We essentially confirm our identity through the stories we tell about ourselves. Put that way, it reads even better:
This perceived unity turns out to be fragile only through conflicts and sometimes even crises. “Each of us has a life story, a kind of inner narrative whose content and continuity is our life. One could say that each of us constructs and lives a “story”. It is our identity. When we want to know something about someone, we ask: “What is their inner, real story?”
Our concept of ourselves is a process that begins with detachment from our most important attachment figures. We first recognise ourselves in the mirror, understand that we have a name.
Every human being is a unique narrative that is continuously and unconsciously created through and within them – through their perceptions, their feelings, their thoughts, their actions and, last but not least, through what they say. Biologically and physiologically, we are not very different from each other – historically, however, as a lived narrative, each of us is unique.”
Oliver Sacks, „The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat“
