Pinocchio and Breaking Free From Your Strings | Kristin Reinbold
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Breaking Free From Your Strings: How to Become Your Real Self
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Kristin Reinbold shares how to identify the invisible strings holding you back and do the real work to break free. Inspired by Pinocchio.
The Strings You Don’t Know You’re Carrying
Most of us move through life carrying invisible strings we didn’t even know existed. They’re not made of rope or wire. They’re made of things whispered to us as kids. Things we believed about ourselves that we never questioned. Things we did to survive, and then kept doing long after we needed to.
Kristin Reinbold, a middle school teacher, podcast co-host, and author, spent most of her life being pulled in directions she didn’t choose. And it wasn’t until she was in her early 40s, after a failed marriage, an addiction struggle, a stint in rehab, and years of searching for something outside herself to fill an internal wound, that she realized something: the strings were hers to cut.
We tend to think of Pinocchio as a kids’ movie. But there’s a reason why Kristin watches it now as an adult and sees something completely different. She doesn’t see a wooden puppet learning to be brave. She sees herself, and probably you, learning to recognize what’s actually holding us back.
What Are Your Strings, Really?
In the film, the Blue Fairy tells Pinocchio that to become a real boy, he has to prove himself brave, truthful, and unselfish. But here’s what gets glossed over in the 80-minute runtime: he has to actually go through something to prove it. He can’t wish his way there. He can’t have someone else do it for him. He has to walk through the fire.
For Kristin, the strings weren’t about disobedience or misbehavior. They were deeper than that.
She was adopted as a baby. She always knew it, her parents told her they “got to pick her out special.” But there’s a dichotomy in that message that most people don’t talk about. Yes, she was chosen. But she was also abandoned. And for a kid, both of those things are true at the same time, and they create a wound that doesn’t go away just because you had loving parents.
So she spent years searching. She wrote journals and poems about finding her biological family. She created elaborate fantasies about what her life would look like when she finally belonged somewhere. At 18, she made the trip to Oregon to meet her biological mother. And the reality was nothing like what she’d imagined. The house was falling apart. They asked her for money. It wasn’t the homecoming she’d spent half her life dreaming about.
That’s when Kristin made a choice that shaped the next two decades: she jumped into relationships, marriages, and behaviors that made her feel chosen. Because if someone else chose her, maybe that would fill the hole. Maybe that would finally make her feel like she belonged.
That’s a string. It’s not visible, but it’s real.
The Work Happens in the Silence
Here’s what Kristin discovered: you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.
She spent years trying different solutions. She got married too young, then again. She struggled with food addiction and alcohol. She tried to be the person everyone else needed her to be, the chameleon, the entertainer, the one who could read a room and adapt to survive in it. All of that was exhausting. All of it was a symptom of the same wound: not knowing who she was on the inside, and not believing she was enough as she was.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet.
Kristin started sitting in silence every morning. Five minutes at first. Then 15. Then 45 minutes of just… nothing. No podcasts. No social media. No trying to fill the void with something external. Just her, alone with herself, listening to what she calls her “inner Indian”, that still, small voice that tells you the truth if you’re brave enough to hear it.
“We don’t like to be quiet,” she says. “We are all little narcissists. We love to hear ourselves talk. Our world is so loud. We live in such a loud environment of social media and the news. We just always have to be consumed with information.”
But when you remove all of that and sit with yourself, something shifts. You start to see what’s actually true about you versus what you’ve been told. You start to recognize the strings.
Maybe a string is a belief your parents repeated when you were young. Maybe it’s a toxic relationship you can’t leave because you’re terrified of being alone. Maybe it’s a habit you use to soothe yourself because sitting with your own feelings is too hard. Maybe it’s the voice in your head that says you’re too old, too broken, too damaged to pursue what you actually want.
The strings are different for everyone. But the work to break them is the same: you have to know yourself first. You have to be willing to sit in the discomfort of that knowing. And then you have to make a choice.
The Magic Isn’t the Wish, It’s the Work
One of the biggest misconceptions about Pinocchio is that the wish is what makes the magic happen. That if you just dream hard enough, the fairy godmother will wave her wand and you’ll become real.
That’s not how it works in the film, and it’s not how it works in life.
The Blue Fairy doesn’t transform Pinocchio into a real boy because Geppetto wished for it. She tells him that he has to prove himself brave, truthful, and unselfish. The wish is the starting point. The work is everything else.
Kristin went through a divorce. She raised two kids as a single mom on welfare while putting herself through college. She watched her son navigate autism. She lost her father four weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer. She went to rehab. She did the inner work, the meditation, the therapy, the daily practice of sitting with herself.
That’s the work. That’s what actually transforms you.
And here’s the thing nobody talks about: the work doesn’t make you a different person. It makes you more yourself. It strips away the false things you put on to survive, and it leaves you with what’s actually true about you.
“For the first time in a long time, I can say my insides match my outsides,” Kristin says. “I’m okay. I’m enough. I’m good. There’s nothing else out there for me that I need to add to it.”
That’s not happiness. That’s peace. And peace is something you can’t buy, can’t get from another person, and can’t wish into existence. It only comes from knowing who you are and being willing to let that be enough.
The Invitation
If you’re carrying strings right now, and most of us are, you don’t have to wait until you’re 42 to start cutting them. You don’t have to wait until everything falls apart. You can start right now, in this moment, by asking yourself one question:
What belief about myself am I carrying that isn’t actually true?
Then sit with that. Really sit with it. Don’t try to fix it or solve it. Just acknowledge it. Because you can’t break a string you don’t know you’re carrying.
The work is hard. The silence is uncomfortable. The truth about yourself might be things you’ve been avoiding for years. But on the other side of that work is a version of you that isn’t being pulled in directions you didn’t choose. A version of you that knows what you stand for. A version of you that can look yourself in the eye and say, “I’m okay. I’m enough.”
That’s the real magic. And it’s available to you right now.
Listen to the full conversation at https://youtube.com/@YesAndLand | Learn more at https://www.yesandland.com/