story of my life since birth essay

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My Life Story, Essay Example

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The beginning of my life was quite traumatic as my father was killed before I was born during the war in Liberia. My mother raised me as a single parent and sent me to school at the age of five, with the help of the UNHCR. Because of the help of UNHCR, I was able to learn things I would not have learned if they have not been there to support my studies and all the other needs that my mother and I had to get by with. This is why I thank them for their generosity.  After middle school, the only help from the UNHCR was for things such as medication and health supplies, so getting proper education became as an issue for my family. My mother struggled and we worked through the crisis until the American government approved us to come to America in the year 2005; this proved to be one of the best days of my life as it gave me a better sense of seeing the hope that is still there to get me and my family off from struggles that we have to deal with.

The memories of my life have caused me to despise the idea of even writing about it. I have realized since birth that life was not easy, and that it is full of strife that I and my family needed to survive. These experiences did not leave so much of a good thought in me and I think that writing about it even makes the situation harder to contemplate with. Nevertheless, I am hoping I could give a bit of distinction on what life has been for me and how it has created a better person in me through time through this writing.

Let me star by introducing my country of origin. Sierra Leone is a beautiful country in West Africa, with a lot of resources. Most people visit the country in search of diamonds; nevertheless, this resource has been the source of good reputation and war at the same time. This is why Sierra Leone is most known for diamonds and the civil war that last for a decade in the country. This war did not only destroy the country but also the lives of the people who have become alienated in their own nation; finding no protection for their lives because of the oppression they have to deal with from foreign elements who come into exploit the diamond resources of the country.

Before the war, my mom used to tell me how beautiful the country was, how people use to come from other countries to come get education, do good businesses, and how tourism has caused many people from other nations to come over for vacation. When she tells me stories like this, it makes me think more about how much better the country could have been without the war. The last war that lasted for a decade which started in 1989 was prolonged a few more years after that. It is because of these circumstances that I lived at least half of my life under the constraints of war.  It is also for this reason that I am not as interested as others are in sharing their life stories as I see mine as a mere blot of ink that has marked my history pitch black.

Although this is the case, I appreciate the fact that this writing activity might bring me into a deeper realization of my role as part of my country and as a supporter of my friends. I hope to bring better lives to my people, however, doing so requires immense effort and serious thinking which I could accomplish through writing down my experiences and reflecting on them through this activity.

One good thing about living in Sierra Leone is being able to mile with foreigners. Even in the middle of the war years, some white people from America and Europe come to visit the country. They use to bring all the children together, walk around with them, and tell them stories of where they from, and even play with the young ones. It is because of these instances that I realized my desire to get out of my country, learn more from outside in foreign nations and embrace a better option of living that is available for me and my family.

Education in Sierra Leone was one of the best in all African counties. During the British regime, education in the country was clearly effective and designed to help the young ones advance academically. However, in the long run, such system has been affected by the war as well. The poverty-stricken communities are almost choice-less when it comes to the education they could get that they even need to transfer to the city just to be able to get good education. As for myself, I attended nursery, kindergarten, and primary school in Sierra Leone. These days were both the best and worst days of my life. Learning in school was fun, but the journey going to school was harsh due to the war years. The two learning shifts make it hard for us to learn as much as well need. It give us only five hours in school every day which means we have to cover as much activities as needed within the given five hours of learning. I really did not like the morning shift because I have to wake up 6 am in the mooring to get ready for school. But my family used to wake up 5 am in the morning to pray, which makes my mom wake us up at 4 am in the morning. This goes on for a long time, and at some point, I have to get used to it; somehow, this attitude helped us a lot during the war years. Most of the time, the rebels are attack in the morning around 3 to 4 am. Most people are sleeping at this time and it makes it easier for them to accomplish their scrupulous missions during the said times. I remember one night when the rebels attacked and I was getting ready for school. The next thing I heard was a big and loud sound and people are screaming at the same time while they are running and calling their family members names. Most people were saying “Dan day cam o” which means “the rebels are coming”.  It took quite some time for tragic nights to end. For several years, we lived in fear for the coming of the rebels and remaining awake at such an early hour helped me and my family to be alert all the time.

Before the war, everything was much easier to handle. No worries loomed our heads and school was really fun. I remember going to school with my friends, walking and talking about what we going to do, what movies we should watch, what kind of games we should play tonight, and how we are going to study. We wear uniforms to school and only black and white shoes and socks. Like any other student, I did not like taking home works so much. It was such a drag for me to spend so much time learning even after school hours. Nevertheless, I know all these works helped me develop further.

Everything changed when I started studying ‘the American way’. Unlike the structured system in Sierra Leone, I had the chance to learn through particularly understanding what we are reading in class. I am able to realize the connection of my lessons to my personal being. I have learned how to academically survive and become more serious about my studies. I began to enjoy every bit of my education as I know the worth it has on me as I embrace a better life in America for me and my family.

The system of learning in America that I hope would be taken into account by the government in Sierra Leone is the provision of good and free education to students all the way through high school and some community colleges. Education is very important especially for individuals who have had to deal with the pressures of war. People need to realize that they have better hopes in life, and embracing such opportunities through getting good education is necessary. Today, only 50% of the students actually finish school all the way to college. It is because of this that only a few individuals get to find good jobs which further increases the poverty level in the country. I believe that with the attention of the government focused on improving educational provisions for the young ones, the country would be able to accomplish better options of living for the people and

Poverty in Sierra Leone makes it harder for people to live, go to school, have food for their family, have jobs, business, and everything else. We all know Sierra Leone is one of the richest countries in the world when it comes to resources, but yet we are one of the poorest countries in the world today because of the war years. War destroys lives and people living in war stricken countries are stripped off from every possibility of living better lives and embracing better options of being satisfied with what they do. This results to the increase of the number of uneducated individuals and increased violence in the country. Poverty makes it really hard for citizens to rely on the government like most people do in America.

