My Life’s Journey

My Life's Journey is a timeline. You plot the moments that made you who you are, then look at the shape of them. Add each one with a year or a rough age, a short title, and a longer reflection. Call it something if it helps. Actually name it, something like a turning point, an achievement, a setback, a relationship, a decision. There is no minimum. Five entries done properly beats 30 done thinly. The thinking comes from narrative identity research, most associated with Dan McAdams at Northwestern University. His work found that we do not hold our lives as a list of events. We hold them as a story, with themes, turning points, and a sense of where it is heading, and the shape of that story predicts things. People who tell redemption stories, where difficulty led somewhere, tend to score higher on wellbeing than people who tell the same events as a decline. You cannot change what happened. You can notice which story you have been telling about it, and whether it is the only one available. Setbacks belong on here. So do the small moments. A sentence someone said to you at 15 earns its place as much as a job does. Come back to it after something significant happens. The line keeps going.