The Story of Me

This chapter offers a concrete alternative to the language of vocation, examining how narratives shape a person’s self-perception. Human beings chart the future direction of their lives based on their construction of stories about themselves; moreover, these stories are woven together and interconnect in complex ways. Such self-constructed and self-referential narratives are best described using the word myth: we are always engaged in a process of myth-making as we explore the contours of our lives. This language, suggests the author, may help us to reshape the concept of vocation in a way that recognizes the dynamic nature of the self, clarifies matters of agency, and attends to the retrospective nature of the construction of the self. To illustrate these points, the author offers a number of his own “myths of self,” as well as references to self-constructed narratives in the Bhagavadgita and in other literary and cultural accounts.