In America, the government has social welfare programs that help citizens until they can make it on their own. If Sierra Leone can establish some of these programs, poverty in the land could be controlled accordingly. It is good to hear though that the country fairs better today that it ever did before when it was still under the war era. People are coping with the changes and are trying to deal with poverty in a much positive manner. I expect that in the coming years, more positive changes will come into place and more people would be given a better chance in life.

No, there is no better place than home. Sure, I have had bad experiences in Sierra Leone, but I also have good memories that remind me of what my country is capable of. Like any other individual who was able to see the good years in Sierra Leone, I would like to bring back the prosperity and peace that the country has. However, to do that, I first need to attend to myself, my personal capacities to improve in life for myself and my family. Once I have achieved such accomplishment, then I can face the possibility of engaging in a more remarkable process of helping my countrymen embrace a better life in Sierra Leone. When I come back to my country, I want to be prepared to help my fellowmen, especially the children in giving them the chance to experience the educational provisions I have received here in the United States.

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How to Write a Life Story Essay

Last Updated: April 14, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Alicia Cook . Alicia Cook is a Professional Writer based in Newark, New Jersey. With over 12 years of experience, Alicia specializes in poetry and uses her platform to advocate for families affected by addiction and to fight for breaking the stigma against addiction and mental illness. She holds a BA in English and Journalism from Georgian Court University and an MBA from Saint Peter’s University. Alicia is a bestselling poet with Andrews McMeel Publishing and her work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the NY Post, CNN, USA Today, the HuffPost, the LA Times, American Songwriter Magazine, and Bustle. She was named by Teen Vogue as one of the 10 social media poets to know and her poetry mixtape, “Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately” was a finalist in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 101,528 times.

A life story essay involves telling the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. It can also be called an autobiographical essay. In this essay, you will tell a factual story about some element of your life, perhaps for a college application or for a school assignment.

Preparing to Write Your Essay

• If you are writing a personal essay for a college application, it should serve to give the admissions committee a sense of who you are, beyond the basics of your application file. Your transcript, your letters of recommendation, and your resume will provide an overview of your work experience, interests, and academic record. Your essay allows you to make your application unique and individual to you, through your personal story. [2] X Research source
• The essay will also show the admissions committee how well you can write and structure an essay. Your essay should show you can create a meaningful piece of writing that interests your reader, conveys a unique message, and flows well.
• If you are writing a life story for a specific school assignment, such as in a composition course, ask your teacher about the assignment requirements.

• Include important events, such as your birth, your childhood and upbringing, and your adolescence. If family member births, deaths, marriages, and other life moments are important to your story, write those down as well.
• Focus on experiences that made a big impact on you and remain a strong memory. This may be a time where you learned an important life lesson, such as failing a test or watching someone else struggle and succeed, or where you felt an intense feeling or emotion, such as grief over someone’s death or joy over someone’s triumph.

• Have you faced a challenge in your life that you overcame, such as family struggles, health issues, a learning disability, or demanding academics?
• Do you have a story to tell about your cultural or ethnic background, or your family traditions?
• Have you dealt with failure or life obstacles?
• Do you have a unique passion or hobby?
• Have you traveled outside of your community, to another country, city, or area? What did you take away from the experience and how will you carry what you learned into a college setting?

• Remind yourself of your accomplishments by going through your resume. Think about any awards or experiences you would like spotlight in your essay. For example, explaining the story behind your Honor Roll status in high school, or how you worked hard to receive an internship in a prestigious program.
• Remember that your resume or C.V. is there to list off your accomplishments and awards, so your life story shouldn't just rehash them. Instead, use them as a jumping-off place to explain the process behind them, or what they reflect (or do not reflect) about you as a person.

• The New York Times publishes stellar examples of high school life story essays each year. You can read some of them on the NYT website. [8] X Research source

Writing Your Essay

• For example, you may look back at your time in foster care as a child or when you scored your first paying job. Consider how you handled these situations and any life lessons you learned from these lessons. Try to connect past experiences to who you are now, or who you aspire to be in the future.
• Your time in foster care, for example, may have taught you resilience, perseverance and a sense of curiosity around how other families function and live. This could then tie into your application to a Journalism program, as the experience shows you have a persistent nature and a desire to investigate other people’s stories or experiences.

• Certain life story essays have become cliche and familiar to admission committees. Avoid sports injuries stories, such as the time you injured your ankle in a game and had to find a way to persevere. You should also avoid using an overseas trip to a poor, foreign country as the basis for your self transformation. This is a familiar theme that many admission committees will consider cliche and not unique or authentic. [11] X Research source
• Other common, cliche topics to avoid include vacations, "adversity" as an undeveloped theme, or the "journey". [12] X Research source

• Try to phrase your thesis in terms of a lesson learned. For example, “Although growing up in foster care in a troubled neighborhood was challenging and difficult, it taught me that I can be more than my upbringing or my background through hard work, perseverance, and education.”
• You can also phrase your thesis in terms of lessons you have yet to learn, or seek to learn through the program you are applying for. For example, “Growing up surrounded by my mother’s traditional cooking and cultural habits that have been passed down through the generations of my family, I realized I wanted to discover and honor the traditions of other, ancient cultures with a career in archaeology.”
• Both of these thesis statements are good because they tell your readers exactly what to expect in clear detail.

