Blog 12

Identify at least three notable assertions or other moments in Beck’s text that caused you to sit up straighter and take note. Explain what exactly caught your eye. Did you react as a believer or doubter? Did you build a connection between the text and the world or the text and your self?

The first place in Beck’s article that made me sit up and take notes was when she mentioned how “people with Autism do not construct narratives for the structure of their lives.” I found this to be very interesting and I wanted to learn more about this topic because I can greatly relate to it with my younger brother Brady. I wanted to know more on what maybe causes this and maybe even a small amount of research to back it up, although I felt like the topic was introduced and then dismissed very quickly. Another part of the article that I found interesting was when McAdams referred to people as “actors” when people are telling the story about the different roles of their life and story. I find the word “actor” to maybe not be the right word because actor to me means actually like someone who you aren’t and pretending to be someone other than yourself. Although, the roles that McAdams referred to as actors were the brother, sister, mother, or neighbor, even though these are all real roles that someone can portray and would not really make pretend. My favorite part of the article was when mental health was brought up. I loved the quote that says “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”, I feel like this quote is very relatable to me. I always find myself thinking of bad experiences I may have had over and over again and before I talk the experience through with someone else, I can not stop stressing about the situation. It helps me to receive someone else’s outlook on the situation. I found it very interesting that two different types of stories were brought up, both redemption and contamination sequences. I thought back to some of my personal stories and found that I have a hand full of these of my own. I mostly found myself to be a believer of a lot of points brought up within this article and I felt like I could strongly connect to almost all of it. I found this article to be very interesting, although I did find that some parts of the article were very repetitive, by stating the same content but just in different forms. Something I did notice in this article was that there was a quote that says “life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality…” I found this quote to be interesting because this article focuses on how each of our personal life experiences and stories makes up the chapters of our lives and each of us has a unique story to define the lessons of our lives. Although, the next article we are going to be reading is titled “I am not a story” which I can guess is going to be about how our personal life experiences are not a story, these two articles will be interesting to compare since I can kind of get a feel on how they are going to counter argue each other. A connection I made between myself and the text was when it was brought up that “in order to have a relationship, we have had to tell little pieces of our story” I found this to be very relatable because I feel that when I first meet a friend you tell them all about these past chapters in your life and then when you build a stronger relationship with that person, the two people actually start to form chapters of both of their lives together and now the two people are intertwined between the two very different chapters of their lives. I love when personal experiences are referred to like a story and how our whole life is one big story with several chapters because I love how even though there can be the same experience in a dozen people’s stories, none of those dozen stories will be the same version. I find it interesting to see the details that each person pays stronger attention to in their personal chapter/story. I do believe that our lives are like one big narrative.