As Lucy Grace writes, “Our lives are a bundle of stories.” 1 In fact, even the self, that seemingly solid and continuous “I” we carry through the world, is a story, a narrative we construct and reconstruct by piecing together memories and experiences into what feels like, as Guy Saunders writes, “a single unified self.” 2 We are thus all storytellers at heart, and the story we are most often telling, retelling, and revising is ourselves. As cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett argues in Consciousness Explained , our selves are “magnificent fictions,” not “independently existing soul-pearls” but “artifacts of the social processes that create us.” 3 We do not discover who we are; we narrate ourselves into being.
Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square (Thu,) studied this question.