You have one particularly important story that you tell yourself, about yourself: your ‘life story,’ which helps you to organize your experiences and give you a sense of Self.

Even dictating your behavior in some cases. You are constantly updating, amending and adding to this story as you encounter new experiences.

Personality comes in layers. The first layer is your basic character, made up of traits driven by your genetics and environment. The second layer are things like values and goals.

The third layer is the story you tell about your life, a sort of cognitive script that helps you understand how you came to be the way you are, and where you think your life is going, giving you some sense of meaning and purpose.

Nodus Tollens: Your life is a story. The days flip past, too quickly to absorb, a mess of seemingly random events. So you look back and highlight certain moments as important, as turning points in the main plot. You trace each thread back to its origin, finding omens and ironies scattered along the way, until it all feels inevitable, and your life makes sense. You know how this story is going to end, but you are still eager to skip ahead, dying to know what happens next.

But there are times when you look up and realize that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. You thought you were following the arc of the story, but you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand. Either everything seems important or nothing does. It’s a tangled mess of moments that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre, that keeping changing depending on what you choose to highlight.

What kind of story is this? Just another coming-of-age tale, the same one your parents told, with the names switched around? Is your everyday life part of the origin story of something truly epic? Are you unwittingly getting by on other people’s charity, mistaking your own luck for your own success? Are you a character in a romance, a tragedy, a travelogue, or just another cautionary tale?

As you thumb through the years, you may never know where this all is going. The only thing you know is that there’s more to the story. That soon enough you’ll flip back to this day looking for clues of what was to come, rereading all the chapters you skimmed through to get to the good parts – only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.