• An anecdote is a very short story that carries moral or symbolic weight. It can be a poetic or powerful way to start your essay and engage your reader right away. You may want to start directly with a retelling of a key past experience or the moment you realized a life lesson.
• For example, you could start with a vivid memory, such as this from an essay that got its author into Harvard Business School: "I first considered applying to Berry College while dangling from a fifty-food Georgia pine tree, encouraging a high school classmate, literally, to make a leap of faith." [15] X Research source This opening line gives a vivid mental picture of what the author was doing at a specific, crucial moment in time and starts off the theme of "leaps of faith" that is carried through the rest of the essay.
• Another great example clearly communicates the author's emotional state from the opening moments: "Through seven-year-old eyes I watched in terror as my mother grimaced in pain." This essay, by a prospective medical school student, goes on to tell about her experience being at her brother's birth and how it shaped her desire to become an OB/GYN. The opening line sets the scene and lets you know immediately what the author was feeling during this important experience. It also resists reader expectations, since it begins with pain but ends in the joy of her brother's birth.
• Avoid using a quotation. This is an extremely cliche way to begin an essay and could put your reader off immediately. If you simply must use a quotation, avoid generic quotes like “Spread your wings and fly” or “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’”. Choose a quotation that relates directly to your experience or the theme of your essay. This could be a quotation from a poem or piece of writing that speaks to you, moves you, or helped you during a rough time.

• Always use the first person in a personal essay. The essay should be coming from you and should tell the reader directly about your life experiences, with “I” statements.
• For example, avoid something such as “I had a hard time growing up. I was in a bad situation.” You can expand this to be more distinct, but still carry a similar tone and voice. “When I was growing up in foster care, I had difficulties connecting with my foster parents and with my new neighborhood. At the time, I thought I was in a bad situation I would never be able to be free from.”

• For example, consider this statement: "I am a good debater. I am highly motivated and have been a strong leader all through high school." This gives only the barest detail, and does not allow your reader any personal or unique information that will set you apart from the ten billion other essays she has to sift through.
• In contrast, consider this one: "My mother says I'm loud. I say you have to speak up to be heard. As president of my high school's debate team for the past three years, I have learned to show courage even when my heart is pounding in my throat. I have learned to consider the views of people different than myself, and even to argue for them when I passionately disagree. I have learned to lead teams in approaching complicated issues. And, most importantly for a formerly shy young girl, I have found my voice." This example shows personality, uses parallel structure for impact, and gives concrete detail about what the author has learned from her life experience as a debater.

• An example of a passive sentence is: “The cake was eaten by the dog.” The subject (the dog) is not in the expected subject position (first) and is not "doing" the expected action. This is confusing and can often be unclear.
• An example of an active sentence is: “The dog ate the cake.” The subject (the dog) is in the subject position (first), and is doing the expected action. This is much more clear for the reader and is a stronger sentence.

• Lead the reader INTO your story with a powerful beginning, such as an anecdote or a quote.
• Take the reader THROUGH your story with the context and key parts of your experience.
• End with the BEYOND message about how the experience has affected who you are now and who you want to be in college and after college.

Editing Your Essay

• For example, a sentence like “I struggled during my first year of college, feeling overwhelmed by new experiences and new people” is not very strong because it states the obvious and does not distinguish you are unique or singular. Most people struggle and feel overwhelmed during their first year of college. Adjust sentences like this so they appear unique to you.
• For example, consider this: “During my first year of college, I struggled with meeting deadlines and assignments. My previous home life was not very structured or strict, so I had to teach myself discipline and the value of deadlines.” This relates your struggle to something personal and explains how you learned from it.

• It can be difficult to proofread your own work, so reach out to a teacher, a mentor, a family member, or a friend and ask them to read over your essay. They can act as first readers and respond to any proofreading errors, as well as the essay as a whole.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://education.seattlepi.com/write-thesis-statement-autobiographical-essay-1686.html
• ↑ https://study.com/learn/lesson/autobiography-essay-examples-steps.html
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201101/writing-compelling-life-story-in-500-words-or-less
• ↑ Alicia Cook. Professional Writer. Expert Interview. 11 December 2020.
• ↑ https://mycustomessay.com/blog/how-to-write-an-autobiography-essay.html
• ↑ https://www.ahwatukee.com/community_focus/article_c79b33da-09a5-11e3-95a8-001a4bcf887a.html
• ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/your-money/four-stand-out-college-essays-about-money.html
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY9AdFx0L4s
• ↑ https://www.medina-esc.org/Downloads/Practical%20Advice%20Writing%20College%20App%20Essay.pdf
• ↑ http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-harvard-business-school-essays-2012-11?op=1
• ↑ http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/passive_sentences.htm

About This Article

A life story essay is an essay that tells the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. Start by coming up with a thesis statement, which will help you structure your essay. For example, your thesis could be about the influence of your family's culture on your life or how you've grown from overcoming challenging circumstances. You can include important life events that link to your thesis, like jobs you’ve worked, friendships that have influenced you, or sports competitions you’ve won. Consider starting your essay with an anecdote that introduces your thesis. For instance, if you're writing about your family's culture, you could start by talking about the first festival you went to and how it inspired you. Finish by writing about how the experiences have affected you and who you want to be in the future. For more tips from our Education co-author, including how to edit your essay effectively, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Life’s Stories

How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are—and is a fundamental part of being human.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

In Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis. “‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,’” he says.

“‘What did you expect?’” a friend responds.

“Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose—this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc .’”

But it’s not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn’t much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc. In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you’re on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.

“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,” writes Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, along with Erika Manczak, in a chapter for the APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology.

In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is.  A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.

“Sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives,” says Jonathan Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, “but the default mode of human cognition is a narrative mode.”

When people tell others about themselves, they kind of have to do it in a narrative way—that’s just how humans communicate. But when people think about their lives to themselves, is it always in a narrative way, with a plot that leads from one point to another? There’s an old adage that everyone has a book inside of them. (Christopher Hitchens once said that inside is “exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain.” ) Is there anyone out there with a life story that’s not a story at all, but some other kind of more disjointed, avant-garde representation of their existence?

“This is an almost impossible question to address from a scientific approach,” says Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah.  Even if we are, as the writer Jonathan Gottschall put it, “storytelling animals,” what does that mean from one person to the next? Not only are there individual differences in how people think of their stories, there’s huge variation in the degree to which they engage in narrative storytelling in the first place.

“Some people write in their diaries and are very introspective, and some people are not at all,” says Kate McLean, an associate professor of psychology at Western Washington University. Journal-keeping, though a way of documenting the life story, doesn’t always make for a tightly-wound narrative. A writer I interviewed several months ago—Sarah Manguso—has kept a diary for 25 years, and still told me, “Narrative is not a mode that has ever come easily to me.”

Nevertheless, the researchers I spoke with were all convinced that even if it’s not 100 percent universal to see life as a story, it’s at least extremely common.

“I think normal, healthy adults have in common that they can all produce a life story,” Pasupathi says. “They can all put one together … In order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story. And so it’s hard to be a human being and have relationships without having some version of a life story floating around.”

But life rarely follows the logical progression that most stories—good stories—do, where the clues come together, guns left on mantles go off at the appropriate moments, the climax comes in the third act. So narrative seems like an incongruous framing method for life’s chaos, until you remember where stories came from in the first place. Ultimately, the only material we’ve ever had to make stories out of is our own imagination, and life itself.

Storytelling, then—fictional or nonfictional, realistic or embellished with dragons—is a way of making sense of the world around us.

“Life is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environment and in our lives at all times, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it,” Adler says. “The way we do that is by structuring our lives into stories.”

It’s hardly a simple undertaking. People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. Someone might have an overarching narrative for her whole life, and different narratives for different realms of her life—career, romance, family, faith. She might have narratives within each realm that intersect, diverge, or contradict each other, all of them filled with the microstories of specific events. And to truly make a life story, she’ll need to do what researchers call “autobiographical reasoning” about the events—“identifying lessons learned or insights gained in life experiences, marking development or growth through sequences of scenes, and showing how specific life episodes illustrate enduring truths about the self,” McAdams and Manczak write.

“Stories don’t have to be really simple, like fairy-tale-type narratives,” McAdams says. “They can be complicated. It can be like James Joyce out there.”

If you really like James Joyce, it might be a lot like James Joyce. People take the stories that surround them—fictional tales, news articles, apocryphal family anecdotes—then identify with them and borrow from them while fashioning their own self-conceptions. It’s a Möbius strip: Stories are life, life is stories.

People aren’t writing their life stories from  birth, though. The ability to create a life narrative takes a little while to come online—the development process gives priority to things like walking, talking, and object permanence. Young children can tell stories about isolated events, with guidance, and much of adolescence is dedicated to learning “what goes in a story … and what makes a good story in the first place,” Pasupathi says. “I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around little kids, but they really don’t understand that. I have a child who can really take an hour to tell you about Minecraft .” Through friends, family, and fiction, children learn what others consider to be good storytelling—and that being able to spin a good yarn has social value.

It’s in the late teens and early years of adulthood that story construction really picks up—because by then people have developed some of the cognitive tools they need to create a coherent life story. These include causal coherence—the ability to describe how one event led to another—and thematic coherence—the ability to identify overarching values and motifs that recur throughout the story. In a study analyzing the life stories of 8-, 12-, 16-, and 20-year-olds, these kinds of coherence were found to increase with age. As the life story enters its last chapters, it may become more set in stone. In one study by McLean , older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change.

McAdams conceives of this development as the layering of three aspects of the self. Pretty much from birth, people are “actors.” They have personality traits, they interact with the world, they have roles to play—daughter, sister, the neighbor’s new baby that cries all night and keeps you up. When they get old enough to have goals, they become “agents” too—still playing their roles and interacting with the world, but making decisions with the hopes of producing desired outcomes. And the final layer is “author,” when people begin to bundle ideas about the future with experiences from the past and present to form a narrative self.

This developmental trajectory could also explain why people enjoy different types of fictional stories at different ages. “When you’re a kid, it’s mostly about plot,” McAdams says. “This happens and this happens. You’re not tuned into the idea that a character develops.” Thus, perhaps, the appeal of cartoon characters who never get older.

Recently, McAdams says, his book club read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. “I read it in high school and hated it,” he says. “All I could remember about it was that this sled hits a tree. And we read it recently in the club, and whoa, is it fabulous. A sled does hit the tree, there’s no doubt that is a big scene, but how it changes these people’s lives and the tragedy of this whole thing, it’s completely lost on 18-year-olds. Things are lost on 8-year-olds that a 40-year-old picks up, and things that an 8-year-old found compelling and interesting will just bore a 40-year-old to tears sometimes.”

And like personal taste in books or movies, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are influenced by more than just, well, ourselves. The way people recount experiences to others seems to shape the way they end up remembering those events. According to Pasupathi’s research, this happens in a couple of ways. One is that people tailor the stories they tell to their audiences and the context. (For example, I tell the story of the time I crashed my mom’s car much differently now, to friends, than the way I told it to my mom at the time. Much less crying.)

The other is that the act of telling is a rehearsal of the story, Pasupathi says. “And rehearsal strengthens connections between some pieces of information in your mind and diminishes connections between others. So the things I tell you become more accessible to me and more memorable to me. Those can be pretty lasting effects.” So when people drop the cheesy pick-up line “What’s your story?” at a bar, like a man who nicks his carotid artery while shaving, they’ve accidentally hit upon something vital.

But just as there are consequences to telling, there are consequences to not telling . If someone is afraid of how people might react to a story, and they keep it to themselves, they’ll likely miss out on the enrichment that comes with a back-and-forth conversation. A listener “may give you other things to think about, or may acknowledge that this thing you thought was really bad is actually not a big deal, so you get this richer and more elaborated memory,” Pasupathi says. If you don’t tell, “your memory for that event may be less flexible and give you less chance for growth.” This is basically the premise of talk therapy.

And all of this doesn’t even account for all the conversations you plan to have, or elaborately imagine having and never have. The path from outside to inside and back out is winding, dark, and full of switchbacks.

Once certain stories get embedded into the culture, they become master narratives—blueprints for people to follow when structuring their own stories, for better or worse. One such blueprint is your standard “go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.”

That can be a helpful script in that it gives children a sense of the arc of a life, and shows them examples of tentpole events that could happen. But the downsides of standard narratives have been well-documented—they stigmatize anyone who doesn’t follow them to a T, and provide unrealistic expectations of happiness for those who do. If this approach were a blueprint for an IKEA desk instead of a life, almost everyone trying to follow it would end up with something wobbly and misshapen, with a few leftover bolts you find under the couch, boding ill for the structural integrity of the thing you built.

“I think that’s a particularly pernicious frame for people who become parents,” Pasupathi says. “That’s a narrative where the pinnacle is to get married and have kids and then everything will be sort of flatly happy from then on.”

And these scripts evolve as culture evolves. For example, in centuries past, stories of being possessed by demons might not have been out of place, but it’s unlikely most people would describe their actions in those terms nowadays.

Other common narrative structures seen in many cultures today are redemption sequences and contamination sequences. A redemption story starts off bad and ends better—“That horrible vacation ultimately brought us closer as a family”—while a contamination story does the opposite—“The cruise was amazing until we all got food poisoning.” Having redemption themes in one’s life story is generally associated with greater well-being, while contamination themes tend to coincide with poorer mental health.

Many people have some smaller stories of each type sprinkled throughout their greater life story, though a person’s disposition, culture, and environment can influence which they gravitate to. People can also see the larger arc of their lives as redemptive or contaminated, and redemption in particular is a popular, and particularly American, narrative. “Evolving from the Puritans to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Oprah Winfrey … Americans have sought to author their lives as redemptive tales of atonement, emancipation, recovery, self-fulfillment, and upward social mobility,” McAdams writes in an overview of life-story research . “The stories speak of heroic individual protagonists—the chosen people—whose manifest destiny is to make a positive difference in a dangerous world, even when the world does not wish to be redeemed.”

The redemption story is American optimism—things will get better!—and American exceptionalism—I can make things better!—and it’s in the water, in the air, and in our heads. This is actually a good thing a lot of the time. Studies have shown that finding a positive meaning in negative events is linked to a more complex sense of self and greater life satisfaction. And even controlling for general optimism, McAdams and his colleagues found that having more redemption sequences in a life story was still associated with higher well-being.

The trouble comes when redemption isn’t possible. The redemptive American tale is one of privilege, and for those who can’t control their circumstances, and have little reason to believe things will get better, it can be an illogical and unattainable choice. There are things that happen to people that cannot be redeemed.

It can be hard to share a story when it amounts to: “This happened, and it was terrible. The end.” In research McLean did, in which she asked people who’d had near-death experiences to tell their stories to others, “the people who told these unresolved stories had really negative responses,” she says. If there wasn’t some kind of uplifting, redemptive end to the story (beyond just the fact that they survived), “The listeners did not like that.

“The redemptive story is really valued in America, because for a lot of people it’s a great way to tell stories, but for people who just can’t do that, who can’t redeem their traumas for whatever reason, they’re sort of in a double bind,” she continues. “They both have this crappy story that’s hanging on, but they also can’t tell it and get acceptance or validation from people.”

In cases like this, for people who have gone through a lot of trauma, it might be better for them not to autobiographically reason about it at all.

“The first time I ever found this association, of reasoning associated with poor mental health, I thought that I had analyzed my data incorrectly,” McLean says. But after other researchers replicated her findings, she got more confident that something was going on. She thinks that people may repress traumatic events in a way that, while not ideal, is still “healthy enough.”

“The typical idea is that you can repress something but it’s going to come back and bite you if you don’t deal with it,” she says. “But that’s still under the assumption that people have the resources to deal with it.”

In one study, McLean and her colleagues interviewed adolescents attending a high school for vulnerable students. One subject, Josie, the 17-year-old daughter of a single mother, suffered from drug and alcohol abuse, bipolar disorder, rape, and a suicide attempt. She told the researchers that her self-defining memory was that her mother had promised not to have more children and then broke that promise.

“I’m the only person that I can rely on in my life because I’ve tried to rely on other people and I either get stabbed in the back or hurt, so I really know that I can only trust myself and rely on myself,” Josie said when recounting this memory.

“That’s pretty intensive reasoning,” McLean says. “So that’s meaningful in understanding who you are, but it doesn’t really give you a positive view of who you are. It may be true in the moment, but it’s not something that propels someone towards growth.”

