What is narrative identity?
It’s a story you’ve got about how you came to be, who you are, and where your life’s going. That’s not your whole identity—there are a lot of other things that are part of your identity—but it’s a really important part, and it’s a neglected part. Narrative identity is just as much about how you imagine the future, even though it hasn’t happened yet, as it is about how you reconstruct the past. If I’m planning to be president of the United States, and I’m currently laboring in academia, well you’re going to have to develop a way to connect up your past with your goals for the future.
When do we begin to develop it?
There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going.” Kids have memories going back probably to age 4. They can tell stories early on, they learn, but they don’t see their lives in big narratives that they are the main protagonists of. As people get older they just don’t want to remember negative stuff, and they just forget it.
Continued (Source): How Aging Shapes Narrative Identity
