“It is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making. There is thus no feeling, no experience, no thought, no perception independent of a meaning-making context in which it becomes a feeling, an experience, a thought, a perception, because we are the meaning-making context.”
from The Evolving Self : Problem and Process in Human Development by by Robert Kegan
What does it mean to us that this thing happened? How is it impacting our sense of self and the story of our lives? On paper, lots of us have similar stories because we live out similar events (we go to high school, we get dumped by a guy, we grow up and move out, we think about getting married and so on and so on) but the meaning we make of those events can be very different. That’s