We Are Stories in the Making

Our Identities are a Neverending Narrative

 This is what Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of the Self has taught me about Narrative Identity, and how I applied it to rewrite my story and start living like the main character and not an NPC anymore. 

By Ery Falco

“I am not what happened to me.
I am what I make of what happened to me.”
—Carl Jung

The first time I learnt about the term narrative identity was in my Anthropology class back when I was studying Philosophy.

One of my professors gave us a lecture about French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and his theory of the self. 

So basically what Ricoeur said was that we are our stories.

My identity is the story of my life I tell myself and I tell others. So basically like a novel or a movie. 

Obviously it is more complex than that and I will explain more of it in a second, but that’s basically the core of the theory. 

And I am getting ahead of myself, but this is why I believe you can be whoever you want to be and rewrite your story over and over again until you feel it makes sense to you, and only you. 

We are the main characters and authors of our stories. We can write and rewrite our stories as much as we like.

And understanding this helped me reclaim my story, my narrative and helped me see myself as the main character of my life and not like an NPC who is just background noise in the world. 

Now, before continuing, I will get a little nerdy and tell you why I find fascinating Ricouer’s approach. 

It is mainly because deep inside I have always thought of myself, of my life as a work in progress, like a movie that was still being filmed, or a novel that is still being written, and everyday is like a new chapter. 

And finally I could justify this feeling of narrative identity with real philosophical arguments. 

You see I have always been drawn to read philosophy about the self, identity issues and existential crisis, mostly because personally all my life I had been experiencing them thanks to my neurodivergence. 

And as the nerd I am, I have always wanted to dig more into it and read the experts on the matter trying to understand these things better. 

But, as it always is, Philosophy about identity and the self, had left me with no punctual answers, and instead with more questions. 

I don’t think anyone throughout all human history had given an argument like Ricoeur. Philosophers before him had either said that:

a) what makes our identity is our capacity to think, because personal identity resides in the mind not in the body (like René Descartes); or

b) that our whole identity relies on the continuity of our memory, mainly because what makes a person the same person over time is the continuity of consciousness, especially memory of past experiences (like John Locke); or

c) that our self identity would be nothing but a collection of different perceptions, and since nothing remains perfectly the same over time, identity is always an illusion, fictional. (like David Hume); or 

d) that our identity is neither given nor discovered, it is created, because our identity is always in the making (like Jean-Paul Sartre, which is similar to Ricoeur’s but he dives deeper on the matter than Sartre).

So basically what Ricoeur said was that we make sense of ourselves by telling stories about our past, our actions, our intentions.

These narratives integrate changes, interruptions, and contradictions into a coherent sense of self.

And he agrees with Sartre that our identity is not given, it is created, but he words it differently, saying that Identity of the self is constructed through narrative.

(through this narrative where we integrate all our past, actions, experiences and that we tell others)

Now, so much more is to be said about this, but what I want to mainly focus on is in this part: we are our stories.

And only us can make sense of who we are by integrating all our experiences, thoughts, actions, etc., into one cohesive, coherent story. 

But also, I need to emphasize that it’s not only the story about ourselves that we tell others, that we post on social media so everyone can see how cool we are… but the story we whisper to ourselves when no one’s listening. The secret narrative that we draw in sketchbooks, write in journals, or even in unfinished poems at 3 a.m.

Which leads me to one important question, whose answer I had to be aware of in order to start healing the pieces of my hurt and fragmented neurodivergent self. 

And now I tell you to answer in complete sincerity, so you can be aware of the response too. So,

What is the story of yourself you have been telling (to yourself in private) so far? 

Which basically means, who are you? What is your identity?

Because if you are  like I was me, or at least how I am trying not to be anymore, the story about you  and your identity, you tell yourself is quite different to what you tell others or you let others see. 

Let me explain. 

Have you ever heard about the term “masking”? 

I know I have done it ever since I have memory but hadn’t known about the term until recently. 

Masking, or to mask, is as the term implies, to wear a mask over your real self identity in order to show this facade to the world and protect your inner identity from the exterior. People who mainly do so are neurodivergents or who have experienced some sort of trauma or cPTSD.

We tend to mask our real selves in order to fit in.

I don’t know if this is something we are taught or it is learnt over time even at a young age. But in my personal case I think it was kinda both. I remember my granny used to say to me to never be like me in public, or that whatever I was in private, to keep it to myself. That I had to play the part of a quiet, well behaved girl. Never laugh too loud. Never say what’s on my mind if I am not asked to speak. Never talk about my nerdy quirks and interests, because no one would care. 

