The stories we tell ourselves

I’m doing narrative research, which involves understanding knowledge as how humans make sense of the world through narrative, through stories. I am analyzing, well ok, I am still transcribing, but I will be analyzing my data, looking at what and how my participants, or narrators, tell their experiences, and also how metanarratives and counternarratives shape their stories, and how the narrators draw upon these to relate both their experiences and themselves.
In thinking about narratives, I have realized that there are certain stories I tell, over and over again, about the process of doing a PhD. First of all, I tell the story of how I decided to return to school and enrol in the PhD because I wanted to spend my days in cafés, because I was tired of working 9 to 5, because I wanted time to volunteer at my children’s school. In telling this story I construct the PhD experience as liberating, and myself as living very much in the present. I also minimize the very intense intellectual commitment and hard work involved. The story has evolved, and now I say that I want to get a job as a professor eventually, because it will allow me to travel. While the story is “true” to some extent, it also masks my very real desire to teach and do research, to collaborate and learn, and I am pretty sure that behind both those narratives there is an attempt to conceal my own ambition and geekiness.
The other story I tell is that I work so much, and have so many responsibilities, that I have no time to procrastinate and am so very motivated when I finally have a day to work on my thesis. That has been the case most of the time, but there are days, like today, when I have tasks I find boring to do, like listen to recordings and verify that my transcriptions are accurate, and I do all the laundry in the house and clean the refrigerator instead of doing the work I need to do… This doesn’t make the motivated self narrative less true, it just exposes my own incoherence and contradictions. Now back to work! or should I go for a run?