Spreading one’s Wings, Milestones, Deus ex Machina: Self-creation as a Process of Changing Your Life with the Examples of Narrations Provided by Women

Abstract

This paper presents narrative-biographic research conducted with participation of women who declare that they have introduced important changes into their lives. The qualitative data was collected using narrative interviews as well as a tool to examine changes in the biographic perspective; namely, Line of life. In the presented paper, the authors reconstructed biographical self-creation, meaning the ways of life in which important changes are a central category of a story about life. The authors reconstruct three different ways of narrators’ lives – “spreading one’s wings,” “milestones,” “deus ex machina,” and a case study that describes the process of self-creation and introduction of important changes into a life in more detail.