Are we always the stories we tell about ourselves?

What was that? So what? And other questions about narrative identity, authenticity, and creativity that I am resting in

Jun 01, 2025

After midnight, when self-doubt and perfectionism scream like cicadas on a sweltering summer night, I come close to deleting my newsletter. I feel called to document my thoughts and theories, but am tortured by the fact that time and hindsight will transform how I relate to them, and how accurately they represent me. My past selves and my past work threaten my pursuit of an actualized, unified self.

I mentally mark up old posts in angry red ink, like a professor grading on a curve, crossing out the parts where who I was isn’t who I am, circling the lines that I’d write differently with the insight, skill, and distance I have now. Problems I struggled with months ago seem trivial, or have been retroactively nuanced. I can see my biases more clearly — when I was channeling my higher self, or my inner teenager, or writing from a place of wisdom, or from a wound.

As an OCD-haver, I am plagued by the need to “know for sure” and discern the “truth” about a situation through rumination and mental compulsions. A newsletter confessing my thoughts and opinions is to OCD what a mirror is to a budgie. My writing must not only be Perfectly Written, but speak The Truth and Be Authentic; any writing that does not meet this rigorous standard is considered ‘impure’ and ‘contaminates’ my most recent, most ‘exact’ identity.

I continue living and learning beyond a piece of writing from last week, two months ago, five years ago. Hindsight makes us liars, growth makes us hypocrites. Distressingly, everything I write will be ‘impure’ one day, or was tainted from the start by my subjectivity.

Of course, attempting to discern the perfection and (current and past) truthfulness of old work is futile, and also agonizing.

Documentation inevitably creates contradiction, as I grow beyond the self I was when I wrote that story or posted that essay, but all these selves represent a truth. It might not be one that I am proud of, or one that I still stand by. But refusing to erase or shame my past work, and therefore learning to tolerate ambiguity, ultimately defends and creates safety for greater ‘authenticity’ and self-knowledge.

Narrative identity vs. the unstoried life

Narrative identity is the theory that we form our identities by crafting internalized, evolving myths about ourselves to make meaning of our lives. In his book The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, psychologist Dan P. McAdams, explained:

“We are all tellers of tales, and we seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives. Starting in late adolescence, we manufacture our dramatic personal myths by selectively mining some experiences and neglecting or forgetting others.”

While McAdams doesn’t believe narratives provide an ‘objective truth,’ he believes they support better self-knowledge.

I’m not totally buying it. There are infinite ways to document and share an experience; a narrative is profusely subjective, formed through memory, perspective, and emotion. Doesn’t “selectively mining” and self-mythologizing render our narratives, at worst, untrue and, at best, unstable?

In his article “I am not a story,” published in Aeon, analytic philosopher and literary critic Galen Strawson pushes back against the narrativists. He uses French philosopher Michel de Montaigne as an example of how the dubiousness of memory threatens the ‘truth’ of narrative:

“Montaigne writes the unstoried life – the only life that matters…. His honesty, although extreme, is devoid of exhibitionism or sentimentality…. He seeks self-knowledge in radically unpremeditated life-writing, addressing his writing-paper ‘exactly as I do the first person I meet’. He knows his memory is hopelessly untrustworthy, and he concludes that the fundamental lesson of self-knowledge is knowledge of self-ignorance.”

The danger, as Strawson points out later in his article, is that becoming the stories we tell about ourselves might incentivize us to script our lives. In my younger years, I often viewed myself through the eyes of an imaginary audience, romanticizing my pain, seeking out drama for the plot, playing the part of the tortured artist in my one-woman tragedy. My “exhibitionism” and “sentimentality” ultimately blocked productive growth and insight. At some point, I set the intention to live an “unstoried life,” before I had the vocabulary for it, and my ‘authenticity,’ self-knowledge, and peace increased substantially.

