She knew the story of her life: her cries, her coos, her first words. The nurse had explained that the artificial light used to treat jaundice could affect hair color. She had darker skin and frizzy hair, and the neighbors started to gossip about her origins.īut Sophie never faltered. As she grew older, Manon looked nothing like her parents. The nurse had switched the babies by accident. Unbeknownst to Sophie, it wasn’t her baby. The baby spent her first days in an incubator under artificial light and was returned to her mother four days later. Once upon a time, an 18-year-old Frenchwoman named Sophie Serrano gave birth to a baby girl, who suffered from neonatal jaundice. The facts matter less than the narrative. What are you to make of so many emotions, so many events? In your life, you will move from triumph to heartbreak to boredom and back again, sometimes in the space of a single day. It is to recognize that everything constantly changes. It is, instead, to find meaning in the progression from one event to the next. The idea is not to delude yourself that bad things are actually good. What about your divorce? Is it a sign you’re unlucky in love or a difficult passage to a more hopeful romance? That time you were laid off, for example, is it further proof that your career’s going nowhere? Or is it the best thing that ever happened, liberating you to find work that suits you better? Conversely, if you acknowledge that you’ve made mistakes and faced difficulties but seek (or have already glimpsed) redemption, you’ll feel a much greater sense of agency over your life. If you’ve interpreted the events of your life to mean that you’re unlucky or unwise, it’s hard to look optimistically at the future. I mean what’s your STORY? What narrative have you constructed from the events of your life? And do you know that this is the single most important question you can ask yourself?Īccording to the fascinating field of “narrative psychology,” the stories we tell about ourselves are the key to our well-being. I don’t mean where you grew up, went to school, got your first job, etc.
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