And I don’t blame her, you know, she lived a tough life as a woman in the mid XX century and that is what she learnt from it. She was only trying to give me some advice so I wouldn’t suffer as much as she did. 

But our timelines were different, and thank the Goddess for Feminism that we women can speak out loud for ourselves more than before. 

So sadly, her advice that I tried to follow canonically, was in fact hurtful to me. And she said that to me when I was like 5 or 6, I was still a child. And ever since then I started to mask myself. But not only because my well intentioned granny said so, but because I found out she was right as well. 

Anytime I was “me”, like the real me, with my peers, or my teachers, or just people in the grocery store, I would get disdain, from something as simple as a side eye to sometimes being ostracized by my classmates in recess time because I was too weird to hang out with. 

And so in my best interest to socialize, to fit in and not be called out as the “weirdo” one for being me, I started to mask. I started to blend in. I started to like whatever everyone liked or whatever was trending. 

Until I washed over myself. 

And so the story of my identity and my life that others knew started to slowly divert from the story I used to tell myself I was. And that led me to have some hard time distinguishing where my mask ended and where my real self started…

So that’s when I started wondering… Why did I feel like I was living someone else’s life? What happens when your story doesn’t make sense? When your pages are torn, scattered, or erased by hands that weren’t yours? 

And how could I make it stop?

That’s when I started to look for answers in therapy, in self help books, and in Philosophy. And came across Ricoeur's theory. 

And that led me to other questions, like…

What if identity isn’t something you find, but something you write?

What if healing doesn’t come from fixing yourself, but from becoming the author and main character of your own story?

Can I rewrite my own story into something that feels like mine?

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur gave me a language for identity that isn’t rigid—it’s written, and most importantly isn’t finished, it’s ongoing. 

In Ricoeur’s theory, identity is not a static thing you possess. It’s a living thing you shape.

So once I started to ask myself, “what is the story I am telling myself of who I am?,” some things started to shift in me.

First I revised my past, my actions and my experiences from the mindset I had, and from the story that everyone else knew, and found out I was living a narrative I didn’t find myself comfortable with. 

Basically I was telling myself an old story of defeat, of being powerless, of being a victim. One where no matter how smart and outgoing I looked, I was never free, always inside a cage, playing a role of being someone I didn’t even recognize anymore.

And I realized that that was the root of all my self loathing. I hated myself because I did not recognize my reflection every time I looked in the mirror. I could not recognize who I had become, just… to fit in? to be accepted?

I also realized that I was never fully accepted by my peers and people around me, so I asked myself, all this masking and becoming someone I don’t like so I could be liked by everyone else and be praised, just to end up not being liked, being ostracized and being called a fake and a weirdo. 

So what had been the whole point after all? 

And that’s when my journey of years in therapy, healing and self growth began. 

I knew I had to rewrite my story. Not by changing the past, although I prayed every night to God to let me go back in time to change a few things. But it never happened. I couldn’t change what had already happened. But I could change my perspective of those events. 

Why did I always feel like a victim? Why did I let others dictate how I should feel about something?

And so I rewrote my past as a story of becoming, not being a powerless victim anymore. 

And after overriding my past, or the identity I thought I had, with the new identity I was building, I started to write my new future. 

Nothing really change around me, but inside me it felt like I was born again. I felt I was living a second chance  to start over my life and live the way I always wanted. This new chapter in my story synced with the fact that I was about to turn 30 years old and I thought it was the perfect way to end a decade and begin a new age. (and yes this is another easter egg subtle mention to Taylor Swift, if you know, you know)

And this is also where art met my healing journey.

You know, now I am telling this like it all happened on a sunny Saturday, weekend fresh breeze through my hair and every star just aligned, and suddenly everything made sense. But it took me years of rewriting my narrative, of overriding my old identity with my new one. And I think it’s still not over yet.

Some days I still wake up feeling down like I used to, some days I catch myself doing old lame habits that self-destruct me, but on those days I have to consciously try harder and tell myself “no, I am not like that anymore”. And some days, the sun just rises on my bedroom window and everything feels perfectly fine and life just flows. So that is how it feels. 

So I get you if you say it’s not that easy or simple. You know, some of us weren’t handed coherent stories. And we have had to pick up the pieces of our fragmented self and give it some coherence through hard work. For me therapy, journaling and art were key to be able to make it. 

I realized all my life I had been written by others, in voices that didn’t belong to me. So journaling actually helped me to find my own voice. And distinguish what were my true beliefs and my true desires from what others had put inside my head. 

