Free write (15 min)

When I initially read Galen Strawson’s article “I am not a story” I didn’t know whether to agree with his idea that narratives do not shape who we are or not. He brought up some valid points that I might agree with individually, but as a whole, I lean towards disagreeing with him. He brings up several compelling points throughout his essay. For example, he mentions that we are made up of many selves, not just one. He says we can’t be made of one singular self, rather we are composed of many selves. I agree that we are made up of many selves, but those can all exist as one and that is what makes us who we are. I believe that those “selves” are results of our experiences and those experiences make us who we are — which allows us to tell our story. I don’t really know what my main life story exactly is yet, but I do know its made up of a compilation of my smaller life stories and as I grow those stories will follow me as new ones join, and one day I will have a life story put together. Strawson talks about how the narrative disposition only comes to a few people and most people don’t have good enough memory to be a narrativist. While Strawson argues that self-knowledge comes in bits and pieces only, I think that idea can go further by believing that those bits and pieces make up our story. He references an author that Beck also referenced, Dan McAdams, and used the same general idea in different ways. I agreed with McAdams when he said: “We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.” Without these smaller pieces, we wouldn’t have anything to make up our stories. We are all products of our experiences. This idea that we are storytellers allows room for optimistic thinking by trying to see the better side of things, which is important to our overall wellbeing.