Monthly Archives: January 2012

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Two Incomplete Problems with Living a Better Story

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At the start of the year, I wrote a post about telling a better story. It’s a hard task. There are two problems that I’ve run across already. I have a blog so I get to share these things. It’s a nice arrangement.

1) I should take every opportunity to tell a good story. I was listening to The Moth, one of my favorite podcasts, today. The Moth is a series that features true stories told live without notes, and it’s awesome. Today, I listened to a story from Salman Rushdie, best-selling author of several novels including The Satanic Verses. His story took place while he was working on Verses. He ended up getting writer’s block and traveled to Nicaragua to “experience a revolution.” His story was about war and about the inequality that existed in that country. But he told it with an insane amount of humor and poise, and I had two thoughts: First, should he really be telling the story like that? Shouldn’t he be talking about how horrible it was and how bad war is and all that? But then I realized that this story was decades in the past. Humanity needs to laugh at itself. Second, sometimes we need to tell a sad story happily.

I started thinking about what my life would be like if I stopped dealing in failure and started dealing in success. What if, instead of talking about how many things Freud got wrong, I talked about all of the things he got right? I suppose people would start to call me a Freudian, but perhaps that’s just because they don’t understand.

2) To tell a better story, you have to know who the main character is. Spoiler alert: it’s you. This is not to say you need to know exactly who you are. That’s never going to happen. This is to say that you need to know a few things about yourself and you need to live knowing those things are true. My heart is different than yours. And your heart is different than mine, and that effects how we live our lives.

If you want to know more about telling a better story, I feel like you should visit Donald Miller’s blog. All of my ideas are reflections on his.

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Asking for Help is Harder than Asking for a Date

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I like to do things myself.

In high school, I dated this girl for a while. The thing about dating someone regularly in high school is that you always have a built-in date for dances. And that’s nice.

But without fail, my parents would start hounding me about a month and a half before the dance. “How are you going to ask her?” they would ask.

I like to think that I am a creative person, but sometimes I have trouble coming up with original ideas. And at my high school, it was pretty important to ask someone to a dance originally. Fireworks were not necessary but encouraged. If you could figure out how to build a canal for gondola rides, you should do that. That sort of thing.

So a month and a half before the dance, my parents would be like, “When are you going to ask that girlfriend of yours to the dance?” I would respond that I didn’t have an idea, yet. And then they started to give me ideas. A lot of them were great. A lot of them were cute and adorable. But I refused to listen to them because I wanted to use my own ideas.

That was a noble quest, I suppose. Except one year that idea never came. And I waited too long. I asked my girlfriend to the dance one morning before school. That was it. Yawn.

This is a mistake I’ve repeated many times since then. I hate asking for help. Even when I get it into my head to ask for help, I rarely ask the kinds of questions that would benefit me. Instead, I dance around the issue, hoping that the person I’m talking to will magically read my mind. They don’t.

There are people out there with specific knowledge that you can use. These people are probably not in your immediate group of friends. We tend to encircle ourselves with people who are similar to us – single or married, student or businesswoman, parent or childless. They are great friends, certainly, but if we want specific knowledge we need to seek out people who have what we think we want. We need to talk to people who have already been through what we are going through. And then when we talk to them, we need to ask them very specific questions.

That way, we will always creatively ask the girl to the dance on time.

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A Confession About My Romantic Notions

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I need to level with you. All of my brain energy that is left over at the end of the week, after all my responsibilities have been met, goes towards thinking about and obsessing over romance. I don’t share that with a lot of people because it makes me sound like a fourteen-year-old girl. It’s not something I’m proud of or want to continue doing. And I want you to think more of me than that. But I’m on this kick where I am trying to be a little more honest about things so we are going to work through some things today.

I don’t know the first thing about love. I have no idea. I’ve had my share of relationships. I’ve used the l-word sometimes. But I have absolutely no clue.

A while back, I decided that love was a choice – that all of these ideas about “falling” for someone are romantic fantasies. That’s not to be mean or pessimistic. I don’t think that love is any less intense because of that. I just think it’s a choice.

I also don’t think there’s one person out there for everyone. Yes, usually you are in a committed relationship with one person at a time; that does not mean that person is the only person for you. I think we construct stories about people to deal with the horrifying reality that is “till death do us part.” It’s freakin’ scary.

I was working Interview Day for my college a couple of days ago. A mother of a prospective student asked me if my college was my first choice. I grimaced. It’s not a fair question. The answer is no. It wasn’t. I didn’t get in to my first choice. And had I gotten into my first choice, I would have gone there. I tell people that it would have been a hard decision, but I know it wouldn’t have been. I would have gone in a second to the school that rejected me. But if I was given that decision again and this time I did get into my first choice and I was told exactly what my life would look like had I picked the pathI am on now, perhaps the decision would have been harder. I like where I am now. I like what I am doing with my life. I like the people I know. And so when people ask me if this school was my first choice, I usually answer that I can’t imagine being anywhere else. Because I can’t. I love it here.

So we create a narrative in which fate brought me here or destiny picks our soul-mates. Because it’s comfortable to believe that. It’s horrifying to think that we could have made the wrong choice.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a terrifying moment where my idea of love as a choice and my idea that there wasn’t one person out there for me came crashing together. How, then, do you determine the person you spend the rest of your life with? I have annoyed many of my close friends with this question over and over again. “You just know,” they say. Or as my parents like to succinctly put it, “It’ll come when you aren’t looking for it.” I think these statements are little more than tautologies. They aren’t helpful. They don’t serve as practical advice.

But then I started thinking about these statements differently. I read something recently that compared finding a significant other to finding a career, a life-mission. I thought that was stupid at first. Finding a career is easy. You just do and work until you find something you love and then you do primarily that one thing. And when I took the time to write that thought out, I realized the comparison to romantic relationships wasn’t that stupid. Because how do you explain to someone what finding something you love looks like or feels like? You can’t. It’s impossible. It just happens.

That’s the difference, then. I have always assumed I will have a career. I assumed that I was going to college. And so when it came time to make that decision, I made it with the best options that were open to me. But sometimes, I don’t assume I am going to have a family. And I wrongly think that the best way to finding my future spouse is through a string of committed relationships. Committed relationships are good, I guess, but they’re kind of like spending your adolescent years spending time at different universities until you decide to commit to one. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You need the information from high school before you can go to college. But when it comes, you are ready to make that decision.