It’s possible to over-reason about good things in your life as well. “There’s been some experimental research that shows that when people are asked to reflect on positive experiences, it makes them feel worse, because you’re like ‘Oh, why did I marry that person?’” McLean says. “Wisdom and maturity and cognitive complexity are all things that we value, but they don’t necessarily make you happy.”

Though sometimes autobiographical reasoning can lead to dark thoughts, other times it can help people find meaning. And while you may be able to avoid reasoning about a certain event, it would be pretty hard to leave all the pages of a life story unwritten.

“I think the act of framing our lives as a narrative is neither positive nor negative, it just is,” Adler says. “That said, there are better and worse ways of doing that narrative process for our mental health.”

In his research, Adler has noticed two themes in people’s stories that tend to correlate with better well-being: agency, or feeling like you are in control of your life, and communion, or feeling like you have good relationships in your life. The connection is “a little fuzzier” with communion, Adler says—there’s a strong relationship between communion and well-being at the same moment; it’s less clear if feeling communion now predicts well-being later.

But agency sure does. It makes sense, because feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are classic symptoms of depression, that feeling in control would be good for mental health. Adler did a longitudinal study of 47 adults undergoing therapy, having them write personal narratives and complete mental-health assessments over the course of 12 therapy sessions. What he found was not only that themes of agency in participants’ stories increased over time and that mental health increased, and that the two were related, but that increased agency actually appeared in stories before people’s mental health improved.

“It’s sort of like people put out a new version of themselves and lived their way into it,” Adler says.

(There’s something about the narrative form, specifically—while expressing thoughts and feelings about negative events seems to help people’s well-being, one study found that writing them in a narrative form helped more than just listing them.)

But, he continues, “I’m not like Mr. Agency, agency at all costs. I don’t believe that. If you have Stage 4 cancer, agency may be good for you, but is it a rational choice? And I do think [redemption] is good in the long term, but in the throes of really struggling with illness, I don’t know that it actually helps people.”

But I wondered: Though agency may be good for you, does seeing yourself as a strong protagonist come at a cost to the other characters in your story? Are there implications for empathy if we see other people as bit players instead of protagonists in their own right?

“That’s actually kind of an interesting empirical idea,” Pasupathi says. “I don’t know that anybody’s looking at that.”

As Adler’s work shows, people need to see themselves as actors to a certain degree. And Pasupathi’s work shows that other people play a big role in shaping life stories. The question, perhaps, is how much people recognize that their agency is not absolute.

According to one study, highly generative people—that is, people who are caring and committed to helping future generations— often tell stories about others who helped them in the past. McAdams suggests that narcissists are probably more likely to do the opposite—“People [who] are really good at talking about themselves and pushing their own narrative, but they’re not willing to listen to yours.”

“If our stories are about us as triumphant agents going through life and overcoming, and they underplay the role of other people and the role of institutional support in helping us do those things, we are likely to be less good at recognizing how other people’s lives are constrained by institutions and other people,” Pasupathi says. “I think that has real implications for how we think about inequity in our society. The more the whole world is designed to work for you, the less you are aware that it is working for you.”

It’s a dizzying problem: People use stories to make sense of life, but how much do those stories reflect life’s realities? Even allowing for the fact that people are capable of complex Joyce-ian storytelling, biases, personality differences, or emotions can lead different people to see the same event differently. And considering how susceptible humans are to false memories, who’s to say that the plot points in someone’s life story really happened, or happened the way she thought they did, or really caused the effects she saw from them?

Pasupathi’s not convinced that it matters that much whether life stories are perfectly accurate. A lot of false-memory research has to do with eyewitness testimony , where it matters a whole lot whether a person is telling a story precisely as it happened. But for narrative-psychology researchers, “What really matters isn’t so much whether it’s true in the forensic sense, in the legal sense,” she says. “What really matters is whether people are making something meaningful and coherent out of what happened. Any creation of a narrative is a bit of a lie. And some lies have enough truth.”

Organizing the past into a narrative isn’t a way just to understand the self but also to attempt to predict the future. Which is interesting, because the storytelling device that seems most incompatible with the realities of actual life is foreshadowing. Metaphors, sure. As college literature-class discussion sections taught me, you can see anything as a metaphor if you try hard enough. Motifs, definitely. Even if you’re living your life as randomly as possible, enough things will happen that, like monkeys with typewriters, patterns will start to emerge.

But no matter how hard you try, no matter how badly you want to, there is no way to truly know the future, and the world isn’t really organizing itself to give you hints. If you’re prone to overthinking, and playing out every possible scenario in your head in advance, you can see foreshadowing in everything. The look your partner gives you means a fight is on the horizon, that compliment from your boss means you’re on track for a promotion, all the little things you’ve forgotten over the years mean you’re definitely going to get dementia when you’re old.

“Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere,” E.M. Forster once wrote. These become obvious in the keeping of a diary: “Imagine a biography that includes not just a narrative but also all the events that failed to foreshadow,” Manguso writes in Ongoingness, the book about her 25-year diary . “ Most of what the diary includes foreshadows nothing.”

So what to do, then, with all the things that don’t fit tidily? There is evidence that finding some “unity” in your narrative identity is better, psychologically, than not finding it. And it probably is easier to just drop those things as you pull patterns from the chaos, though it may take some readjusting.

But Pasupathi rejects that. “I would want to see people do a good job of not trying to leave stuff out because they can’t make it fit,” she says. “We’re not trying to make pieces of your life go away.”

And so even with the dead ends and wrong turns, people can’t stop themselves. “We try to predict the future all the time,” Pasupathi says. She speculates that the reason there’s foreshadowing in fiction in the first place is because of this human tendency. The uncertainty of the future makes people uncomfortable , and stories are a way to deal with that.

