The greatest story there ever was, sort of
Little field notes ripped from my journal on something I've called 'storyliving'.
Storyliving; the act of seeing your life as one sprawling story.
The day after I decided to take 2 weeks off, we were out driving.
Summer fields flashed by in sleepy yellows, a raging headache crashed inside my skull, and all I could think about was how obsessed I've gotten with writing on life, I forgot to write a life. I wondered, with my head against our dusty car window, how could I be a storyteller, and ignore the stories of everyday life?
Why, I asked myself, did I restrict myself to writing stories only on the page? Why did I believe the sky wasn't the blankest page there was? Why each lilac-stained dawn wasn't just a dreamy metaphor, but a real, lived in experience? And the place where all those dreamy metaphors come from. The original source.
Life's smallest details become something to paint stories with when you're a writer. You take seriously the frayed jeans of some driver’s seat lover. The bleached blue cotton stretched across a gritty knee. The smell of grass. The cream haze of cheap soap. You not only take them seriously but hold them close, trying to keep every detail – for you are nothing if not a safe keeper. If not a good lover, a writer will always be a good saver.
But aren't we all sort of writing novels? Every hour an excerpt, of our own narrative?
We drive past houses nestled among bleached spaces, and I think of all the stories written in them. How not everyone chooses to write them down, not everyone chooses to share them, but stories will always be stories. We write them by breathing.
Storyliving could be explained as presence, but presence is empty of longing. Presence feels pure, like a higher state. Like some higher place. What I want is garden bed chaos, a return to the Earth, the feeling that I can never keep track of what it means to live. Heart pangs on a lonely glittery night. Soft whimpered breaking. Stumbling, pining, disordered imperfection. Everything all together.
Headlights blur bright on those navy roads. I think of all the stories waiting out there in that unknowable darkness. I think maybe they’re waiting for me to write them. Not the ones on the page – the ones in touchable life. The real skies above me. Some cute old bookstore I'll carry armfuls of books home from. Horny airport crushes to be had. The grey sadness to feel in bathtubs other than the one I know. Scissor cut flowers tied wonky and gifted to your best friend. The blueberry cake you scoffed, that time you left the rat race of the internet, for a while.
The creator economy is blooming – we all know how to create a life for paper, or pixels. I still love our paper stories and our blue light lives. I'm just trying to remind myself that life is a medium too. A life is a story, too.
I very much dislike how everything is dubbed “content creation” these days. It’s a thief of sincerity and authenticity, it cheapens the art, the romance, the act of existing and breathing for anything more than what it is and who we are.
This is a post that needed to be written, and certainly one that I needed to read. Thank you, Brooke. I’m reminded of going to an Immersive Van Gogh event where people were so busy capturing the magnificent images through their phones that they were missing the experience. Even the word ‘capture’ speaks to the problem. There’s tremendous value, of course, in expressing and I am extremely grateful for the opportunities I have to do that and for the many Substack writers I read who do it so beautifully, yourself included. At the same time, it can be another form of addiction, an obsessive need to capture, to package, and to push it out to the world. On that last, just to mix metaphors and bit more, I wonder at the value of birthing ideas so quickly as is the case with all of our social media sites. Are we missing something by seeing moments as little discrete pieces of ‘content’, not connecting this moment to another one and fully living the story? As you can see, Brooke, your post has provoked a lot of thoughts. Thanks so much 🌷