![]() ![]() “Declare yourself” to your colleagues at work. Here are three sets of people to tell your stories to:ġ. So what is your story? Are you telling the right one? And are you telling it to the right people? They are the heart of love and of meaning. “What makes a family is what we build together, what we tell each other.” Serrano told The New York Times (where I read this story). “It is not the blood that makes a family,” Ms. This other daughter looked just like Sophie-but what did that even mean, when she didn’t know her stories? The other mother felt the same way. ![]() It was Manon she had nursed, Manon whose nightmares she’d soothed, and Manon whose stories she knew. Sophie saw that her biological daughter looked just like her in a way that Manon did not and never would.īut she felt no connection to this other girl. But here’s where it takes an unexpected turn.Ī meeting was arranged for the two mothers and their daughters. It’s a typically fascinating “switched at birth” tale. She belonged to another set of parents, who had been raising Sophie’s biological daughter in a town several miles away. The baby, then aged 10, wasn’t his, but she wasn’t Sophie’s either. It was only when Sophie’s husband accused her of giving birth to another man’s baby that she went for paternity tests and discovered that her husband was right (sort of). She knew the story of her life: her cries, her coos, her first words. The nurse had explained that the artificial light used to treat jaundice could affect hair color. She had darker skin and frizzy hair, and the neighbors started to gossip about her origins.īut Sophie never faltered. As she grew older, Manon looked nothing like her parents. The nurse had switched the babies by accident. Unbeknownst to Sophie, it wasn’t her baby. The baby spent her first days in an incubator under artificial light and was returned to her mother four days later. Once upon a time, an 18-year-old Frenchwoman named Sophie Serrano gave birth to a baby girl, who suffered from neonatal jaundice. The facts matter less than the narrative. What are you to make of so many emotions, so many events? In your life, you will move from triumph to heartbreak to boredom and back again, sometimes in the space of a single day. It is to recognize that everything constantly changes. It is, instead, to find meaning in the progression from one event to the next. ![]() The idea is not to delude yourself that bad things are actually good. What about your divorce? Is it a sign you’re unlucky in love or a difficult passage to a more hopeful romance? That time you were laid off, for example, is it further proof that your career’s going nowhere? Or is it the best thing that ever happened, liberating you to find work that suits you better? Conversely, if you acknowledge that you’ve made mistakes and faced difficulties but seek (or have already glimpsed) redemption, you’ll feel a much greater sense of agency over your life. If you’ve interpreted the events of your life to mean that you’re unlucky or unwise, it’s hard to look optimistically at the future. I mean what’s your STORY? What narrative have you constructed from the events of your life? And do you know that this is the single most important question you can ask yourself?Īccording to the fascinating field of “narrative psychology,” the stories we tell about ourselves are the key to our well-being. I don’t mean where you grew up, went to school, got your first job, etc. ![]()
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