There is always one internal narrative, which is always there with us. But it is tough identifying it despite feeling being one even after experiencing diversity of sensory experiences and our all goals, memories, emotions, actions, beliefs, and present awareness seems to cohere to form a single individual. Despite enormous number of distinct events punctuating our life, we feel continuity of identity through time-moment to moment, decade to decade.
I feel because at times, our commitment to withstand and grow strong beyond those enormous events, we face many anomalies which doesn't fit our 'big picture' belief system and our mind tries to smooth those anomalies and discrepancies in order to preserve the coherence of the self and stability of behavior. As our commitment and dedication to fight the anomalies and discrepancies keeps faltering, the smoothing and normalizing process keeps increasing, creating multiple distinct identities in our mind.
Our priority should be to face these anomalies and solve the problems and don't allow new identities to take shape in our mind. Not only it helps us to stay strong as a self, it gives us a strong internal narrative, which ultimately reflects in our social behavior.
Our emotions, like pride, arrogance, vanity, ambition, love, fear, mercy, jealousy, anger, hubris, humility, pity, self-pity etc. doesn't exist in social vacuum. All our emotions make sense only in relation to other people. It makes perfect evolutionary sense to feel grudges, gratitude, or bonhomie towards other people based on our shared interpersonal histories. We take into account that attribute the faculty of choice, or free will, to fellow social beings and apply our rich palette of social emotions to their actions on that basis. But we are so deeply hardwired for imputing things such as motive, intent, and culpability to the actions of others that we often overextend our social emotions to non-human, non-social objects or situations.
That's how it becomes very difficult but extremely important to create a coherent internal narrative. There are much more than enough things to distort it and damage us permanently. Building coherence in any activity, any narrative takes time. According to researcher Ms. Phillipa Lally, Psychology Researcher of University College, London, a public research university, a habit takes 66 days to set in and become automatic. According to her study, a new habit can be formed between 18 to 256 days, depending upon the interest, commitment and practice of the individual. So, for your reader to get habituated of you, it will take some time. That’s why self-awareness, commitment, dedication and consistency are very important.