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Posted May 29, 2026 Reviewed by Davia Sills
The philosopher Galen Strawson writes that he has “no clear sense of who or what I am.” Perhaps to many of our surprise, he is not describing something distressing or undesirable. He experiences this as his natural state, a way of being that has always felt ordinary and at ease to him. He also believes a significant number of people share this experience but have been made to feel that something is wrong with them.
There seems to be a widespread assumption in psychology, in therapy, and in everyday life that a psychologically healthy person is one who can tell a coherent story about their life. We are supposed to know where we came from, what shaped us, and where we are heading. Our past is supposed to make sense of our present, and our present is supposed to point toward a future.
The implicit assumption that a coherent self-narrative is a mark of maturity and integration is present in most spheres of our lives, including in therapy, where clients are encouraged to construct a narrative arc that links their early experience to what they are struggling with and to future possibilities. It is expected from us when we apply for a job, where we need to demonstrate a legible career trajectory as evidence that we are competent; and in the self-help world and personal development programs, which routinely treat the construction of a personal narrative as the path to self-knowledge and meaning.
In psychotherapy, narrative therapy is one well-established approach. Developed in the 1980s and 1990s, it is a widely practiced modality that helps clients examine the stories they tell about their lives, challenge the dominant narratives that constrain them, and construct alternative stories that open up new possibilities for action and identity. This is a powerful experience for many, but the difficulty arises for people for whom the idea of having a life story does not come naturally in the first place.
Strawson identifies a “remarkably robust consensus” among thinkers in philosophy and literary theory that self-narration is necessary for a full human life (among them Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, and Paul Ricoeur; see Strawson, “The Unstoried Life,” 2018). We are told that we are the stories we tell about ourselves, that we become the autobiographical narratives by which we explain our lives, that constructing a coherent life story is essential to having a fully developed identity. Strawson calls these thinkers “the narrativists,” and he thinks they are wrong, or at least that they are wrong as a universal claim about all human beings. As he puts it, the narrativists are “at best, generalizing from their own case.”
He observes that some people simply do not experience themselves as characters in an ongoing story. They do not feel strong continuity with their past selves, and they do not organize their experience into an arc that builds toward a resolution. Strawson distinguishes between those he classifies as “Diachronic,” who naturally experience themselves as persisting through time and living out a continuous story, and those he calls “Episodic,” who do not. The distinction is probably best understood as a spectrum rather than a clean binary, with most people falling somewhere between the two poles, but Strawson’s point is that the episodic end of that spectrum has been consistently overlooked or pathologized. He describes himself as episodic, and throughout his work, he writes against a tradition that has, implicitly or explicitly, treated his way of inhabiting a life as deficient or incomplete.
For many, the experience of being unable to produce a coherent self-narrative and of having that inability treated as a clinical problem becomes a form of epistemic invalidation. Among neurodivergent individuals in particular, it is not uncommon to hear accounts of feeling out of place because they are unable to produce the coherent life story that is asked of them. They may go to therapy and feel like they are failing at it because they cannot make sense of their lives as a fully coherent story. They may go to job interviews and feel out of place because their career path looks like a zigzag rather than a ladder, or they may enter relationships and feel pressured to project a future they cannot clearly or honestly see.
Indeed, the feeling of having no sense of who you are is not always benign. Identity disturbance, defined as a markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self, is a recognized diagnostic criterion for borderline personality disorder, and fragmented or incoherent self-experience is often considered a feature of complex trauma and dissociative conditions. But for those who struggle with these conditions, the inability to narrate a stable sense of self is typically accompanied by chronic emotional pain, volatile relationships, a pervasive sense of emptiness, and significant distress about not knowing who they are. Strawson’s description of the episodic mode, however, does not seem to carry these disturbing qualities. The episodic person does not intrinsically suffer from the absence of narrative when the cultural pressure to produce one is removed.
Strawson describes the experience of living an “unstoried life”: one where existence feels perpetually fresh, as though one is always just beginning. The past does not weigh heavily, and the future does not exert a strong pull. One lives in the thickness of the present moment, responding to what is here rather than organizing experience into a trajectory. Memory is available, but it does not form itself into a story without deliberate effort. There is a sense of bewilderment at being identified with one’s past work, past decisions, past selves, as though those belonged to someone else.
He draws on a wide range of writers to show that this way of relating to time is not new or that unusual. The people he cites include Montaigne and Virginia Woolf. Some described a sense of genuine estrangement from their earlier selves and earlier work, as though those belonged to a different person. Some described their inner lives as composed of impressions and episodes that resist any impulse to be organized into a plot. None of them experienced selfhood as a story, and none of them seem to have been troubled by that fact.
If Strawson is correct, living without a life story can be a legitimate and fulfilling way of living. The unstoried life is not a life without depth of feeling, commitment, or care, and it does not need the scaffolding of narrative to feel real. For the many people who have spent years trying to produce a coherent life story and failed, and who have concluded on that basis that something is wrong with them, Strawson’s work may offer deep relief and inspiration.
References
Strawson, G. (2004). Against Narrativity. Ratio, 17(4), 428–452.
Strawson, G. (2018). The Unstoried Life. In A. Altobrando et al. (Eds.), The Realizations of the Self (pp. 113–133). Springer.
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Imi Lo is a consultant and the author of three books, including The Gift of Intensity. She holds three master’s degrees in Mental Health, Buddhist Studies, and Global Cultures.
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The best way to begin something new—in love, work, and life.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.