Living a good story

I recently had to write my bio for my graduate school program. After all the writing I have done, my statement of purpose, dozens of cover letters, this blog, 100 words about who I am and what I've accomplished was shockingly difficult. I wrote my educational information, then a general sentence about my career and I was stuck. I took a break from it for a day. During this time I contemplated why it was so hard for me to summarize what I have done and came this conclusion:

Maybe it's so hard to write about where we've been because it forces us to re-examine where we want to go. When we do this, we are forced to ask ourselves what we really want and evaluate whether or not we are on track to getting it.

In essence, our bios tell us in a concise paragraph whether or not we are living the narrative we have imagined. We seldom think of our lives in terms of a story until someone else asks us to tell it to them. We also have to sift through years of experiences and decide what were the most important events and accomplishments were. I know ten years from now it will probably be easy to pinpoint the most significant events in my early career, but when they are so recent in history, sometimes it's hard to pick them out. So for now I'll do the best I can, and in a few years, I'll have a whole new bio.