I will not lie to you, it was hard work. Exhausting at times. And some days I just didn’t want to put any effort anymore. I thought my life, my story, myself was not worth rewriting nor healing. 

But you know, I came to learn that a fragmented self is still worth keeping. Is still worth healing, worth rewriting. 

And that is how I turned to art—not to decorate my life, but to survive it.

Writing became a reclamation of my identity. Painting helped me bring some memories and feelings to a visible tangible figure, that allowed me to show other people like, “this, this is how it feels”. 

And that is where this collection of photographs and mixed media art came to life, with the help of my best friend Isabel Taracena. 

And bringing this project to life felt like breathing, like freedom, like catharsis. Just as Aristotle had once described it: 

the purgation or purification of the emotions of pity and fear that are aroused in the audience of a tragedy.

In this case it felt like my life was the tragedy and I was both an actor and spectator of it. But it worked. It did purge some emotions that were bottled up inside me and it was not a nice feeling when they came out, but the aftermath felt freeing. 

So what advice do I want you to leave with?

First, do art or journaling or therapy or whatever helps you to rewrite your own story, and own your own identity. 

You can draw your inner child.
Or you can work with fiction, like writing a character who carries your grief.
Or if you’re more visual, you could film a version of you.

When you become an artist not just to describe pain, but to dialogue with it.
You reshape your narrative, your identity, your story.
 

Maybe it is helpful as well if you ask yourself:

What do I make of this?

REMEMBER: You don’t need to be a “real professional artist.”  You just need to be real. This isn’t about being professional, or having the best technique or even the best talent. 

It’s about telling the truth, your truth. 

And, consider this, sometimes the most powerful healing happens in a community.

So find your community or create one! Maybe create a shared circle with friends and family, or even strangers on the internet who may understand and validate what you feel. 

(on that note, you may also join my community in Patreon of creative neurodivergents, I am growing it and I would be delighted if you join it too)

And before I finish, I want to give you five philosophical principles (with prompts) for healing, expression, and self-reconstruction. Use them or dive more into them if you feel like it helps you. 

1. Narrative Identity (Ricoeur)

Art lets us tell the story in our own voice.

We don’t erase the past—we give it structure.
We become the storytellers of our own lives.

🖊️ Prompt: Write a myth version of your childhood. Make yourself the protagonist.

2. Emotional Catharsis (Aristotle)

Emotion that’s held in becomes illness. Art helps your purge it.

Through color, rhythm, movement—we transform chaos into coherence.

🎨 Prompt: Use only shape and color to express a feeling. No words allowed.

3. Dialogical Self (Ricoeur + Existentialism)

You contain multitudes. Art allows them to speak to each other.

We draw masks. We write from shadow parts. We let our inner selves take the mic.

🎭 Prompt: Write a letter from your “hidden self” to your “performer self.”

4. Meaning-Making (Hermeneutics)

Your art is a message. You don’t have to understand it all at once.

Interpretation isn’t about decoding—it’s about listening.

🔍 Prompt: Revisit an old artwork. Ask: What was I trying to say before I could say it?

5. Ethical Becoming (Existentialism)

Art is rehearsal for becoming.

We create to imagine better versions of ourselves—and then we become them.

🪞 Prompt: Paint or write your future self. Not perfect—just possible.

So here we are.
Not broken. Not fixed.
Just… unfolding.

Ricoeur gave us the theory for narrative identity, art helps us materialize this narrative and we can give it a meaning.

Remember this quote from Carl Jung: 

You are not what happened to you.
You are what you make of it.

So write.
Paint.
Sing.
Film.

You are not the end of your story. You are the author and the main character (so stop living like an NPC).

If this resonated with you and you want to keep in touch, feel free to join my email list, or my Patreon.

I am just starting to build a community in Patreon of neurodivergent creatives for us to support each other. 

If you want to join, I am giving away for free some spots for 6 months. 

Use this link to join. (if you can’t join, it means the spots are all taken, but don’t worry, the tier is less than a coffee per month, just 5 USD and you can have a 7 day free trial if you want to try if it is for you) 

I share personal stories, thoughts on creativity, healing, and art—and I’d love to connect with you there.

You’re not alone. You never were.
And you’ve still got time.

Love you,

Ery Falco

RELATED LINKS

Check out my mixed media project about my self identity and neurodivergence crisis here: all of my cages are mental

Are you an artist interested in creating your personal brand on social media? Check out this is the course I took to learn how to do so.

Would you like to buy any art prints I make? Go here to my online shop