One thing I found really interesting from Julie Beck’s essay “Life’s Stories”, was the fact that she described how people tend to think of their life as a story. This caught my attention because I had never really thought about this idea specifically in detail before, however I do realize that this seems to be true for the people that I have met, at least. I feel that I have been using this story outline as I think about my life without acknowledging it.  On the same note, I also found the following quote intriguing: “’Sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives,” says Jonathan Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, “but the default mode of human cognition is a narrative mode’”. Another topic that stood out to me from Beck’s writing was that we tend to follow a specific, set path for how our lives should play out. For example, we generally believe in graduating high school, heading straight into college to pursue higher education, getting married, and then having a family.  As a recent high school graduate, I have realized that this is very true especially in the sense that we are all pretty much expected to go to college. A third concept from Julie Beck’s writing which stood out to me was the idea that we all go through three fairly distinct stages of our lives. The first, from birth, is becoming an actor for specific roles we are designated, such as being a daughter or sister. The second, which occurs as we age, is becoming an agent. This is when we maintain our roles but build on ourselves and our lives through decision making. Finally, the third stage is becoming an author by creating a narrative with our experiences.  I think it is interesting that each of these ideas is generally applicable to people today, although we somewhat selectively ignore and do not challenge them .