When she was 35, Margaret Sands took her teenage daughter on a cross-country trip to her former Catholic boarding school. But the point of the visit wasn't to stroll the grounds and reminisce.
It was to break into the chapel, long since abandoned, and "rip the place apart." After she jimmied her way inside, Margaret punched the pulpit and made blasphemous gestures to the icons. With her car keys, she inscribed a message on the chapel doors: "I hate nuns. They beat children." Then she calmly told her daughter that they could leave.
Margaret says she was primed for trauma. Her mother, a glamorous writer and actress, and her father, an alcoholic opera singer, had always been mismatched. They divorced when she was 4, packing her off to boarding school for a period she calls "The Institutionalization of a Human Being—Ages 5 to 10." There she suffered at the hands of abusive nuns. "I was abandoned and left with pathetic old women," Margaret says. "Those years have haunted me ever since."
At 12, she ran away from a second school, "a dumping ground for street people and incorrigible youth." She made her way to a Walgreen's, had a bowl of chili at the counter and then called her mother from a pay phone, telling her she'd never see her again if she wasn't allowed to come home. "I blackmailed her," Margaret says.
As a teenager, Margaret was rebellious, and at age 21, she found herself pregnant and unmarried. Urged to give up her baby for adoption, Margaret agreed but then kept her daughter after a last-minute showdown with hospital personnel.
"You can't tamper with the foundation" and expect a fulfilled human being to emerge, Margaret says of what she calls her "wasted life." Telling the story at age 45, a full decade after journeying back to the scene of her troubled youth, she expresses determination to provide her daughter with the foundation she lacked. She sees her brazen act of vandalism as a sign that she has actively rejected her abusers and closed the door on the trauma she endured.
Margaret, like the rest of us, has turned the raw material of her life into a narrative, complete with heroes and villains, plot, theme and epiphany. To Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams, a pioneer in the up-and-coming field of narrative psychology who studied Margaret's saga, the life story represents the construction of personal identity at its core. "We are all tellers of tales, and we seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives," he states. "Starting in late adolescence, we manufacture our dramatic personal myths by selectively mining some experiences and neglecting or forgetting others."
Yet it would be wrong to say we're deluded, or to suggest that because the stories are skewed, they can't possibly be true. "We aren't telling ourselves lies; we're composing heroic narratives that tell us essential truths about ourselves," says McAdams.
In the Beginning
We start writing our life stories from the moment we're born. While infants don't sustain a sense of autobiographical continuity, early relationships set the stage for stories they will one day tell. The attachment formed between baby and primary caregiver determines what McAdams calls the "tone" of narrative identity, ranging from hopeless pessimism to boundless optimism. A baby with a secure attachment, he says, will grow up to craft sunnier plotlines. Small children, meanwhile, absorb the symbols of their future narrative from the world around them: Religious icons, fairy tales told at bedtime and inviting (or intimidating) neighborhood streets all enter the mix.
In early childhood, we learn storytelling from our parents. Mothers and fathers who provide coherent, emotion-rich narratives of family life have children who develop more coherent narratives of their own life experience by the end of the preschool years, says Robin Fivush, professor of psychology at Emory University. (Such kids reap additional cognitive and social benefits from narrative wizardry, Fivush notes.)
And gender plays a role. Parents describe the past in more elaborate ways when talking to girls. When mothers talk to daughters about an unfortunate event, they are likely to provide some sort of emotional resolution, for instance, "That was sad when your guinea pig died, but we got you another one!" Boys are often left to find the emotional center themselves.
There are gendered formats to our tales, says Avril Thorne, a psychologist studying narrative memory at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Men tend to tell John Wayne-type narratives: 'I wrecked my bike at 1,000 miles per hour and hit a tree. I broke my leg in five places,'" she points out. "Women will give the story a Florence Nightingale spin: 'My neck was broken, but I was worried about my mother because she wouldn't open her eyes.'"
The Teenage Mythmaker
Our early training leads, in adolescence, to a knack for spinning a fantastical narrative of the self. "Life becomes mythic in our teenage years," a time of sexual awakening and the onset of abstract thought, when we actively search for who we are, McAdams explains. Many teens imagine extraordinary feats, from rock superstardom to discovering new cures for disease.
By late adolescence the most fanciful of these myths give way to more realistic stories about family, friends and the experience of growing up. These later stories, which connect the teen to his past and explain where he fits in the world, are the ones that will drive his narrative identity for many years to come.
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