Case Study 2: Amara — Whose Story Is This?

Background

The name tag problem did not resolve itself after the information session. Amara carried it.

Not because she was fixated on it — she had real things to think about, real work to do — but because it kept finding her. The following week, at her nonprofit's staff meeting, the new director asked everyone to "introduce themselves and say one thing about their professional identity." Amara's colleagues spoke easily: I'm a community organizer. I'm a policy researcher. I'm an advocate. When it was Amara's turn, she gave her name and her role and said "I care about people having what they need," which was true but which was also, she realized on the way home, not really an identity. It was a value. It was a disposition. It was not yet a story.

She was beginning to understand that these were different things.

The Chapter Question

The chapter offers a framework that Amara finds herself returning to: identity as a narrative that integrates past, present, and anticipated future. McAdams's "personal myth."

Amara has a past. She has more past than many 24-year-olds, in the sense of having more significant events that shaped her before she had the cognitive and emotional resources to process them fully. A mother with an alcohol dependency. The caretaker role from childhood. Nana Rose as the one person who received her without requiring anything in return. Nana Rose's death at nineteen. The difficult college relationship with Marcus that confirmed several of her worst fears about herself. The subsequent years of rebuilding.

She has a present: a new city, a new job, new relationships — Kemi's friendship, the careful beginning of something with Yusuf.

What she does not yet fully have is the narrative that connects them. The story that says: this happened, and then this happened, and this is what it made me, and here is where I am going.

She has been living in chapters but has not yet written the through-line.

The Self-Concept She Inherited

Amara's self-schemas, examined carefully, include several that she can trace directly to her childhood caregiving role:

I am someone who takes care of others. (Inherited: required from early childhood.)

I am responsible. (Inherited: someone had to be.)

I am strong. (Developed in response to circumstances that required strength.)

I don't need much. (Adaptive at home; a constraint everywhere else.)

The schemas are not false. She is genuinely caring, genuinely responsible, genuinely strong. But several of them were formed by a 9-year-old managing an impossible situation, and they carry the 9-year-old's logic. The 9-year-old who did not need much was surviving. The 24-year-old who does not need much is limiting herself.

This is what she has been calling, since the personality chapter, the "authorship check." And the identity chapter adds a framework: some of her self-schemas are inherited from circumstances rather than genuinely chosen. The question is whether she will examine them and decide which to keep — and whether she will recognize that keeping them after examination is different from keeping them by default.

Amara is a young Black woman who grew up in a working-class household. She is the first person in her immediate family to attend a four-year college, and one of very few people from her neighborhood to do so.

Her social identities are not primarily sources of distress for her — they are, in many ways, sources of genuine pride, belonging, and purpose. The community organizing work she does at her nonprofit connects to her identity as someone who came from that community. She does not experience her race or class background as a burden so much as a dimension of who she is that she is still learning to hold fully.

What she has noticed, in reading the chapter's discussion of social identity, is that she has occasionally allowed others to define those identities for her — to narrate her class background as disadvantage, her race as obstacle, her family history as damage. She has sometimes accepted those narratives because they came from people with authority (therapists, professors, social workers), and because there was enough truth in them that they were hard to reject entirely.

But they were not the whole story. And they were not always hers.

The question of whose narrative about her life is the right one — hers, or someone else's with professional standing — is a real identity question, and one she is still working out.

The Narrative Structure

When Amara sits with the chapter's framework about redemptive and contamination narratives, she recognizes something she has been avoiding.

Her account of her childhood — when she tells it to others, when she thinks about it herself — tends to be predominantly a contamination sequence. Things were hard. Her mother drank. Nana Rose was the exception, and Nana Rose died. Marcus was painful. The ending of each chapter has been darker than the beginning.

She can see the redemptive elements — she is here, she did something with what she was given — but they feel performative when she says them. Like the right answer, not the true one.

The chapter, importantly, does not say she should simply adopt a redemptive narrative. It says the narrative can be worked with — and that working with it honestly, rather than either avoiding it or forcing it into a pre-approved shape, is the productive path.

