Paula spent her 20s looking for a solution to her dissatisfaction. She believed a sense of fulfillment would arrive alongside key milestones: getting her law degree, getting married, having children. Now that she has all three, she feels worse than ever. Her family doesn’t understand why she isn’t happy. Her single friends are annoyed by the disappointment she feels in partnership. Paula feels trapped in her picture-perfect life.
The problem is that Paula spent a decade believing she was acting in accordance with her own desires. She was instead building a life story from an inherited script: one in which her professional worth was dictated by her parents’ career path and her societal worth was determined by her marital and maternal status. Her life story didn’t match who she was or what she actually wanted.
A Co-Authored Story
Dan McAdams argues that the way we tell our life story represents our internalized and evolving identity, providing us with meaning, purpose, and coherence (McAdams & McLean, 2013). But our narrative identity isn’t constructed alone. It is co-authored by the cultural context in which we reside.
Master narratives are widely shared cultural stories that mandate how to live a good life in a particular society (McLean & Syed, 2015). Among other things, these stories tell us how a life should unfold and how the story of that life should be constructed. Paula was living inside a script for how her life should progress: conventional success, then marriage, then motherhood. These milestones function as rungs on a ladder, each one expected to follow the last in an acceptable order. Many people are expected to climb it — especially women.
Who is permitted to adopt which master narrative varies significantly by race, gender, sexuality, and class. These scripts are powerful in part because of their invisibility. They don’t arrive as arguments we can accept or reject; they are assumptions baked into daily living. We seldom notice when we have absorbed one.
One sign that a story isn’t yours is that breaking it produces guilt or shame disproportionate to any real harm. Another is that you can’t articulate why you believe it. If no good answer comes, or if the answer doesn’t reflect your values, you are probably dealing with an inherited script.
Resisting the Script
Master narratives are not absorbed automatically. They present themselves as identity resources that can be either internalized or resisted, and when a culturally imposed narrative is resisted, an alternative narrative may emerge in its place (McLean & Syed, 2015). Research has shown that marginalized populations are more likely to take on alternative narratives, and that the use of more transgressive narratives is associated with greater identity processing (McLean et al., 2018).
Paula faced pushback from her family and peers when she resisted the story she had adopted, because master narratives are not only held privately, but also enforced socially. Her decision to divorce was met with accusations of ingratitude. Her choice to leave law for greater work-life balance as a barista was met with derision. As you carve out an alternative narrative, these responses pose real challenges, and the costs are not always recoverable.
The reward isn’t an easier life. It’s a life that’s actually yours.