Moving through life without a clear narrative or sense of coherence brings me closer to ‘truth.’ I must write from inside the paradox, stay in the contradiction, embrace the ambiguity, by capturing myself exactly as I am, and talking about what I am learning to hold before I’ve learned to hold it (as I am now!). Admitting how little we know ourselves, and living unscripted, might lead to greater self-knowledge than insisting on a cohesive narrative.

Strawson nuances his argument with this passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (1876):

“How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times 70 skins and still not be able to say: ‘This is really you, this is no longer an outer shell.’
… Besides, it is an agonizing, dangerous undertaking to dig down into yourself in this way, to force your way by the shortest route down the shaft of your own being. How easy it is to do damage to yourself that no doctor can heal. And moreover, why should it be necessary, since everything – our friendships and hatreds, the way we look, our handshakes, the things we remember and forget, our books, our handwriting – bears witness to our being.
…But there is a means by which this absolutely crucial enquiry can be carried out. Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has drawn out your soul, what has commanded it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and by their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self.”

It is so interesting to me (and to Strawson) that Nietzsche talks about the sequence! I am always evolving and changing and my narratives are subjective, but the archive of my writing, no matter how out-dated, represents a truth; it reflects what my past selves cared about, what they were struggling with, what they felt was important to share with others. Seeing your archive laid out, gauging how true one piece feels compared to another, can give you insight into the kind of creating you “truly loved” and want to do more of.

Who I was three posts ago isn’t who I am now, but it is who I was. Editing or deleting old posts that no longer represent my current self scrambles the sequence and erases the truth (even if my perfectionism is not a huge fan of it).

Perhaps the fact that I no longer relate to something I wrote underscores how ‘authentic’ it was in the first place. That emotion, that experience, that thesis couldn’t be expressed any other way. That doesn’t mean it was good — it could, objectively, lack technical skill or a certain je ne sais quoi — but that’s the truest way it could be written. Rewriting or obscuring evidence of that evolution, how I got here from there, would be the impurity.

What was that?

I’ve been paying attention to how artists talk about their evolutions, how they reconcile their past eras.

There is no better case study than the musician Lorde, who received backlash from long-time fans for her 2021 album, Solar Power, for its sharp deviation from her signature “sad girl” image.

Here’s a paragraph from a 2021 article on Solar Power by

Sophie Lou Wilson

(who also writes on Substack!) that captures the online discourse going on at the time:

“One fan’s viral tweet compared the singer’s current iteration to her Pure Heroine era, saying, “i feel like 2014 lorde would have hated 2021 lorde”, to which a quote tweet replied, “honestly me before therapy and medication would have despised me with therapy and medication, let happy people be happy ok!!” …It revealed an expectation amongst some fans for artists to stick to the same mood — and sound — throughout their entire career, even though we know that we all experience a spectrum of emotions, even though the most authentic art is capable of capturing them all.”

I don’t view Solar Power Lorde as a fake, or as a sellout, or as an inferior entity tarnishing her image as a “sad girl” artist, but as a part of her that simply had to be externally expressed. As Wilson put it, the “most authentic art” captures the different lives we’ve led, the myriad emotions we’ve felt.

Lorde’s upcoming album, Virgin, is described as “a journey back to herself,” hinting that we’ll get a peek into how her relationship with herself and her art has transformed.

In a recent interview between Lorde and the artist Martine Syms, Lorde spoke about her creative process:

“This was another one of my big tenets, to avoid prowess wherever possible. Everyone’s good at everything, and I kind of don’t care. Show me what it looks like when you are bad. Show me how it looks when you get it wrong. It feels like that’s what’s at stake to me. Trust they know you’re smart and that you know how to do things, and that working in these simpler or more spontaneous or more naive-feeling forms is going to do something interesting.”

Perfection and prowess are going out of style. I see several posts, every day, shunning the self-help books and wellness culture that once dominated the zeitgeist. We’re sick of anesthetizing our complexity with aesthetics, of mediating our instability with micro-trends, of repressing our chaos with psychoanalysis and labels, of bypassing confusion by rushing to a lesson.

