A few months after I started my newsletter, my dad—not a writer—teased me, said “Cloudgazing? More like navel-gazing.” Oof, the way this comment has lived with me! Is that all this writing thing amounts to? I’ve wondered. Rancid, rotting self-indulgence, that takes us nowhere but within ourselves, where surely there are no answers to the questions we have in the face of life? Is it ever enough, or is it just an effort of epic singularity? On my worst days, I succumb to this, when the life I’ve chosen makes me feel lonely and uneasy.
Except…isn’t that what searching feels like? Lonely and uneasy?
Because when this writing life is not a wrestle between me and the page, I read and read and read and read other people’s accounts of their lives. Certainly there are a lot of these interiors available. There is an overwhelming amount. Except that, when you cut to the core of what you like and are looking for, there’s Lynn Steger Strong practicing and succeeding, Fariha Róisín’s reality in dreaming beyond the enclosures we know, Catherine Lacey doing it all in 144 words, Amy Lin as the softest gut punch I’ve known. All of them, similarly, searching for a way outward from within.
I think that what I fear is not just how much I yearn to be outside of myself, but how much I want others to know that I think of them in this experience as well. That any expression I make here is not just for my own end. It’s for expansion: the kind that poses questions and says I’m not the only one asking. Expansion that questions the shapes we take in the world and says I’m not the only one hoping to make a different kind of shape. (Because the one I take now is so uncomfortable sometimes.)
How do we find expansion, if not by moving in some direction, any way that we are able?
I think expansion—growth!—comes from finding different paths toward a narrative truth. It’s not an explosion of things (something excessive and obviously outward) but rather a digressive pointing back to a single thing.
Narrative truths are the big truths about being human, not shallow truths like “pain exists” or information swapping like “here is how you settle the pain.” It’s something that’s committed to and has stakes in the future, and deliberately not a future where I am more fit, better dressed, more intelligent…but one where my truth seeps deeply into yours, where they are bound and extended past me and you and into a future whole. (If you want to think more about this, I’ve been reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration; would recommend.)
Following the accounts of other people’s modern lives may sometimes seem shallow. No, none of us are special. Why does everyone think they’re so special? is probably a question we have all asked ourselves in this moment in time. Because I don’t feel more fulfilled when I learn about someone’s new smoothie recipe or watch their dance routine or go through a day in their life. These are all momentary aspects of living: they don’t take us anywhere beyond their singularity. A great workout routine or organized closet is helpful at best, stagnant at worst, and truly amounts to only piles of itself when multiplied. Nuance has no place in our forced replication of moments: even if those moments appear beautiful and perfect and organized and aspirational, they only stack, they don’t merge.
Maybe some of my gazing is too inward. But there is always a throughline I find when I spend time with other people’s written accounts of their lives, accounts that connect us to one another on a conscious level of engagement: where we seek truth and not just facts. Something real, not just something we say is real. Where there’s one big net waiting and able to catch us, and it’s not (ironically enough) the internet.
