How Much of What You Believe About Yourself Did You Actually Choose?

What an ancient Sumerian idea can teach us about inherited beliefs, identity, and the stories we carry.

Thousands of years before psychology gave us words like conditioning, schemas, and self-concept, the Sumerians told stories about the forces that shaped human civilization.

One of the most fascinating ideas they left behind was the concept of the me.

The me appear throughout Sumerian literature as divine powers or principles connected with the ordering of civilization. They encompassed an extraordinary range of human experience: kingship, priesthood, wisdom, craftsmanship, music, truth, falsehood, conflict and many of the institutions and behaviors that made organized society possible.

In the Sumerian story often known today as Inanna and Enki, these powers are held by Enki, god of wisdom and the freshwater abyss.

Inanna visits him at Eridu.

A feast follows.

Enki gives the me to Inanna, and she takes them back to her city of Uruk. When Enki later realizes what has happened, he attempts to recover them, but Inanna ultimately brings the me into Uruk.

It is an ancient story about divine powers, cities and civilization. But read thousands of years later, it raises a remarkably modern question:

What are the invisible forces that organize our own lives?

The Things We Inherit Before We Know We Are Inheriting Them

None of us begins life with a blank understanding of the world. Long before we are old enough to consciously decide what we believe, we are learning.

We learn what earns approval.

We learn what causes conflict.

We learn what success looks like.

We learn which emotions are acceptable.

We learn how people like us are “supposed” to behave.

We learn what love looks like from the people who love us.

We learn what money means from the way adults talk about it.

We learn whether failure is something to recover from or something to fear.

And eventually, many of those lessons stop feeling like lessons.

They start feeling like truth.

Psychology offers several ways to understand this process.

One is through schemas: mental frameworks that help us organize information and interpret our experiences.

Schemas are useful. Without them, we would have to interpret every situation from the beginning.

But schemas can also become restrictive.

A child who repeatedly receives praise for achievement, for example, may begin forming a belief that being successful is connected to being worthy.

Someone who grows up around financial anxiety may develop deeply rooted assumptions about scarcity.

Someone praised for always being “the strong one” may eventually struggle to ask for help.

The original lesson may disappear from memory.

The belief remains.

And so we enter adulthood carrying our own invisible collection of organizing principles.

Not Sumerian me in the historical sense, of course.

But inherited rules nonetheless.

Who Told You That?

There is a simple question I return to often in writing:

Who told you that?

You might write:

I am bad with money.

Who told you that?

I'm too old to start again.

Who told you that?

I'm not creative.

Who told you that?

People like me don't become successful.

Who told you that?

I always ruin things.

Who told you that?

Sometimes there is an obvious answer.

A parent. A teacher. A partner. A religious community. A culture. A painful experience.

But sometimes nobody explicitly told us anything.

We constructed the rule ourselves.

Something happened repeatedly, and our mind did what human minds are extraordinarily good at doing:

It found a pattern.

The problem is that patterns can become predictions.

And predictions can quietly become identities.

It happened before. Therefore, it will happen again.

I failed at this. Therefore, I am a failure.

Someone rejected me. Therefore, I am undesirable.

I haven't succeeded yet. Therefore, perhaps I never will.

The experience may be real.

The conclusion is still an interpretation.

Your Brain Is Trying to Make Sense of the World

There is a reason changing deeply held beliefs isn't as easy as repeating a positive affirmation.

Our minds naturally pay attention to information that fits what we already believe.

Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

If you believe you are unlikeable, you may remember the person who ignored your message far more vividly than the three people who were happy to hear from you.

If you believe you always fail, your failures may become evidence while your smaller successes are dismissed as luck.

If you believe opportunities never come to you, every closed door joins the case against your future.

This doesn't mean we should ignore reality.

Quite the opposite.

Personal growth becomes dangerous when it asks us to pretend evidence doesn't exist.

Sometimes you tried and failed. Sometimes someone hurt you. Sometimes you weren't chosen. Sometimes you worked incredibly hard and received very little in return.

Those experiences deserve honesty.

But there is a difference between saying:

This happened to me.

and saying:

This is what always happens to me because this is who I am.

One describes experience.

The other turns experience into identity.

The Rules That Once Protected You

Not every inherited rule is harmful.

Some of our beliefs helped us survive difficult environments.

Maybe staying quiet kept the peace. Maybe being independent prevented disappointment. Maybe perfectionism earned approval. Maybe expecting the worst made bad outcomes feel less shocking. Maybe never asking for anything protected you from hearing no.

Psychologically, behaviors that appear limiting in adulthood may once have served a very real purpose.

This is why I don't particularly like telling people to simply “let go” of old versions of themselves.

Sometimes that version of you deserves more respect than that.

She figured something out.

She adapted.

She found a way through.

You don't have to hate her to stop living by all of her rules.

You can simply say:

Thank you. That helped me then. I don't know if I need it now.

Examine What You Carry

This is where the ancient story gives us an interesting metaphor.

In Inanna and Enki, the me are transferred.

They move from one place to another.

Human beliefs move too.

From parent to child.

From culture to individual.

From experience to expectation.

From expectation to behavior.

From behavior to the next generation.

We inherit things without consciously choosing them, and we pass things on without always realizing we are doing it.

Which means part of becoming more conscious is examining what arrived in our hands.

Not everything inherited needs to be rejected.

Some things deserve to be protected.

Some need to be questioned.

Some need to be adapted.

And some should end with us.

A Writing Exercise: Your Inherited Rules

Take a blank page and write:

The rules I learned about life were...

Don't overthink it.

Write whatever appears.

Maybe:

Work comes before rest.

You shouldn't talk about family problems.

Money doesn't come easily.

Being emotional makes you weak.

You need a relationship to be complete.

Good mothers sacrifice everything.

Failure is embarrassing.

You should always keep everyone happy.

Dreams are fine, but you need to be realistic.

Then choose one.

Underneath it, answer four questions:

Where did I learn this?

What evidence supports it?

What evidence contradicts it?

If I had never been taught this, what might I believe instead?

That last question is important.

Because rewriting your story does not mean replacing every uncomfortable belief with a beautiful one.

It means becoming conscious of the beliefs writing the story for you.

You Are Not a Blank Page

We inherit language.

Culture.

Family stories.

Expectations.

Fears.

Values.

Ways of loving.

Ways of protecting ourselves.

Ideas about success, beauty, aging, relationships, money, morality and belonging.

We are shaped long before we understand that shaping is taking place.

Perhaps the goal, then, isn't to become completely free of influence.

That would be impossible.

The goal is to become conscious enough to choose what continues.

The Sumerians imagined a world ordered by powerful forces that made civilization what it was.

Thousands of years later, we might ask what forces are quietly ordering ours.

So take another look at the rules you live by.

Ask where they came from.

Ask whether they are true.

Ask whether they are still useful.

And most importantly, ask:

Do I want to carry this forward?

Because you may not have chosen every story you inherited.

But you can decide which ones you continue writing.