Why do we write?

“Let me be a part of the narrative.”

Whether or not you’re a writer in terms of putting pen to paper on a regular basis, you are writing a story about yourself.

Each of us walks around with a different narrative in our heads because it’s our instinct as humans to translate the onslaught of incoming information and the ups and downs of our life experience into a story that makes sense to us. It’s how we’re wired, and it’s an instinct that helps us find meaning in the chaos of existence.

Narrative can be beautiful, instilling us with a sense of purpose and reminding us that we matter, that each person is distinct and precious and fills a specific place in this world. But it can also be a dangerous thing.

The problem comes when we’ve built a narrative in our minds that we feel stuck with. “I can’t do this” or “I’m too old to do that” or “I want this thing, but it’s clearly not going to happen for me.” Blowing up those negative narratives can be terrifying in a way because you have to learn to let go of your conviction in something, but it can also be freeing.

In order to start this newsletter, I had to let go of a certain narrative taught to me by the toxic parts of capitalism: the idea that my writing would only be valuable if it were part of a traditional job, that my words were meaningless unless they were tied to a desk, a paycheck, a retirement account.

To go further back, I had to let go of several toxic narratives simply to start writing again. I told myself for a long time that I had clearly “failed” because I had never found that “passion job” that we’re told to look for; that I had fallen behind everyone else and could never catch up; and that all my best ideas were behind me.

Unfurling the story of how I let go of each of those narratives would take us outside the scope of this newsletter, but I hope the simple fact that I’m here, writing this for you, is a testament to the fact that we can identify, untangle, and even rewrite the narratives playing in our minds that sometimes block us from reaching for the things that we want.

There’s a fine line to walk between being able to let go of narratives when they’re hurtful and wrong, and remembering why we create them in the first place, and every day I do my best to find it.

I’ve been keeping journals for about 15 years, and something that’s fun about the practice is when people are excited to find out that they warranted being mentioned in your journaling. It’s our human instinct to want to be part of narratives, to feel important because we are a piece in a story. Even my scribbling in a notebook that nobody else will ever see means that whatever happened made me want to take what I was experiencing and give it a life outside my head on paper.

“Writing doesn’t confer importance,” Jo March says in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 vision of Little Women. “It reflects it.”

Jo may be the writer of the family, but in this scene that is not technically canonical but carries the spirit of Louisa May Alcott’s life and work, Amy is the sister who gets straight to the heart of why we write, why we create narratives to find transcendence in the ordinary. She disagrees with Jo’s assumption that stories about everyday people are too small to matter.

“I’m not sure,” Amy says to Jo, “perhaps writing will make them more important.”

For people who would like to laugh while also finding hope that things will get better:

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you may remember that I’ve recommended Aziz Ansari’s Right Now Netflix comedy special before. With everything we’ve lived through this year, a 2019 special feels like a time capsule from a bygone era, but Right Now is unique in that it’s both very much a hilarious snapshot of 2019 and a nuanced, timely treatise that has “aged” shockingly well. I rewatched it recently and found it as fresh and insightful, perhaps even more so, than when it debuted on Netflix last year.

What struck me most this time was Ansari’s funny yet earnest hope that future generations will judge us – all of us – because things by then will be so much better. We will keep realizing that so many beloved pop culture icons and stories are problematic because our perspective will expand and grow, not in a censorious way, but because we’re all learning to treat each other better. We have to hope that our children will learn about what our society looked like and not be able to believe the injustices we lived with, put up with, and too often overlooked because we’re selfish and it’s inconvenient to change. It’s the message we all need right now.  

For anyone who needs some historical perspective as we try to survive 2020:

While looking back through the tinyletter archive, I realized I’ve also recommended Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett in a previous newsletter, but it’s absolutely a reading recommendation that bears repeating. Tippett is the longtime host of the On Being podcast, where she interviews people from all walks of life to talk about stories, existence, struggle and hope. This book gathers interviews with scientists, theologians, poets and activists to attempt to answer some of the questions that haunt us: “What does it mean to be human?” Can we change? Can things get better?

I’ve been thinking often of the wide lens that Becoming Wise and its wonderful voices offer as we fight our way through 2020, with a pandemic exposing the fragility of our social structures, with frustration and grief over racial injustices erupting again into protests and calls – screams – for change. Whenever people say things can’t change, I ask them to look at the past 100 years of human history (and specifically, American history), in which things have done absolutely nothing except change, over and over, mostly for the better. As a woman and particularly as a biracial woman, I wouldn’t want to live in any time other than right now, even though our world still has so many problems. Oppressive laws and unjust social structures have been toppling for the last century, and I have confidence that we will keep breaking down the barriers that separate us from each other. We might just have to live through some painful history first.