“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion says. But I don’t like Joan Didion, and I wish she’d never said that. I am looking in the mirror, and I am upset, rehearsing for an interview, a date, or the dreaded “tell me about yourself”—generally getting my narrative together. I want to present as someone with a sense of self and defined pursuits, but in the meantime, I’m still working on getting there. Somehow I never have meantime enough to figure them out.
The first time I heard this quote, I thought it was about communal storytelling—myths, fables, and the like—and its role in social bonding and norm creation. That’s nice, I thought. The phrase stirred up vague images of cave paintings and The Flintstones, an assurance that human stories, recorded or not, have always been present. Confronted with it a second time, amidst the colder setting of The White Album and slightly more insecure, I read it as an exercise in self-rationalization and coping. I tell myself stories to explain the world around me and the indignities within it. In order to live.
Her words have lingered, and I encounter them somewhat frequently. English class, online, in speeches otherwise well-delivered. It’s the public’s finest distillation of Didion, to the point that the YouTube description of her Netflix documentary only contains the quote. Today, though, I see the maxim as pathogenic. It honestly makes my skin crawl. The basest expression of loving kindness—sitting together to hear someone tell a story—has been spoiled. Her prescription has changed with the world that passes it around, acquiring a pre-professional shell along the way.
Today, a more natural reading of “in order to live” becomes “to make a living”: We tell stories to make a living. I’m not playing fast and loose with definitions here—think about it for a moment. To talk about the rest of what it is “to live”—the actual, you know, living of it all—I have to add extra words. I need to say “living, like having fun, like being outside, like seeing a sunrise, like doing what you love,” because living, standing on its own, has become work. I can’t just tell you that I’m doing something “to live,” for fear that you’ll hear it as “for my future housing prospects.” I especially can’t say that I don’t know why I’m doing something. Everything has to Fit In and Make Sense, and it’s obviously my job to package and present that to anyone who might need to hear my story. I was instructed about the necessity of this packaging first for college applications, then in Career Center events, and lately, it seems, everywhere and all the time. The moment I go online, I’m bombarded with messaging about creating cohesive work histories and extracurriculars and leadership activities, whatever that means. It’s pervasive, reaching my eyes no matter how many accounts I block. I’m confused, though, if when I actually make my story, I need to sell it like I’m already at the end of my professional development journey. I’m still not sure where I get to try things and make mistakes if I need to keep repainting the walls of my heart before you can see inside, but I’m sure someone will tell me on LinkedIn.
Like my hopes and dreams, the first half of Didion’s excerpt has also been remodeled—I no longer hear the “we” who tell stories as referring to any sense of community, but an infinite stream of isolated storytellers, all self-mythologizing and hoping against hope that someone might buy what we have to sell. But if we keep revising our story instead of writing it, it’ll only get shorter, more compact, rendering both the description and our actual lives less vivid. I want to go back to the start of this issue. You’d expect me to say that I’ve been interested in public health or literary arts since I was four, but it’s just not true. I can’t take that advice. Though I’ve heard the beginning is a very good place to start a story.
Before the start of my sophomore year, I resolved to do things differently in order to achieve something. This sounds vague, I’m sure. I have no more specificity. I was just going to “get involved” and “make something of myself.” I wasn’t sure how, but it was going to happen because it was important for my resumé and my “professional image,” and I’d do the things I wanted, and emerge as a more competent, shiny “sophomore studying public health @ Brown…” as a result. And then school started, and then I took a fifth class, and it was math (for math majors, if you ask me), and then I overslept, signed up to write for a magazine, joined a band, took nine days for Thanksgiving, stayed up late three nights in a row to watch movies on a plasticky couch, and found myself generally driving a train with no brakes to an even less certain destination.
Perhaps this was doing things differently, but it probably wasn’t my best course of action. The alternative was clear: do the bare minimum of what would look nice on my resumé and relate to my future that I definitely have figured out, and spend the rest of my time eternally remediating my image in the hope of satisfaction that would never come. School, work, dorm, change my hair, school, work, dorm, repeat. This would alleviate my issues of having too many interests (or too poor impulse control to manage them). I would simply get rid of the inessential parts of my life, like listening to music, and replace them with inherently valuable “demonstrated interests.” This would make me a more hireable candidate, an easier sell, and lend me a more straightforward narrative. I’d appropriately present myself, for once, and simultaneously change my actual interests to represent my superimposed ones. Internal bliss.
But this concocted, artificially straightforward narrative is vulnerable: one wrong move and it topples over, too tall and slender to withstand any sideways forces. Stability is found in something more like a rooted, branching tree. A tree grows from the tips of its branches, today’s growth feeding tomorrow, instead of from the larger historic base. Lose too many branches, and a tree won’t grow very much at all. Some are pruned into straightforward trees, and others seem to grow up at warp speed, hurtling in one direction before they could ever branch out.