We’ve realized there can’t be wisdom without mistakes, or skill without embarrassment, or a protagonist without a story, and that our cultural moment demands a flawless, invariable self but shames the experimentation that must come before it. We’re losing brain cells from holding our breath, waiting for our past selves, or our latest iterations, to be cancelled or mocked. We want to be bad, to get it wrong, to be more simple, a little naive. We want to lean into the self-ignorance, the unstoried life that Strawson champions. That, I think, is ‘authenticity.’

Lorde doesn’t reject or shame her Solar Power era, but keeps a cool distance from it, hinting that she, perhaps, now views it as being naive, of not knowing better:

“It’s been four years since my last album came out, and the last one, I was going through a lot. I think as artists, we were metabolizing a lot. Summer of 2021, there was this feeling of, ‘Okay, we’re back out here, and everything’s totally fine!’—and it was just so not the case.”

Even though Solar Power was all bright yellow, shimmering and summery, Lorde was struggling with body image issues and an eating disorder. With this new context, does this mean Solar Power was inauthentic or self-deceptive? Even though Lorde felt like “everything’s totally fine,” the next few years revealed it wasn’t. Should she have left this era undocumented because time and distance have revealed it wasn’t a static state?

Solar Power captured exactly who Lorde was and what she was feeling in 2021, even if she didn’t fully understand herself or how events were unfolding around her. She wasn’t purposefully lying to herself or pretending to be someone she was not, and she certainly wasn’t pandering to her fans. I think that, ultimately, makes Solar Power not only objectively ‘truthful,’ but even radically authentic, because Lorde embraced the difference between her Pure Heroine self and her Solar Power self, and refused to stay confined within her “sad girl” narrative when it no longer felt true.

Some truths are impermanent, some are ever-lasting. If Lorde tried to create Solar Power now, she couldn’t. If she were to retract it, she would erase the history that brought her where she is today.

Lorde’s latest single, “What Was That,” off her upcoming album Virgin, seems to comment on her Solar Power phase. She sings: “I tried to let whatever has to pass through me, pass through.” If the Solar Power part of Lorde wasn’t externally expressed, the Virgin part of Lorde (which, she described in the same interview, as feeling truer) might not have alchemized. If I hadn’t purged certain emotions and parts of me through art and self-expression, even imperfectly, they’d still be stuck, screaming at me, creating chaos in more disruptive ways. I’ll agree with the narrativists here: life-writing did make way for eventual self-knowledge.

Like Lorde, I’m holding my transformations and past selves to the light and asking myself, “What the fuck was that?” I’m questing, at the edge of a new frontier, wondering what it means to be who I have been versus who I am now. The conversation between Lorde and Syms is, at its core, about radical self-acceptance. In the same interview, Syms said:

“I want to be more myself, my truest, most magnetic, freakiest self, with a gigantic purple aura around me. That is where the power is. But sometimes that vulnerability, it’s so uncomfortable. That’s something I’ve been reckoning with over the past year, just being okay in that space of discomfort, and being like, it’s a part of it…. It’s actually okay to feel what you’re feeling and to be sort of monstrous.”

The closest I can get to “my truest, most magnetic” self is by documenting myself exactly as I am, in all my wrongness and naivety and freakiness, like Montaigne does in his “radically unpremeditated life-writing,” and, in the future, resist the urge to repress and shame the inevitable contradiction that time will create. Perhaps it is more inauthentic to repress whatever needs to pass through me, even if I am aware it is merely a temporary feeling, a visiting theory. Feeling uncomfortable with the vulnerability of being seen changing is part of self-discovery.

Censoring my past selves, what they were feeling and what mattered to them, is denying the truth. If I surround myself with Syms’s gigantic purple aura, give myself permission to have been everything I have been, and felt everything I have felt, no matter how transient or monstrous, that’s how I can continue being creative.

Coherence through narrative

When we write, we assign a narrative to an experience. We mythologize ourselves. This very essay, for example, some would say, according to legend, has a thesis. There are so many different theses an essay on narrative identity could have. Is it inauthentic to investigate identity — in all its contradiction and complexity and chaos — through the distance of writing, through a singular argument? Is a lesson, a resolution actually a shroud I’m throwing on ambiguity?

Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher best know for his work investigating the nature of subjectivity and narrative identity, believed we are the stories we tell about ourselves, and that this allows for coherence. As I mentioned earlier, narratives are too subjective to always allow for ‘truthful’ coherence, but the act of creation can lead to greater self-knowledge.

Ricoeur argued that texts create a necessary, productive distance between ourselves and our experiences. Paradoxically, this distance (created by language, writing, and temporality) makes reflection and self-knowledge possible. He believed writing is an act of interpreting the self, and acknowledges that interpretation is always evolving.

Not to get too meta, but writing this essay helped me figure out how I feel about narrative identity, and how to move forward with more self-compassion and empowerment. I am always being transformed when I create. Text is a portal. The person I was before writing this essay is not the same person posting it. A mere week ago, my mouse was hovering over the “delete” button because I could not make sense of the paradox between myself and my past selves, between contradiction and authenticity!

Writing does not promote pure delusion or restrictiveness, but as Joan Didion once wrote, acts as a means to “find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” Constructing ourselves through text creates opportunity for bias and contradiction, yes, but its usefulness as a tool for greater self-knowledge outweighs the cons.

Reconstructing and reconciling our selves

Okay, writing helps us understand ourselves. Narrative and myth aren’t threats to authenticity or nuance, but champion them through appropriate distance. But what if old writing (in all its initial helpfulness or catharsis) no longer reflects who I am? Yes, writing helped me grow in the moment of creation, but what if, in hindsight, I wrinkle my nose at its execution, or shake my head at its message?

The question I’m asking can be further explored through the popular thought experiment, The Ship of Theseus.

Here’s the scenario: Say the Athenians preserved the ship of the hero Theseus, and replaced its decaying planks with new ones over time. If every plank of Theseus’s ship replaced, one by one, is it still The Ship of Theseus?

The question I’m asking is: What should be done with those decaying planks (the past self)? Are the old planks the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ Ship of Theseus? And if so, what are the implications of throwing them out?

To put a more relatable spin on it, take the “I Used to Know Her” trend. Here’s an example:

@tooogreedy.gee you changed me, you saved me and I’m forever grateful, i love being your mommy 💖

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An influencer will show an old picture of herself with the text “I used to know her, she was so…” and then contrast it with a picture of her current self, often dramatically different in both aesthetics and lifestyle, with the text “Not someone you know anymore.” These videos are usually self-critical, suggesting the past self is inferior to the new self, as if it is a different person entirely.

In the example above, the woman in the video went from a party girl to a mother. Is she still the same person? If her past self is not her, and is not an “authentic” representation of her, must evidence of her old self be deleted or made the gazingstock of a viral video to uphold the purity of her current self?

I’ve, obviously, always had little tolerance for imperfection and contradiction. In another post, I wrote:

“When I read old diary entries, I’d glow with embarrassment and rip out the pages. When a blog I had as a teenager gained 2,000 followers overnight, I deleted it in a panic.
When I was younger, I knew I was still learning and growing, and the writing getting published in online newspapers and magazines would not be the pinnacle of my abilities. Instead of being excited, I dreaded that evidence of my inexperience… would be floating around the Internet.”

Like Theseus’s ship, parts of me are carried over into who I am, and some are left behind, and, like the participants of the “I used to know her” trend, my instinct is to destroy the past selves, only seeing my current self as the ‘truth.’ If I, the writer-character, am always in flux, perpetually self-constructing, which version of me is authentic?

There’s no single, correct answer. We’re dealing with a paradox, after all. But here’s my take: Both versions of the ship are a truth, along with all the iterations in-between, as the planks are gradually replaced. It’s not ‘or,’ it’s ‘and.’

In which case, the initial versions of the Ship of Theseus and the TikTok influencers shouldn’t be exiled as separate, primitive entities. (That was definitely a sentence!) Our “planks,” our past selves, and the sequence of them, are still representations of ourselves.

This universal hatred and embarrassment of our past selves that we all possess (along with the demand that our favourite artists stick to one genre and one image) once again speaks to our intolerance for change. My hope, instead, is that we build more safety within ourselves, and within the collective, to tolerate the evidence of our past selves and reconstruct and reconcile and integrate our contradictory parts, not shame or destroy them.

You can’t throw out your old selves (your old planks) without losing something intimate, important. As I write this, I’m surprisingly, shockingly, finding myself sad that the unique angst and epiphanies of my past selves, that I can no longer access and am quickly forgetting, are not authentically documented for me to reflect on and share with others who might be going through the same experiences.

The sequence of my art, the archive of my writing, is evidence of me, and helps me know and see myself more clearly. Recognizing all the versions of myself, even if unsavoury, increases not only my tolerance for chaos, but my self-compassion.

Self-compassion and truth

Ricoeur also believed that self-esteem is affected by the stories we tell about ourselves. For better or for worse, the stories we tell about ourselves inform our self-perceptions. When we tell stories about our shamefulness or moral failings, it is harder to esteem ourselves. Telling our stories kindly, but with humility, moves us toward ethical self-recognition; we gain more clarity about our values and how we affect others.

Writing about an experience from a place of perfectionism and self-criticism unfairly turns me into a villain and distorts the ‘true’ story. Cognitive biases make me an unreliable narrator. Being harsh is less truthful than being self-compassionate.

How am I supposed to keep developing if I make it so unsafe to be wrong and messy and human, knowing that I will one day hate who I am now? If gazing inward is so hostile, how can ethical self-recognition be accessed? Self-compassion (or, at least, an unpremeditated, unstoried lens) helps me explore an experience and an emotion fully, because it makes it safe for me to see and acknowledge the part I really played without exaggeration.

Being kind to ourselves in our writing, with appropriate self-awareness, rather than casting ourselves as losers and antagonists, empowers us to move forward with dignity and greater accountability and better tell the ‘truth.’

Being seen changing

Picking apart my old writing is another futile attempt at trying to stay in control by denying the fact that my old posts were all I was capable of at the time, in all my humanness and naivety. Telling myself “you should've known better” is not the truth. I have the skills to write better now, but the exact wisdom, talent, and self-awareness I needed was not accessible to my past selves.

The remaining question, of course, is: Should we publish our work when the gap between the greatness we are destined for and our technical abilities has not coalesced, when we only half-understand or half-believe what we are writing about, when the cohesion we gain through narrative is only as strong as our flimsy, barely-sinewed self-knowledge?

I tortured myself, at first, for not launching my newsletter sooner, but I am so glad I didn’t. What seemed like self-doubt was actually discernment. Anything I published in my early twenties would have been very, very embarrassing. I suggest healing your neuroticism and hypervigilance before posting online; your introspection might breed more solipsism than ethical self-recognition, the myths you write might paint you as a villain when you were merely a person, the theories you spin might enable your paranoia. Again, these narratives might be exactly what needed to be expressed, but I’d refrain from sharing them until you’ve given them space to gauge their level of truth.

After a few more years, I knew it was time to start sharing my work, even though I was (and am) still learning and growing and understanding myself. At this point, not writing and sharing is a fate much worse than public humiliation.

Settling into a new identity or developing a new skill is like breaking in new boots — even though it’s painful, and might result in disgusting and embarrassing open sores, I must keep going until they fit. I can’t hide myself away behind a closed door, or I’ll never break in those boots. I must leave the house. I must walk, with my open sores and my humanness exposed. If I wait for the day when I am a fixed, immutable being to begin, I never will.

The cultural moment we’re in, and our own inner critics, make it feel so dangerous to be bad, to be a beginner, that most of us will give up, put down the paintbrushes, delete the newsletter.

