Stories

At a recent offsite, S got our regional team to share three critical moments of their life that shaped them into who they are today. I wasn't there -- but how I'd have liked to be, to glean a better perspective on what drives these incredibly intelligent go-getters. 

The whole idea of defining your life in three big 'aha' moments sounds slightly ridiculous when who we are today is the culmination of thousands of thoughts and interactions, big and small. 

If someone were to ask me the same question, i'd probably respond with a selection of life occurrences curated to reflect how i wanted them to perceive me. And the moments i'd share would probably vary from group to group, depending on my position amongst/ relationships with individuals in the group.

Funny how while ruminating this over the past few days, i chanced upon 'The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves', by Emily Esfahani Smith, yesterday:

"We are all storytellers — all engaged, as the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, in an “act of creation” of the “composition of our lives.” Yet unlike most stories we’ve heard, our lives don’t follow a predefined arc. Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent — and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.

Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams is an expert on a concept he calls “narrative identity.” McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself — your own personal myth. Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story.

An individual’s life story is not an exhaustive history of everything that has happened. Rather, we make what McAdams calls “narrative choices.” Our stories tend to focus on the most extraordinary events, good and bad, because those are the experiences we need to make sense of and that shape us.

One of the great contributions of psychology and psychotherapy research is the idea that we can edit, revise and interpret the stories we tell about our lives even as we are constrained by the facts."

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The bottomline: We are in control of our lives, and the narratives we weave around ourselves.

Thinking back about the multitude of moments that built me into who i am today -- i wonder if it was really the moments that shaped me, or my relationships with people in those moments.

Was it learning the difference between divorce and separation at thirteen/ choosing to stay in Singapore when the family migrated, or my tenuous relationship with my parents?

Was it six months of studying Ingmar Bergman films and human geography in Stockholm, or meeting a vast plethora of international friends at a time where cultures and perspectives were growing increasingly divisive? 

Was it researching educational pathways in Nai Soi's Karenni refugee camps, or precious conversations with 18-year-olds who had risked everything to sneak across the Myanmar-Thai border at midnight, some by foot, some half-suffocated in the back of rickety lorries?

Was it rediscovering self love at 25, or having had someone in my life who'd taught me the sweet but ultimately also the bitter? 

I'm inclined to think the latter.

On loop

Broken bones always seem to mend