Storytelling

The psychologist Bessel van der Kolk defines agency as “the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstance.” People who exhibit agency have been shown to be happier and healthier, and have a higher quality of life.

They correspond to another set of tools: the three strands of our narrative identity. The first is our me story—the one in which we’re the hero, the doer, the creator; we exercise agency and, in return, feel fulfilled. The next is our we story—the one in which we’re part of a community, a family, a team; we belong to a group and, in turn, feel

Understanding the connections among what gives us meaning, which personal stories we emphasize at any given time, and the visual representation of those pillars of identity was a challenging and ultimately thrilling part of the Life Story Project.

We are very fluent in blunt, materialistic, capitalist questions: What? How soon? How much? What I hope that we can learn to do is add questions of moral imagination to that mix: questions like “Why?” and “To what human effect?” and “How much is enough?”