.
The journey, after all, continues in the curve.
Credits
This reflection was sparked by inspiration from Ajay Deewan’s article, “The Curved Mind: How Metaphor Shapes the Edges of Reality,” published in the Medium publication Where Thoughts Bend.
Special thanks to Ajay Deewan for bending language and thought in ways that invite honest introspection.
