Weekly Reflections, Week 2

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about storytelling. Namely, storylines from books that I was read when I was a child, the kinds that take place on the edge of a forest and in the midst of romance and on the heels of tragedy. The ones that may begin with once upon a time…or in the beginning…or on a dark and stormy night…and end with happily ever after.

The hero’s journey. An indefatigable storyline, whose aspirational and dangerous singularity Joseph Campbell drew up and put forth into the world like an architect erects a building. This is the type of story that carries with it the sense of cohesion and linearity that, these days, I am at once longing for and wholeheartedly resenting. This is the type of story that is meant to be contained within the pages of a children’s book. But even Anna Karenina threw herself under a train. And Juliet drank the poison. And Hester Prynne was ostracized. This is just to say that all stories don’t have a happy ending, although I think I always knew that. We read their stories, the ones cut short, not because they are hopeful, but because they are meaningful, tethered to some force like love or loyalty or sacrifice, a storyline of importance. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.” (Cambell) What storytelling gives us the power to do is explain the unexplainable, ascribe meaning to the meaningless, to derive cause from effect. And we wear our stories on our sleeves like we once wore our hearts at a time when passion was unconstrained in order to brand our self-proclaimed meaning to the world.

This week, as I was finally settling into my apartment, unboxing the last of the scarves and jackets which had been sitting in a corner of my closet, I was feeling at once unattached from the space I was occupying and a general sense of weightlessness. To what meaning am I tethered? What line can I draw through my story to giving it a semblance of coherence like the kind found only in the pages of a children’s book?

My own story does begin on the edge of a forest, or more accurately, a path through the woods, in a white house in a small town outside of Boston. Fast forward twenty-one years, I find myself not in the throes of romance (much to my personal dismay), nor on the edge of a dark dark wood, but on the outskirts of a college campus, thinking about what story I have to tell.

I have more often described myself in college as “shambly” than I have anything else. Certainly never impassioned nor emboldened. I switched my major every week for two and a half years and only declared Foreign Affairs under certain duress in the way of daily emails from my college advisor. I am not in any clubs or organizations. Even the “theme” of this blog is something I turn about in my head daily, dissuaded by the idea that food is not so much a theme as it is a necessity and that so much of my life happens between meals.

In a recent conversation with a friend who is in the midst of applying to jobs—a process as foreign to me as navigating a city whose language I don’t speak—she relayed that the most difficult question she has gotten in any interview has been “what are you most passionate about?” She asked me how I might respond…the only thing that came to mind was “banana bread.” However true, probably not the answer a veteran Bain consultant would be looking for.

How do we articulate a cohesive narrative about our lives when our lives aren’t cohesive? They splinter off every three or four years and evolve into some new chapter that is of a similar duration. How do we draw a line through our stories when they are anything but linear?

I suppose this is all just to say that I am still figuring things out. And this blog is increasingly going to reflect that narrative, one of “shambliness” and all of the goings-on between meals and all of the thoughts that have no meaning and no explanation, the consequences of actions long-passed and since forgotten. And I thank you as you indulge me in my own messiness.