Shankar Vedantam

It could be

a part of me, almost a helper, a guardian angel.

I am what you might call habituated to this sound, and I haven't really experienced any nervousness about it since.

The new story is that tinnitus can be my friend.

So, Jonathan, you said that a story like this might be an example of what you call integration.

What do you mean by that term?

Yeah.

First of all, let me just say, wow, it is not everyone who can take those chronic challenges that get thrown at us and reframe them in quite that way.

And if Denise was able to do that in an authentic way, that's really spectacular.

So.

I really see this story as highlighting, yeah, like you said, the importance of integration in storytelling.

Some of the work that I've done with Lauren Mitchell and others really tried to illustrate the ways in which integration is one of the central developmental tasks of midlife.

In adolescence and early adulthood, we're really laying down early drafts of our life story.

In midlife, our job is to nurture those stories, maintaining them when that's what's called for, helping them develop when that's what's needed, like in Denise's story.

Many events, like the onset of medical diagnoses, can disrupt life.

our sense of integration.

And of course, many negative things like getting a medical diagnosis or getting divorced or getting fired, those things can make us feel like we've lost our sense of continuity.

But positive things can also do that too.

Like becoming a parent can often be a huge shakeup to identity.

And so the work in midlife is really about striving for integration, figuring out what parts of the story from before the disruptive event ought to still be part of our identity and which parts need to change.