Narrative identity is the sense of who you are that develops through the stories you tell about your life: what happened, what it meant and what kind of person you became.
Stories help experience hang together. They can also leave useful details on the cutting-room floor.
"I never finish anything" is quite an edit.
Which things did you finish? Which projects changed because your circumstances did? Which abandoned attempts taught you something? Which genuinely need a different kind of support?
The point isn’t to replace a painful story with a flattering fiction. It’s to give the account enough detail that one sentence doesn’t get to prosecute your entire life.
The Hidden Hero’s Journey explores identity through the domain House, including the remembered stories that make a self-description feel inevitable. Its questions invite participation in the account rather than pretending the past can be erased by a better slogan.
Autobiographical memory looks at remembering your life. Reconstructive memory explains why recall itself can change as a story is revisited.
Dan P. McAdams’s Self and Identity, published by Noba, introduces narrative identity alongside roles and goals. It is a direct psychological source for the concept rather than an invitation to invent a happier past.