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Key points
- Narrative identity creates a sense of self through stories of how we became the person we are and will become.
- College is a unique opportunity for exploration and reflection on our identity and who we want to be in the future.
- Today’s graduating seniors faced unique challenges through the pandemic and many became more resilient.
College students graduating this year faced unique challenges and learned distinctive skills through navigating the pandemic. I had the privilege of giving the faculty address to the graduating honors’ students at Emory University yesterday, and it gave me the opportunity to reflect yet again on what college graduation means, especially for this cohort of students whose college careers were so disrupted by COVID-19. Here are my remarks:
I have been a faculty member at Emory University for more than 30 years. For me, graduation is an annual event. Each year, I celebrate with my graduating seniors, sharing joys at their accomplishments and tears at seeing them leave. I understand that, although I attend graduation every year, for my students and their families, it is a singular, life-defining event; it is a culmination of great hopes and heartaches on the way to a successful launching into the world. And, of course, as part of this celebration, we share stories.
As some of you may know, I publish a blog with Psychology Today on "The Stories of Our Lives." I write about the power of storytelling to create our sense of self, our sense of family and community, and our sense of wonder in the world. Stories are fundamentally how humans make sense of our experiences. Each of us crafts a story of who we are—what psychologists call a narrative identity. Narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story of the self that each person constructs to make sense and meaning out of their life. Today, I want to highlight three ways in which stories shape us.
How We Became the Person We Are
First, stories explain how we became the person we are. We tell about our experiences and, through stories, we interpret and evaluate what these experiences mean for us and those we love.
But these stories are never told in isolation; we are telling our stories to, with, and around others and we are always listening to others' stories. As we grow up, these stories are told within our families, stories of our shared experiences, our summer vacations, and holiday dinners, but also family history. We listen to stories about our parents and our grandparents when they were growing up and growing old, our sisters and brothers, our aunts and uncles and crazy Uncle Joe. These stories are told and retold over Tuesday night spaghetti dinners and special family occasions. Through the telling and retelling of these family stories, we learn about who we are in the world.
My colleague Marshall Duke and I have been studying family storytelling for over two decades, and we have shown the power of this kind of family storytelling. Adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories—stories such as where their grandparents grew up, how their parents met—these adolescents show higher levels of self-esteem, lower anxiety, and a higher sense of meaning and purpose in life. Importantly, it is not knowing this or that particular family story, but that adolescents are embedded in families that tell their stories, create these shared histories across the generations. Family stories are powerful because they provide an anchor in an uncertain world—life lessons about what it means to be a good person and to live a good life.
And we each develop our own story within these family stories. Family stories provide models for adolescents and young adults as they move out into the world and begin to craft their own individual stories of who they are.
Who You Are
So, second, stories of who you are. The college years are supposed to be a time of self-discovery. Adolescents moving into young adulthood leave home and begin to navigate on their own and they ask, “Who am I?” This is a developmental period that the psychologist Erik Erikson labeled “the identity crisis,” but crisis is not quite the right word. Rather it is a time of reflection, of critical thinking, of perspective-taking and increasing awareness of your place in a larger and more diverse world.
College is a time to question, to explore, and to commit—what are your beliefs, values, and ideals? It is not so much a crisis as a considering. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you reject who you were. As one of my students put it, it may be a time of strengthening and stabilizing your worldview as much as challenge and change. What is important is the process, and college provides the intellectual and social tools for you to engage in this process and, ultimately, to construct a narrative identity, the story of you.
But your class was caught by an additional challenge—COVID. Just as you went off to college—went off to explore your independence and discover who you are—the world closed down. By the end of your first year, most of you were back in your childhood bedrooms, and you spent your sophomore year learning more about Zoom than you ever wanted to know! Instead of exploring outward into the world, you were challenged to turn inward to explore yourselves. COVID created unprecedented challenges for your class in particular coming at such a critical developmental point.
In those first few weeks of lockdown, I became part of a multi-university group of researchers studying the effects of the pandemic on first-year college students. Our focus, as you might have guessed, was how first-year students were making sense of these experiences through their stories, how they told about their pandemic experiences, how they narrated both what happened and how they felt about it. We gathered stories and data online in that first spring and across the summer. In fact, some of you sitting here today may be one of our participants! When we started the project in spring of 2020, we thought we would end the study when we all returned to campus that following fall. But, of course, we did not.
You spent your sophomore year remote, continuing to pursue your education in the midst of ongoing and evolving challenges and a world that was rapidly changing. We continued to collect data and, indeed, have just completed our last data collection as our participants across the universities involved are graduating.
When we first began to look at the narratives, we were concerned. Levels of anxiety were skyrocketing, students expressed feelings of grief, of lack of belonging, of lost opportunities, and unclear and uncertain futures. But we also began to see students create more positive meaning over time. A growing closeness with their families, a growing sense of empathy and, frankly, outrage, and a change in reflecting on what matters in life.
You will forever be the college COVID generation, but you have learned something unique from that experience. You learned how to be alone and yet stay connected, how to be caring and to take the perspective of others, even with limited social opportunities, and you reflected on what was most important to you to accomplish. Most of all, you learned how to be strong, yet flexible; again, as one of my students put it, you learned how to maintain your curiosity in the midst of uncertainty. You were resilient.
And you came back to campus ready to engage in the daunting task of an honors thesis. You went into libraries and labs, into communities to do field work and internships, traveled internationally to explore different cultures. And you learned to harness your curiosity with disciplined scholarship. You pursued your passions and you built spirited relationships with your faculty mentors. You conferred and discussed, you debated the finer points of your thesis, and you struggled with learning how to best present your arguments. You wrote. And re-wrote. And re-wrote. And you succeeded! And in writing your honors thesis you have also written your own story, the story of who you are.
Who You Will Become
But perhaps most important are the stories of who you will become. Today, as you celebrate your time at Emory and contemplate your next steps, your story will be forever enmeshed in where you came from and who you are, the stories of your family providing your foundations, and your Emory story providing your intellectual roots. Your time at Emory was a time to explore both personally and professionally, and you have grown and flourished.
But your story is far from finished. The story of who you are today will evolve. I do not know who you will become, but I do know that each and every one of you will live a life worthy of these foundations.
Today, we celebrate graduation with lots of stories. Stories sustain us and create us; they connect us and transform us. Today and always, tell your story proudly. But, also, always, always listen to the stories around you. Our story is never ours alone. Who we are, who we will become is always part of the larger mosaic of stories, of family and friends, of mentors and colleagues. Today we celebrate you. And all the stories that surround you and make you who you are.