“The future is never a direct replica of the past,” Adler says. “So we need to be able to take pieces of things that have happened to us and reconfigure them into possible futures.” For example, through experience, one learns that “We need to talk” rarely foreshadows anything good. (Life has its own clichés.)

There’s been some brain research supporting this link between the past and the future, showing that the same regions of the brain are activated when people are asked to remember something and when they’re asked to imagine an event that hasn’t happened yet. On the flip side, a patient with severe amnesia also had trouble imagining the future.

Similarly, the way someone imagines his future seems to affect the way he sees his past, at the same time as his past informs what he expects for the future.

“If you’re planning to be a doctor, and you’re a 25-year-old starting medical school, and you have expectations about what the next five to 10 years are going to be like, you’ve probably construed a narrative from your past that helps you understand how you got to this point,” McAdams says. “Then, say, you get into med school and you hate it and you drop out, you probably at the same time are going to change your past. You rewrite the history.”

A life story is written in chalk, not ink, and it can be changed. “You’re both the narrator and the main character of your story,” Adler says. “That can sometimes be a revelation—‘Oh, I’m not just living out this story; I am actually in charge of this story.’”

Whether it’s with the help of therapy, in the midst of an identity crisis, when you’ve been chasing a roadrunner of foreshadowing toward a tunnel that turns out to be painted on a wall, or slowly, methodically, day by day—like with all stories, there’s power in rewriting.

“The past is always up for grabs,” McAdams says.

• Essay Editor

How to Write a Story About My Life Essay

Your life story is a unique tapestry of experiences, emotions, and milestones. Here's a guide on weaving these elements into a compelling narrative:

How do I write a story about my life essay? Writing about your life is an introspective journey. Reflect on milestones such as: "In 2005, my family embarked on a cross-country move from New York to California. This was not just a physical journey, but an emotional one as we navigated cultural shifts and personal growth."

How do you write a life story example? Narrative snippets can bring your essay to life. Consider: "Amid the aroma of my grandmother's kitchen, where the scent of fresh-baked bread intertwined with stories of her youth in Italy, I realized the importance of preserving family narratives."

How do you write a story essay? For instance: "As the sun dipped below the horizon, casting a golden hue over our beach campfire, my friend Sarah started narrating her unexpected escapade in the jungles of Borneo. With every twist and turn, we were gripped, realizing that sometimes life's best stories are unplanned."

What is life simple essay? Life's moments can be captured in simple narratives. Reflect upon: "Last winter, while walking my dog Max, we came across a frozen pond. Watching children gleefully slide across it, I was reminded of life's fleeting moments of joy and the importance of seizing them."

How do you write a short life story about yourself? Begin with defining moments: "When I was ten, I found a wounded bird in our backyard. Nursing it back to health didn't just kindle my love for animals but taught me compassion and patience."

How can I write about myself example? Use varied experiences: "From scaling the rocky terrains of Colorado, immersing myself in the bustling streets of Tokyo, to teaching underprivileged kids in my hometown, each experience has crafted a chapter of my ever-evolving life story."

What is our story? "In college, Lisa and I teamed up for a project on Renaissance art. Not only did we ace it, but our shared admiration for art and culture fostered a bond that turned two classmates into lifelong friends."

How do you start an interesting story example? Set the scene vividly: "It was on a cold, foggy night in London when I stumbled upon an old bookstore. Little did I know, this store harbored secrets that would lead me on a whirlwind adventure."

How do you write a successful story? Use emotions to captivate: "As Maria gazed upon the old photograph, tears welled up in her eyes. It wasn't just an image; it was a time capsule transporting her back to summers spent at her grandparents' cottage."

How do you write an example essay? Support your arguments with real-life instances: "In arguing the importance of community, I often reflect on the time my neighbors came together post a hurricane, showcasing unity and resilience."

What life means to me example? "Life, for me, is a mosaic of memories – from the giggles shared over childhood pranks to the solace found in solitary walks during challenging times."

Frequently Asked Questions

• What makes a personal life story essay engaging? True stories resonate best. Pouring genuine emotions, raw experiences, and candid reflections into your narrative makes it universally relatable.
• How can I avoid making my life story essay sound boastful? Maintain a balance. Celebrate achievements, but also shed light on challenges, lessons learned, and moments of vulnerability.
• What tense should I use when writing my life story? Past tense is often used, but present tense can create immediacy when sharing thoughts.
• How personal should I get in my life story essay? Authenticity is engaging, but set boundaries on details you share.
• Is chronological order essential in a life essay? Not necessarily. Chronology provides clarity, but thematic or importance-based sequencing can be impactful.
• Can I incorporate dialogues in my life story essay? Absolutely! Dialogues make moments come alive and give insights into character dynamics.
• Should I conclude with a lesson in my life story? Ending with a reflection or lesson provides closure and a takeaway for readers.

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The Story of my Life

In this personal narrative, the author will recount key experiences and events that have shaped their life. The piece will cover significant moments, challenges overcome, lessons learned, and how these experiences have contributed to personal growth and identity. It will be a reflective exploration of the author’s journey and accomplishments. More free essay examples are accessible at PapersOwl about Cancer.

How it works

Throughout my childhood life, my dream was always to be a medical doctor. Besides, I also prayed so hard that my childhood girlfriend would get married to me and that she would even pursue the same medical course like mine.

My, then girlfriend and I were in the same primary and secondary levels of education until the College level when we moved to separate colleges. At the college education, my dream of pursuing medicine was validated when we joined the class with few other comrades.

Interestingly enough, my girlfriend was also privileged to be admitted to the medical school in the different college.

