A few years ago, I decided to write my life story using Narrative; the art, science and practice of constructing identities through storytelling. As a researcher, I have been using Narrative for more than twenty years through which many life stories, lived experiences, and personal truths were constructed interactionally and contextually between me and my research participants. Where standardised approaches to evaluating patients’ quality of life failed to capture the impact of long-term conditions, Narrative methods opened windows of possibilities for me to see the person behind the patient study participant as a unique individual, or centre of value, with a past, present and a future in process. Pragmatic knowledge grounded in life stories enrich our understanding of the impact of life events.Through narrative we revise our experiences, change our values, and reinterpret the meaning of life based on our new perceived situations. Meaningful Narrative as the central property of value-based knowledge explains strategies of personal change, development and transformation over time. It shows coping and resistance strategies used by individuals when facing the demands of living with an illness or when experiencing life changing events.
When using Narrative to write your life story, you practically use your past as the guiding light to the present and the future. This as the most important characteristic of Narrative was named by Mishler (2006) the redefinition of life: “the past is not set in stone, but the meaning of events and experiences is constantly being reframed within the contexts of our current and ongoing lives.” For example, if you walked away from an encounter in the past because the experience seemed too trivial or too painful or you HAD TO let go of it at the time, during a Narrative storytelling when you unearth that experience, you would see it afresh, you would perceive it this time in the light of your current circumstances, you would attach different weight and meaning to it, you would see it from a different angle, you would reframe and reinterpret it while having a more-developed version of self.
My life story has been evolved around a few major “turning points” in my life, as excellent examples of reinterpretation of life experiences by looking back and realising that “this is it”. The realisation that “this is it” changes the meaning of many life events along the way. Turning points are analysed in many life stories as catalyst for identity development.
When using Narrative to tell your life story, you do more than just describing the past events. You give the audience of your story a walk-through of your life providing them with detail, sometimes little and trivial things which might not be perceived significant by others. Expanding on a part of a story in detail shows how important it is for the narrator. In Narrative storytelling, the invisible people are spotlighted, the silenced voices are heard and the broken souls and bodies are reconstructed. The narrator manages to perform these by bringing the buried stories to the surface, deconstruct them to their original and constituent parts and reconstruct them from scratch into redefined forms and shapes. The redefined story is a strong indicator of change and transformation that has happened in the narrator over time. It testifies to the construction of new meanings in the life of the narrator through which actors, places, relationships, and roles lose their original positions and regain new status and reputation. For example, a workplace that once was naively perceived nurturing by the narrator in the past, during the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of meanings would be deemed discriminative and hindering. In Narrative, personal truths are generated while the past is evaluated in the light of the narrator’s current situation, the past is illuminated by the narrator’s ongoing wisdom, development and growth.
As I am approaching the end of my writing journey, I aim to share some of my experiences with you here before wrapping up the book for publication. Please tune in to my upcoming posts.