2024-07-27 Journal Entry

Created: July 27, 2024 9:48 PM Tags: Daily

I have some thoughts on what to write, but I’m going to free-write a bit until I can start to whittle it down into something meaningful. It has Something To Do With Finding Yourself, and transparently I’m not sure what that means. I have this feeling that “finding yourself” doesn’t really mean anything, and if anything it’s more like orientation. Maybe that’s not quite it, because orientation implies a certain preexisting familiarity by other people, whereas discovering the self is at some point like cutting through the jungle to find some undiscovered place.

I’m very preoccupied with the story of my life. Sometimes that’s how stories work, like how in Beowulf they’re often aware of the stories that came before, about how they’ll be remembered. I don’t think I’m personally so invested in that aspect so much as I’m preoccupied with my story being comprehensible. I want a life that feels coherent to others, and that’s a lot of what “being seen” is, I feel like. It’s someone else understanding my story, regardless of whether or not their version is the same as mine. Lives can take many shapes though, and they don’t have to be a Vonnegut-esque shape of story. They don’t even have to be shapes, or rather that the shapes can be multidimensional. Many of the books that I really enjoyed play on the shapes of stories in different ways — Wolf in White Van tells a story in fragments, and almost in reverse; Infinite Jest was described as David Foster Wallace as being a Sierpiński triangle; The Tatami Galaxy is more like a four-stranded braid.

Of course one rarely know where they are in the middle of the story. We may always hope for something other than where we are — characters in a story always want something, whether that’s greatness or simply a glass of water, as Vonnegut suggests. For much of life I’ve looked for an Answer, that if I simply pray the right prayer or sit in the perfect meditation posture that I’ll Understand. But in fact