In 2001 just one year after I had started my PhD I came up with an article (through personal communication) that changed my views about different aspects of life including my perception of myself and my understanding of the meaning of my relationships with others. The article entitled: “Narrative and identity: the double arrow of time” was written by Elliot Mishler and then published in Discourse and Identity (2006) by Cambridge University Press. The main message of the article as I understood was about the distinction between the concepts of the arrow of time and the double arrow of time and the implications of these concepts to how we understand life story narratives. Life events happen chronologically one event after the other but our life stories are more than a series of events that happened with a temporal order. There is always a thread that links the isolated events and creates a completeness or a story that makes sense to us. We travel to our past, revise the past events and interpret them in the light of our current situations. The essence of this article inspired me since then and guided me through my personal and professional life.
Mishler EG. Narrative and identity: The double arrow of time. In: de Fina, A, Schiffrin, D, Bamberg, M, Drew, P, Goodwin, MH, Gumperz, JJ , eds. Discourse and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006: 30-47.