Joanna Gaines on telling our stories…

In this book extract, New York Times bestselling author Joanna Gaines on how she learned to break free from years of hiding her true self, and continues to challenge untruths she has believed

I entered adulthood carrying around this black-and-white way of seeing the world. I saw through this lens that convinced me there was only one way to go about living. But then I met and married Chip, who is basically a poster child for doing things not wrong or right, but some other way entirely. My narrow outlook threw us for a few loops in those early years, but it was clear that I’d brought into our marriage certain ways of thinking, of living, of managing money based on how my parents raised me. We both did. But while Chip saw them as opportunities to be refined and challenged, for a while, I hid beneath the weight of them. Not to mention that Chip and I are different in seemingly every way, except the ways that matter most to us.