I didn’t read “Life’s Stories” by Julie Beck the first time around, but I did end up getting the general idea of the essay during our discussions in class. Reading this essay after reading “I am not a Story” by Galen Strawson made me have a completely different view on how “our lives are stories”. When reading Strawson’s essay, I totally agreed with everything he said, but now I am not sure if I do.
Throughout my whole life, I have always kind of made my life into a story, telling different people, different versions. I think this has helped me throughout my life, because it has allowed me to think deeper into my life and when something is wrong, I know how to talk about it. I think holding in your problems, and not speaking about them with anybody can be very harmful to your mental health. I grew up in a family where if you needed to talk about something, someone was there for you. Obviously, that isn’t true for everyone’s family, but I think it’s important to grow up having that one person in your life that you can go to with everything, family or not.
Also just getting a narrow look into this essay in class, to actually reading it has made me think more and more. It has helped me understand that not everyone is narrative and can talk about their life, but with some, that’s all they do. It also depends ones age, when little kids try to tell you a story, its sometime hard to pay attention to it because they aren’t skilled at that yet. My best friend has a niece who’s four years old and nephew who is three years old, and I can never fully understand the whole story. But, if my friend was to tell me the same story I would understand it because she, as an adult, knows the proper to tell a story. This essay was really cool to read in the sense of how development of ones self affects how they tell a story.
