I'm wrapping up an article on how understanding identity as a storytelling process can transform how we design digital spaces so that they promote emotional health and wellbeing.

A thread of smart people saying true things across disciplines about self narratives:1/

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Difference bet us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions... to cooperate effectively. This...glue is made of stories, not genes. We cooperate...with strangers because we believe in ... the stories that people invent and tell one another. – Yuval Harari

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely...by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images...the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”-Joan Didion,

"Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?... and by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share." - Jane Hirshfield

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.” Ursula K. Le Guin

To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self."-O. Saks

I have so many more from psychologists in particular, but I'm drawn by those outside my field right now. Do you have any you can share?