What that means, she thinks, is being honest about the contamination without stopping there. The caretaker child became someone who cares about people having what they need — and that is real. The grief for Nana Rose made her take connection seriously in a way she might not have otherwise — and that is also real. The relationship with Marcus was damaging, and she survived it, and she learned things about herself that she had been avoiding before — and that is real too.

The redemption is not in spite of the harm. It is worked through it, not around it.

She is not quite there yet. But she can see it.

The Possible Self That Is Actually Hers

Amara's graduate school application — still in progress, still uncertain — is more of an identity question than an occupational one.

The MSW she is applying for would mean being a social worker. She has been saying that for two years. But sitting with the possible-selves framework, she asks herself: is the social worker identity a hoped-for self, or is it an extension of the caretaker role — the responsible, needed, giving identity that she has been performing since she was eight?

The answer, she thinks, is: both. And that is not a problem, necessarily. The question is whether there is genuine choice in it — whether she would pursue this if the alternative were not a return to the self-concept she is trying to examine.

She sits with the honest answer.

She thinks: there are moments when I am with my clients at the nonprofit — a woman navigating a housing crisis, a teenager who doesn't know who to ask for help — and I feel something that is not obligation. It is more like recognition. Like I understand something about this that I understand from the inside, not from a textbook.

That feels like genuine connection to a hoped-for self. Not just caretaker-as-obligation. Caretaker-as-vocation.

The difference matters.

The Analysis

Identity moratorium as the right place to be

Amara is in moratorium across several identity domains: occupational, values, and partially relational. This is appropriate for her age and life situation. She is doing the examination — not avoiding it, not foreclosing prematurely into inherited identity claims. The discomfort is productive.

The narrative work

What is most relevant for Amara in this chapter is narrative identity — specifically, the possibility that the story she has been telling about her life is both true and incomplete. The contamination narrative captures something real about what happened. It does not capture everything that happened. The integration of both — holding the harm and the growth in the same story without flattening either — is the genuine narrative work ahead.

The inherited self-concept

The self-schemas she is examining are not false. They are both real and historically contingent — real tendencies that developed in specific circumstances that are no longer the context she is living in. The examination is not about discarding them. It is about choosing them — deciding which parts of the identity she was given she actually wants to carry forward, and on what terms.

What the identity framework adds

In Chapter 8, the question was whether Amara's warmth was chosen or required. In Chapter 9, the question expands: beyond any single trait, is the story she is telling about who she is genuinely hers? Has she examined it, or inherited it? And if the examination reveals that some of it is inherited — which it will — what will she do with that?

The answer is not to discard the inheritance. It is to choose it consciously, with full awareness, rather than simply carrying it forward by default.

That is the difference between foreclosure and achievement.

Discussion Questions

1. Amara has self-schemas that she can trace to her caretaker role in childhood — "I don't need much" being one example. How do childhood circumstances shape self-schemas, and at what point does examining them become possible?

2. The case describes Amara's social identities (race, class background) as sources of pride and purpose, not only difficulty. How does this complicate narratives about disadvantaged social identities that focus primarily on harm?

3. Amara describes feeling that others' narratives about her life (from professionals with authority) sometimes do not fully capture her experience. What is the appropriate relationship between professionally constructed narratives (therapy, social work case files, diagnostic categories) and the individual's own narrative?

4. The case ends with Amara distinguishing "caretaker-as-obligation" from "caretaker-as-vocation." What makes this distinction real rather than self-deception? How would she know which one is operating?

5. The chapter suggests that working through a contamination narrative — holding the harm and the growth together — is more honest than either avoiding the harm or forcing a redemptive reframing. What does "working through" actually look like in practice?

Application Exercise

Recall one significant difficulty or loss in your own life — something that has meaningfully shaped you.

Write two brief accounts of it (100 words each): 1. The contamination version: how it went wrong and what it took from you 2. A version that holds both the harm and whatever grew from it — not minimizing the harm, but not stopping at the harm either

Reflect: Which version feels more honest? More useful? Is there a tension between the two?