“Life’s Stories”
“Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn’t much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and — crucially — to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc. In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you’re on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.
“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,” writes Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, along with Erika Manczak, in a chapter for the APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology…
When people tell others about themselves, they kind of have to do it in a narrative way — that’s just how humans communicate… Someone might have an overarching narrative for her whole life, and different narratives for different realms of her life — career, romance, family, faith. She might have narratives within each realm that intersect, diverge, or contradict each other, all of them filled with the micro-stories of specific events…
Once certain stories get embedded into the culture, they become master narratives — blueprints for people to follow when structuring their own stories, for better or worse. One such blueprint is your standard “go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.”
That can be a helpful script in that it gives children a sense of the arc of a life, and shows them examples of tentpole events that could happen. But the downsides of standard narratives have been well-documented — they stigmatize anyone who doesn’t follow them to a T, and provide unrealistic expectations of happiness for those who do.”
(This article is a little too long for the actual content, and I advise skimming and reading the interesting paragraphs)
I’ve been thinking about narrative and stories a lot (a lot a lot a lot) and now important it is to have a narrative, and how society might be sort of organized around giving people narratives for the random stuff that happens in a human life, and how you can see who a society is structured for by looking to see who has good narratives
And I think that when we communicate, we are often offering narratives to each other, signifying about our recognizability. And when someone is trying to communicate a narrative that the other person doesn’t know, or when someone is trying to communicate something that doesn’t have a narrative, that’s when we have to stop and really articulate ourselves as individuals. And that’s really hard.
I notice this especially during small talk — I’m often finding myself in moments of absent narratives, or with narratives that only make sense if I explain a big context. It’s such a relief when I find myself in the company of people who hold my similar narratives.
(Mental health; narrative; psychology)