But what if creating things you regret is a necessary step in harnessing talent? What if sharing your work with an audience is part of completing a creative project, as essential as a title? Getting it wrong and being bad and fucking up are simply part of the richness of artistry and self-discovery, and growth and eventual ‘truth’ cannot be accessed without imperfections and mistakes clearing the way.

Staying inside the question

Another struggle I have with personal writing is discerning an appropriate level of vulnerability. How can I write ‘honestly’ without exploiting myself? How can I tell a story ‘honestly’ if I’m choosing a narrative?

I do not want to write too academically or self-help-ily, because touting that I know the definitive truth about anything is a lie, and the advice and prescriptions I give others will shift the older (and, hopefully, wiser) I get. As I said, I write to figure things out. I feel most free living unstoried. But I also do not want to bleed onto the page, because writing from a wholly subjective, emotional, or reactive place is likely not the full story.

In a recent post, the poet

Andrea Gibson

wrote:

“I pick up my pen when I begin to pick up my head. I write from the soft (or not so soft) landing of the lesson learned. I write when I’ve had enough time and distance to say, ‘Thank goodness that happened.’ ...Because I realized that if I only reach out to you from the healed place, from the lesson learned, then we don’t get to sit in vulnerability together. Neatly resolved stories signal that the exploration is over. Sometimes it’s not about knowing the answer, but being inside the question together.”

I started this newsletter with the intention of writing from inside the question, because it is more honest than trying to distill grey into black and white, or wrap up ambiguity with a neat and tidy narrative, or hide my messiness with performance and sanctimony. When I’m writing, I’m in the trenches, in the muck, in the messiness with you.

Writing from inside the question, of course, creates space for me to contradict myself and change my mind once I am on the other side of it.

Welcoming paradox and making friends with uncertainty and exploring the same pain or emotion or topic over and over again while I figure it out is what invites ‘truth’ in. (This deep need to ‘document’ and ‘confess’ and be ‘authentic’ is likely another manifestation of OCD, but that’s a can of worms for another day!)

But, again, staying inside the question, to me, does not mean exploiting my story or my pain. As Ricoeur argued, writing entails a distance between ourselves and our experiences, enabling better self-reflection and more accurate self-portrayal. Our writing is most honest when we stay inside the question, with some distance.

So what?

This newsletter is exposure therapy. Writing and sharing myself desensitizes me to my own mutability and forces me to move on from ruminating in circles, spiralling in search of an absolutist (and unreachable) truth.

Instead of agonizing over achieving exactness and prowess, I’m going to say: so what? The way I wrote that piece was the only way I was capable of writing it, so what? I took on an ambitious project before I had the technical skills, so what? Something I wrote no longer represents me, so what? Narrative and identity are dubious, so what? I fucked up and got it wrong and have regrets, so what? I don’t know where I’m going but I know that not trying feels worse than being seen trying, so what? So what, so what, so what?

Keeping this newsletter as an archive of my humanness and multiplicity and giving myself more permission to experiment and be unscripted could be a radical act of saying “So what!!!!”

My opinion on my writing will change again and again as the selves I’ve outgrown and the selves I’m growing into argue and fight, then reconcile and learn to play.

The most fool-proof thesis, the most sure-of-itself essay may no longer represent who I am one day. Despite this, art and writing can still champion ‘authenticity’ by reflecting exactly what I’m thinking and feeling, however fleeting. Right now, writing is a tool for making meaning of my life, self-reflecting, and growing, when I do it with an appropriate amount of self-compassion, vulnerability, and distance.

Unstoried authenticity might result in cringe, or regret, or poor execution, but I’d rather encourage a culture where I can be freaky and dumb and curious, rather than petrified of making a mistake or contradicting myself.

Instead of obsessing over and regretting old work, what I can do is extend myself grace and remind myself that perfectionism is the liar, that insight comes from staying inside the question, that it’s okay to be seen changing and figuring things out, and that I must keep declaring So what? So what? So what? from my gigantic purple aura.

How do you relate to your past selves and your old work? How do you react to art that no longer represents you, or that you might even hate? I would love to know in the comments!