We have certain experiences that we see as typical to us. This is interesting. We can tell a lot about what we think of ourselves and our identities by what experiences we call typical. What is interesting about them is that the list of things that we do that we see as typical does not necessarily match up with what we actually do all the time. You see this kind of behavior in people who are particularly hard on themselves. Failure is typical and success is a freak accident. This is amusingly still believed even when in that person’s life the number of successes way over balances the number of failures.
Typical experiences flow out of who we think we are. They are expressions and manifestations of our identity. They allow us to have an existence within the constant ebb and flow of our experiences. They keep us from seeing things like our digestion and sweating as core to who we are. I would not want to live without this function of my identity, but it can often deceive us. Our subjective experience of ourselves can become strongly skewed and this likely by the same mechanism that helps us filter the signal from the noise in our day to day experience. Somehow we can get confused about what is the signal in our experiences and what is the noise. This confusion comes from a core interpretive mistake about who we are.
I know of no quick fix for this, but it is a call to look at other voices in determining who we are and especially the meaning of events in our lives. We too often jump to conclusions based on a clear idea of who we think we are. Maybe a good way forward is to think about the experiences themselves as if they were a part of another person we did not know. What would we assume about this person’s identity and how would that contrast with ours.