During my college life, I got to interact with different people of different races and built the best rapport with them. I also advised my girlfriend to follow the same in her respective college as this would create the best business relation with them in future. My future expectation was to establish the most successful and entrepreneurial cancer center at The Washington DC in partnership with my future wife.

I expected that my love for her would reach that point where we would be married together and be business partners at the same time. On reaching the second level of my college education, we both established a joint cancer treatment foundation at the New York City, which was later known everywhere to be having the best entrepreneurial attributes and skills in managing developing cancer cases. By having such kinds of developments, we were always invited for series of motivational talks in various campuses and colleges.

Besides, my next aim from such exposure was to develop a clinic at the Washington DC when I reached my final year at the college. On reaching my final year, I received some awards for my activities together with my girlfriend, and consequently, we were privileged to get government sponsorship to spread the medical skills to other neighboring states and continents. Similarly, my parents were so much impressed that they always offered me the necessary moral support from my needs. I then graduated from the college a year later with a distinction. I attained a first-class honor in my medical studies while my girlfriend managed equally excellent points that offered us free government sponsored scholarships.

I got engaged in some medical services as I earned while making some savings for my future expectation of having the most admired cancer center at the Washington DC.Usually, all my activities were moving smoothly because I always had the physical and psychological support from my girlfriend. We had loved each other for a very long time since childhood, and hence we had the reason to plan for our future endeavors.

By then we were already engaged, but still, it was a bit early to get married at that tender age since we were at our early 20s.However, during our postgraduate education, I chose to pursue the same medical related course, but my then girlfriend opted for a new field. The field of engineering. At that time, a disparity between us was identified because most the time we were always in different areas of activities except for the weekends when we could gather for refreshment vacations at the nearby beaches.

Still, we were very close, and our partnership with the foundation even grew stronger. Apart from daily educational and commercial activities, every month we both used to visit various places for recreational vacations. Some of the places we visited include Bangkok, Dubai, Mombasa, New York City, Seoul, and London within four years of our engagement. This was an indication of appreciation and love for my childhood “sweetheart.” I also bought her a Mercedes Benz car to appreciate her for giving me her time all those years of our existence.

A year later, our cancer foundation recorded an enormous recognition from various states, and as a result, we received more sponsorships which offered us financial support to help us run it smoothly. At the same time, my girlfriend had a separate engineering firm for herself, which also registered a handsome profit. She had opted to join the engineering school for her postgraduate education program and hence had the upper hand than me to deal with such engineering activities. I had only educational skills in the field of medicine unlike her who developed skills in both the areas, one in the field of medicine during her college level and the engineering skills she attained during her postgraduate studies.As we both reached 30, I proposed to her for an official marriage but she declined to claim that it was still very early to make such decision.

However, we always maintained our engagement as we often went out for dates. During my first date with her, I organized series of entertaining activities, and we both enjoyed. During that same night of our date, I decided to give her engagement ring while getting prepared sooner to get married to her. I moved to a well-decorated mansion at the Washington DC while getting motivated that my dream of having the best-recognized cancer center within the city was edging closer. I was wholly convinced that the time to get married to my long-time girlfriend had equivalently arrived because we had moved together to the mansion as we planned along on the structure, foundation and distinct functions of our future center.

I had set aside a right amount of money for buying a 24-storey building within the city to cater for all the activities within the premise.

During my second date with her, I noticed that besides my engagement ring, she put on a better one than mine. I did not hesitate to ask her but the answer she gave me almost killed me. She affirmed to me that she had been dating another man from her engineering school and that they had a proliferating joint engineering workshop within the city, which was always known everywhere to be furnishing the items used in the White House.

I got perplexed about the issue as I remained to wonder the kind of heartbreak I had encountered. From losing the love of my life to losing my business partner. To add more pain on the same, she was expecting a baby with the other man. I wondered why she had hidden all that from me for the many occasions we had been together. Those were the most disgusting days of my life as I lost interest in my occupation as well as the love story. Perhaps, in future, I will find someone who loves me unconditionally!!

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A Story Of My Life Essay

The Story of My Life Interesting enough, my life began on a Thursday night, on December 17, 1987 In Atlanta Georgia, where I was delivered at 9. Pm to my mother, Ruth Dye and father, Tony Jiffies. I was the second child for my father and the third for my mother. I Just didn’t know anybody or where I would end up In life after that moment. As I grew up, my life changed at each milestone In a person life. I had a rough and very fun childhood.

Essay Example on Story Of My Life Sample

I remember playing outside with family and friends, eating around the dinner table with my family and sleeping with my grandmother until I was 15 years old. My life was filled with more great memories than the bad, even though lived in poverty stricken neighborhood. My grandmother never once, made it seem that way because she made sure we were fed, bathe and had clean clothes and shoes on our feet.

Even though, neither my mother nor my father was in my life, when I was younger, my father decided to change that when I was 15 years old.

He wanted me to be more than cousins that had three kids on their hips and one on the way. He told me, “If you are ready to leave, you can go with me, right now. ” I was hesitant at first, but I decided this might be my chance to get out of the situation I was In. At that point, my grades had started slipping, I started not to go to school, but I know I TLD want that for myself.

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“ Really polite, and a great writer! Task done as described and better, responded to all my questions promptly too! ”

I took that leap of faith and I went with my dad and the rest Is still writing its story.

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Home / Essay Samples / Social Issues / Moving to America / My Past, My Future, And My Present Life Story

My Past, My Future, And My Present Life Story

• Category: Life , Social Issues
• Topic: Father , Immigration in America , Moving to America

Pages: 2 (1135 words)

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