Viewing Life as a Story
A metaphor for living
“Tell me a story,
Tell me the truth
When you aren’t experiencing, you can’t write.”
I’m here to introduce you to an intriguing metaphor for life and how I came upon it.
Background: I’m a recovering control freak with a tendency for arrogant thinking. So, naturally I’ve always been the type of person who stressed over the type of things I knew I couldn’t control. Never things like school, sports, appearance; those were all far too illogical of things to stress about. All of those things could in some light be controlled by your dedication, practice, and time; all things completely within your own control. The stressors for me were things like 2nd public school classrooms. That time in-between lessons where the teachers allow the students to talk amongst themselves while he/she prepares the next slide. “wannaplaywithmeatrecess.whereareyougoingafterschool.whattimeislunch.doesbillylikelikeyouorjustlikeyou.blahblahblaheeeeeeeeeeeekk” Every single syllable from every single mouth seemed to blend together simultaneously until the inside of my head was ringing so loudly I needed to escape to the water fountain in the hallway.
However, in 2nd grade I was incapable of seeing very far beyond myself. I stressed because I felt overwhelmed and I felt sacred because I didn’t yet know how to compartmentalize my emotions and my logic. As my intellect began to develop, so did the depth of stressors that were out my control. When you struggle with arrogance, you like to think you know it all. The desire for knowledge appealed to me as an ultimate strength, yet this desire proved to be my greatest weakness. I would stay up all night scribbling scripture into my journal, trying to make a case either for or against God. I didn’t have time to engage with any scholarly beliefs, because there were too ideas to be known and too many questions to be answered. I knew a lot of beliefs on a lot of life’s big questions. I could quote the Sermon on the Mount to a Christian and recite paragraphs Nietzsche’s text to a nihilist. I would skip class because if I can’t truly know reality-whose to say I should follow anyone else’s. I became obsessed with the desire to find “truth” and I judged anyone who wasn’t living life the same way as me to be ignorant. “They’re all machines!” I would rant to my friends. “If you aren’t devoting your life to finding truth, then you’re just living your life in ignorance.”
I had found the key to freeing myself from uncontrollable circumstance; it seemed so simple. All I had to do was seek. Just so long as I was constantly seeking a truth, I was one step ahead of all you no good, ignorant, machine minded robots out there. COLLEGE? HA. A REAL JOB? HA. RELIGION? TRIPPLE HA. Social constructs. Things that people allowed to control their lives, rather than stepping up and taking the reins on their own. Damn, everyone was so stupid, and here I was, a regular Einstein of life-living and I hadn’t even turn 22 yet.
***
The scary thing about placing oneself on a mental pedestal is the inevitable fall back down. It didn’t take me long to realize that no professor cared about my metaphysically binding convictions for why college didn’t matter; they cared about my missing assignments. Nor was the philosophy world recognizing me for my commitment to enlightenment because I had no essays stating my beliefs. It was then I very abruptly realized that maybe, I didn’t actually have any beliefs at all. I was a mind full of facts and opinions, but a being motivated by self-interest. In my attempt to control and understand the world around me, I had somehow gotten lost in it all. I was so set on defining reality— I wasn’t even really living in it. I was failing school. I was obsessing over answers that no human could ever reason. But, the part that hurt the most was the fact that the entire life I’d been living in order to find for fulfillment; was only making me feel emptier.
At this point in my experiences, I was noticing that not only did I have no control over the things I already knew I couldn’t control; I had also completely lost control over the things in my life I had always been able to control. I was lost, insecure, confused, and at the same time fully self aware that my internal problems were vastly insignificant in relation to the development of who I wanted to become. I couldn’t live in my world seeking “truth” forever because by the time I found it ( if i ever could at all) I would have missed so much living. I needed to realize that some things, they just can’t be answered. I needed to realize that sometimes, there isn’t a right way or a wrong way. I needed to realize that life’s meant to be lived; not understood. And I did realize all this internally; but I was at loss on how to turn these ideas into beliefs.
***
Like most significant things that happen in my life, I have a hard time recalling the exact details of when, where, and how I came up with my metaphor on life. The idea is simple though: life is novel and you are both your own author and main character. When I adopted this idea, my outlook on life changed from incomprehensible to limitless. Everyone I encountered beame a character I could chose to explore or write off as an extra. Every idea I had became a tiny piece to a story that even I couldn’t predict the ending of.
Life is like a book in the sense that everything you are currently experiencing or will experience is written with intention whether the intention is obvious to you at the time or not. Beyond that, different people can read the same book and have a whole different take on the text. This idea is applicable to life too. If you view every life as a story, you will view every life as someone else’s personal work of art; something that is written for the expression of the author and based solely off their experiences. We know not every detail of every story we read, in the same way we know not every experience a person has faced. We are welcome to create whatever meaning deems fit to anyone else’s story, but either way we are only in CONTROL of our own stories. If we’re lucky, sometimes we will find a character that fits flawlessly into our story. But in the same way that every novel has chapters, so does life. Some characters last from beginning to end, others, are only crucial to a smaller part of the story— however, without each chapter, character, and experience; we would be left with no story at all.
Every single life is a story instantaneously being written, experienced, and reviewed. We should do our best to recognize this and attempt to be a positive supporting role in every story we encounter, especially our own. In the same way we can’t control the already recorded actions of a storybook character, we can’t stress over the actions of the characters within our story. This is simply because we aren’t writing theirs, we are only characters inhabiting in. And this idea shouldn’t dishearten you; it should empower you. It should empower you to view life in a novel (get it?) way. I finally learned that life should never be viewed as written, because much like a story— life’s no fun when you already know the ending.
