Narrative Identity

Telling and revising our stories

I have a game I like to play (in my head). I try to think of a single story that I would tell someone who doesn’t know a person, a story that captures who they are. A quintessential story. I have lots of these stories about my mom. I can no longer introduce people to her, so I try to capture her in a story.

For example, when I was young, I loved to go to the library. I would pick out books that I could read and books for Mom to read to me. For a long time, The Five Dolls books by Helen Clare were my favorites. My library had all five books in the series, and we would check them out on rotation. Five Dolls in a House. Five Dolls and the Monkey. Five Dolls in the Snow. Five Dolls and Their Friends. Five Dolls and the Duke. They told the adventures of five dolls – Amanda, Lupin, Jane, Jacqueline, and Vanessa – and the monkey who lived on the roof of their dollhouse. Mom would read them to me, doing voices for each character, including a cockney accent for the monkey. We loved the monkey the best, but we were quite fond of Lupin too.

After a while, Mom had the brilliant idea of typing the books into play format. She pulled out her old manual typewriter and began typing the dialogue and stage directions. After that, we didn’t read the books. We performed them, playing different parts. Sometimes, we’d even convince my older brother to join. We kept these scripts in the two-drawer metal file cabinet in the hall of our small house, nested among the other important papers.

Stories are magical things. They hold so much meaning. We tell stories to understand our world and the people in it. Even this short story about my mom tells you a lot about her. She nurtured my passions. She was playful and funny. We loved many of the same things. She was the best. This story also tells you something about me - who I was then and who I am now.

In his book, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University, describes how we create our identities through stories. We choose aspects of our past, our present, and our imagined future to answer the question, “Who am I?” We weave them into stories that allow us to maintain a sense of continuity. Just like in a tightly plotted novel, the events of our lives make sense when we weave them into stories about ourselves.

However, disruptive events can upend our stories. We lose the plot. The stories that we’ve always told about ourselves may not fit with our current reality. At least that’s what I’ve experienced.

I come from a long line of strong women. When my grandpa went overseas to serve in World War II, my grandma moved in with her mom. Together they took care of my uncle and planted a huge garden and canned vegetables to get them through the winter. After my dad died, my mom climbed a ladder to patch the roof and walked to the barn to help my aunt with the livestock. I like to think of myself as a strong woman (although I have never canned vegetables or patched a roof). I made it through graduate school with two babies. I’ve juggled teaching classes and writing papers and mentoring students. When life throws me a curveball, I try to face it head on, just like the strong women I admire would do.

But one of my primary Parkinson’s symptoms is a lack of energy. I have to strategically plan my days. If I have a late afternoon meeting, I stay home for a couple of extra hours in the morning. I no longer teach full-day executive education classes. Sometimes, I wake up in the morning and I just can’t. I cancel my day and stay in bed.

I’m not alone. Over half of people with Parkinson’s Disease report significant fatigue, and about one-third say that it is their most troubling symptom. My therapist encourages me to think about my energy like spoons. You only have so many spoons, and you have to choose when to use them. Once you are out of spoons, it takes time to regenerate them. At first, I was skeptical of this metaphor. Sometimes, don’t we just have to push through? Pushing through was a characteristic of the strong women that I admired so much.

But sometimes I just can’t push through. If this is what it means to be a strong woman, will the story of who I am have to change? Not willing to give up yet, I have tried to redefine what it means to be a strong woman. Maybe there is strength in knowing my limitations. Maybe it’s strong to make decisions that allow me to contribute over the long-term, even if that means being unavailable sometimes. But it wasn’t until I remembered another story about my mom that these ideas began to ring true.

My dad died unexpectedly at the age of 69. We celebrated his life with a funeral service at the Episcopal Church where Mom and Dad got married. After the service, after my mom greeted everyone who attended, after she convinced Mike to find a screwdriver so she could put his ashes in the columbarium next to her mom and dad, we were preparing to go to my aunt’s house for a meal. “Are you ready?” I asked Mom as she stood in the kitchen of the house where she had lived with Dad for over 40 years. “I’m going to walk there,” she said. “I need. . . I need. . . I just need a few minutes. Go ahead and tell your aunt I’ll be there soon.” And that, I realized, was a different kind of strength.

I come from a line of strong women. That is still part of my story. But sometimes even strong women just need a few minutes.

Are there parts of the your story that no longer fit as well as they used to? How might you revise your story? Can you reframe the parts that no longer fit, or is it necessary to let them go?