My friend C thinks that the story of Daedalus contains the most “myth for your myth,” like “bang for your buck.” If you had to pick any myth, this one would get you the most myth. I’m often told that I, too, should strive for the most “myth for my myth” when considering my own life—do the most things in the same arena, build narrative consistency, maximize my own bang for my buck. Put the most me inside of me. This is a hard task, but I’m learning that it might be the most important one for my ability to land an entry-level job, and thus the most important of my next two years. I think my friend is right—the myth of Daedalus is really many myths. C pointed out that hubris didn’t first meet Daedalus on his famously tragic flight, but had begun to follow him far earlier. Daedalus, an enormously skilled craftsman, was so overcome with career-oriented jealousy that he tried to kill his young craftsman nephew to ensure his own prominence. Were this not enough, he crafted the components of the scheme that birthed the Minotaur, built the labyrinth that it (and eventually Daedalus himself) was trapped in, and the wings of escape that later killed his own son. He was so unable to resist showing off, his hubris so strong, that when told of an impossible task explicitly concocted to find him in his hiding spot, he solved it publicly. Dude. I say all this to say that Daedalus is truly just like us—an overachiever with a CV long enough to attract the attention of King Minos, a success so wild and well-known as to invite divine punishment. He’s got what I was told to want. It doesn’t work out for him. His tree got too small at the top. He can only iterate on the sequence of what he did yesterday. The myth of Daedalus is a meteoric ascent and sudden fall, but if he were the one telling it, we may only have heard of the ascent. You probably don’t want to take advice from Daedalus. Even if he does get the most myth for your myth.
In this new paradigm where stories are currency with which to acquire something, they lose their organic nature. I think they’re even about to become fungible, so commercial as to be interchangeable. Walking around, there’s an odd phrase I keep hearing from my peers. “Did I ever tell you the [xyz] story? You should come over, and I’ll give it to you.” It struck me as incredibly odd when I first heard it. Sitting on the floor of someone’s dorm, I found it difficult to listen to the self-myth of The Thing I Did That One Time. The inorganic nature of the story lands like a prepackaged supermarket salad—bland and never quite what you really wanted. I want to learn about people as people, in the wholeness and richness of life, and in the moment as things happen together. This presentation is very different to me than them just telling the story in the moment. The teller implies a certain importance of their story even when out of context, but it’s a hard sell to me that it’s not important enough to tell right now, yet also so important that we must convene so they can deliver it uninterrupted before I cheer and clap. This process has the glamour of the relational but is truly devoid of it. There’s this undercurrent of revision, this unwillingness to participate in synchronous socializing, an insistence on the perfect realization at a later date. A transaction. We’ve become elevator pitches.
Didion herself has become subject to this issue. Forgive me for burying the lede somewhat, but the very next page of The White Album begins to do some of the work of dispelling the problem. She discusses the doubts she has about the “imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images,” much like I do. She lists her perceived competencies and fundamental shortcomings, her sense that everything she’d ever been told “insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised.” And oh my God! This is what I’ve been saying! I feel you, Joan! Reaching through time, we commiserate. But then she blows it. She ends up insisting throughout The White Album that she is, in fact, someone important, to whom important things happen. With her incredible foresight and typewriter, leotard, and mohair scarf, she portrays herself as someone who does have it figured out. She has to.
Maybe I can be stubborn, and maybe my dislike of Didion is similarly bullish, unfounded. But I am 19, and I can play the trombone. I am 18, and I tell my mother I want trombone lessons. I am teetering over the precipice of 19, and I call a man from a Yelp ad, and “Why trombone?” he asks. “I teach trumpet too; it’s more common.” All I can muster is “Why not?” This doesn’t work as an answer. He asks again, as does everyone else I meet over the course of that summer, and yet I still have nothing better to say. Most people are eventually placated with “God told me someone must play the herald”—this is alarming enough as an answer that they stop asking. I don’t think it’s a terribly interesting question. “Why this, why that?” What am I meant to answer? It’s line item seven on my five-year plan? Lord knows I’ve tried to make it so, but I can’t rope my long-feral curiosities into line like that.
Occasionally, a Post-it note will appear on my suite fridge with a quote lovingly inscribed on its surface. C and I put them up when we think of it. Some are more seasonally thematic (Annabel Lee for Halloween), some are immediately topical (“No matter what, we must eat to live”), and some are maxims that I’m trying to force into saturation. I’ve paraded Sarah Ruhl’s “And life, by definition, is not an intrusion” through my dorm hallways over and over these past few weeks, seeking encouragement not to write this paper or do anything other than make music and socialize because, you know, life isn’t an intrusion. Maybe that’s not what she meant, but I love Ruhl’s stalwart rejection of sterility. Intrusion implies a story, so, sure, she agrees with Didion that there’s a story of me to be told, but it’s a story that coexists with life. Life isn’t an intrusion into this bigger, other thing, because life does not equal narrative. There is no other way. By definition.
This brings me back to the stories we tell. I think we’re hurting ourselves, robbing ourselves of the joys of the intrusions in life when we only pursue the directly applicable just to preempt a hiring manager or quizzical look, a “why” question we have no answer for. But when we forecast ourselves into the future and claim our greatness to have already happened, like on a resumé or in an essay collection, we have nothing to work towards, no branches to grow, and, truly, no story to tell. Life is what happens, and we need to live it. We’re not at the end yet.
I can’t be Joan Didion’s nemesis by virtue of her having already passed, but I can stage this conflict between her and Ruhl. On the surface, their two quotes are so similar: confident and universal, both authors mix the big picture—“in order to live” and “life, by definition”—with the minuscule—“we tell ourselves” and “an intrusion.” But at base, Didion commands us today to sell what we shouldn’t, to dispel our fears by cementing our narratives. Ruhl wants us to see ourselves as something bigger, kinder, more compassionate. You are something outside of what it is to make a living, something more expansive than one narrative. Life is not an intrusion, and you are more than a narrow conception of what it is to live. These excerpts might appear on the same inspirational calendar. Didion’s will never be on my fridge.
