At the library last week, Londyn and I checked out this book:

Goldilocks and the 3 Dinosaurs, as retold by Mo Willems.


It’s a super adorable, super enjoyable little book in a lot of ways. It updates and retells the classic children’s Goldilocks story from the premise that the house Goldilocks breaks into actually belongs to these 3 dinosaurs who love to eat chocolate-filled little girls. 

These dinosaurs set the “poorly supervised” Goldilocks up. 

So instead of her sticking with the script and going to the 3 bears’ house, the dinos reroute her into their house, trick her into stuffing herself with chocolate pudding and … you can imagine the rest. 

Kind of sinister. Kind of dark. Kind of cute. Kind of like all good fairy tales. 

BUT. This book is kind of deep, too.

For one, there are all these hints throughout the book that something ain’t right. 

And Goldilocks just misses one hint after another because she’s so motivated by the pudding and the idea of a post-pudding nap.

She moves through the house overruling the evidence before her and, ostensibly, her own Wise Inner Being… her own Inner Intelligence… until just before the story ends. 

A page or two from the end, she overhears the dinos plotting to eat her as soon as she falls asleep. 

With one eyebrow cocked up, she takes a sacred pause.

And she considers the long list of things she had encountered in the house that had felt a little off. 

Disharmonies within her Inner Guidance system that she had been overruling:
… the “Home Dinosaur Home” sign on the wall becomes more apparent. 
… the incredibly tall height of the kitchen counters, which she’d had to climb up using a ladder…. goes from being weird to being a clue she almost missed.
…and the fact that the chairs and beds all seemed way too large, even for bears, starts to glare. 

In a moment of clarity, Goldilocks realizes that this house wasn’t the three little bears’ house. It is a dinosaur house. 

And she hightails it out of the place, just as the dinos burst in to devour her. She is saved by her own belated, but accurate, Inner Guidance system.

Theeee End. 

Well, that page of the book says The End.

But if you turn one more page, like Londy and I did, you see this note from the author: 

“The moral is that if you find yourself in the wrong story, leave the story.”

Hunh. 

That doesn’t sound like a little kid lesson, does it?

But I’m pretty sure Mo didn’t put that line in just for kids.

That was a word for someone reading or listening to this today.

The moral of Goldilocks and the 3 Dinos is: if you find yourself in the wrong story, leave the story.

Leave the story.

I don’t care if you’ve been overriding your own eyes and ears for 20 years.

I don’t care how much of your life or career you have sunk into this situation that you know ain’t right and ain’t your story.

None of that matters.

Someone reading this today needs to hear this, so forgive me if that’s not you but also… WE ALL need this permission sometimes.

If you find yourself in the wrong story, leave the story.

And… let me say this. 

The love-and-light brigade won’t want me to say this, but it’s true, so here it is anyway: You did not personally write every plot point of the story you have lived and are living right now. 

This culture, this world’s toxic power structures and your spiritual and genealogical ancestors set some stuff in motion years before you were even born that impacts you and your life today. 

And right now today, your this-life traumas, your conditioning, your unconscious patterns, your disappointments, your relational templates with the world and with life and (blessedly) your sacred contracts may be more active in creating your reality than you’re aware of.

But spiritual maturity begins when you stop resisting the truth that you have near-limitless power to upgrade, create and rewrite your own story starting now. 

And the more you mature spiritually, emotionally and psychologically, the more skillful you get at not just fixing situations and relationships… and not just tolerating disharmonies… not just reframing stuff in your mind, but also at seeing necessary endings that need making and making them bad boys, skillfully or not. 

And sure, sometimes you can leave the story by changing the story.

Sometimes you can change the story by accepting something you’ve been resisting about the story. 

But sometimes, in a very real, very literal way, you need to stop telling yourself that leaving the story is failing or would be catastrophic and leave the story by… well, by actually leaving the story. 

You dig? 

I think you do. 

With so much love and respect I hope you can feeling it coming off your phone or laptop or speakers or however this is coming to you.

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI