From “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” by Dr. Oliver Sacks.

“We have, each of us, a life -story, an inner narrative whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our identities.

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.”

A person — human — needs a narrative. I have a narrative about myself just as complicated and as beautiful as the one you have about yourself. That’s sonder. That’s life. However —

Imagine you are forced to live your life constantly reinventing who you are. You are forced to do this through a mechanism of nature — you are unable to retain for any length of time your knowledge of yourself. You think of anything and create fantastical stories hoping that the story you come up with will be the one. The truth never arrives for you.

There are people who live life the way I described. They live with a mental constraint that prevents them from holding on to themselves. In spite of the constraint, they keep on keeping on.

More and more I believe — we can tolerate so much if we have the ability to choose.