Stories

January 8, 2025

Last year I was most dissatisfied with my writing, but I couldn’t narrow down exactly what I was dissatisfied with. I was able to write in scene, create conflict and characters, plot out a piece of work etc. but the sense that there was something more nagged at me but it was one of those things that I didn’t know how to search for and it was such a ‘busy’ year that I didn’t focus too much energy on figuring it out. I drifted through the year that, as I wrote last week, felt like one of the most meaningless years of my life. I see now that one of the threads in the year was about allowing my head to find its acceptance of the aging body, something that I and possibly many of us don’t gracefully embrace. But this is not what I came here to say today. 

            Last month I did a creative writing course that opened the door to understanding this dissatisfaction I had felt with my writing. It was a hard class, with readings that felt so alien to my brain and with a teacher whose ideas about writing were more about slowing down and creating the moral atmosphere rather than throwing the reader into action to hook the reader. I liked what he was teaching. One of the essays we read was Joan Didion’s, The White Album. She starts the essay saying, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.’ Later in the paragraph we see that she is talking about the narratives we build about the events of our life (and possibly others), picking the most ‘workable’ choices to fit the story we want to tell ourselves, but that these stories may actually detract from, ‘the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’

            It is also a truth, at least my truth, that it is easier to see the stories others tell themselves than the ones I build for my life. I also think it is a truth that we are heroes or at least the good guys, the ones wronged, the kind ones, in our own stories and the others who are villians in our story also are heroes in their own, right? I won’t be specific today but since having this thought I have seen many villains of my life in a slightly shifted perspective. Only slightly shifted as I feel I am not yet big enough or flexible enough to see myself as the villain in their life. 

            Our stories often sometimes curated around the fairy tales we’ve been told or as we grow more often the messages we pick up from books. The first book I read this year (I don’t recommend it – so I won’t name it) was one in which the messages followed the lines of 

·      Things happen for a reason. Often bad things – and we need to find the learning in them.

·      For something to exist you have to truly believe it does. This could be a physical object or a dream. So if you cannot manifest your dream then it is your own lack of faith, right?

·      What is not lost cannot be found. Hmm… Along the lines of, we already have everything we need within us?

·      When you want something badly enough the entire universe conspires to get it for you. I think this became popular after The Alchemist became popular.

·      I am right where I need to be. Or that my whole life brought me to this point or some such thing. 

Haven’t we all at some time or the other, especially when life felt purposeless, fallen into one of these beliefs to make sense of what was going on? Yet it is also a truth, for me, that these have stopped me from really diving into the search for meaning in my particular life, which if find I might also touch the universality of the meaning of life. Of course, there are books and philosophers who have done the ‘work’ and have more to say about the meaning of life. But isn’t that also something that I need to approach with caution so that I don’t take on their meaning for mine? 

The last book I read last year was, Headshot, long listed for the Booker. It was about eight young women at a boxing championship. Though structured around the seven fights the girls fought to find one winner, the omniscient narrator wandered around the pasts, the presents, and futures of these girls. Winning or Losing do not define the rest of our lives, nor has your destiny lead you to this one moment. There are multiples of things we exclude if we tell ourselves those particular stories. 

Yes, I think one of the things I will be doing this year is excavating the stories I have told myself, extricating beliefs that I might have built my stories around, and hopefully leading a more fluid life where I can slip out of one of my story lines and into another until they all collapse into the naked present moment. 

And I will be reading more books this year, good and bad ones, and learning about myself from them. Because we read, fact or fiction, not only to know about someone or something else, but to know more about ourselves. As I wrote the line before this one, I had the thought that oops, is that too much of a self-absorbed quest? I will find out.