Seize Your Narrative, Seize Your Life

Are the stories you tell about yourself "redemptive" or "contaminated"? The answer will determine whether you write your own happy ending, or drown in toxic sludge.

Way back in June, in that wonderful interval between Moderna shot #2 and the spread of the Delta variant, I was scanning the horizon for good news about the resumption of Life As I Knew It.

In the NYT, I found an article entitled “We Want to Party and Travel. Hold that Thought,” by Emily Esfahani Smith. Smith is the author of The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness, which isn’t a bad subject to explore when there are four million souls dead and the responsible virus still running semi-rampant.

The NYT article introduces us to Dan McAdams, a personality psychologist at Northwestern, who works to help people uncover their “narrative identity.”

“Dr. McAdams encourages people to divide their lives into chapters, recount major events, reflect on early memories and pull out the overarching themes in their narratives,” Smith writes. “After analyzing these stories, he found that some people tell ‘redemptive’ stories while others tell ‘contamination’ storie…