Narrative Structure

Confessions of a Compulsive Chronicler

 

For my fifth birthday, my parents gave me a puppet theater. Before ceding the stage to my malleable marionettes, I was compelled to step between the curtains myself. A home movie shows gap-toothed me posing for the camera, framed by yellow fabric and a sign reading "Theatre".

I've always kept records. A recent excavation of my room from high school (which also contained box upon box of unexplored relics from middle, even elementary school) uncovered countless notebooks, binders, and photo albums.

Some were diaries, others were academic, but clearly preserved less for their educational content than the epic exchanges of gossip and confessions in the margins-- some in my hand, some not. One contained no writing directly on the page, but instead served as a sort of covered corkboard onto which I had pinned dozens of letters. What's more, this notebook featured an index cataloging the dates, players, even providing context. A black nylon trapper keeper labeled in blue white-out pen turned out to be a treasure trove of meticulously printed and three-hole-punched AOL Instant Messenger conversations, alternating red and blue text, rife with exclamation points. Again, I found a preface complete with dramatis personae, dates, and a summary to set the scene.

I can't have been older than twelve when I assembled these.

Some conversations were printed more than once-- I found them in the binder, then again tucked into a stray global studies notebook. I must have copy and pasted them into emails and saved them. Probably so that I could read them over and over again, even thirteen years later. Indeed, I found myself not needing to read more than a few lines into some of the most coveted chats and letters, because I remember. I remember the accusation of too quick a turn-around after a "breakup", or the cold sweat of hearing some rumor about myself, recounted by a "friend" over the internet.

I especially remember the tactics: walking the line of true and inflammatory, looking for a rise, backing off full of defenses and apologies once the desired reaction and slew of exclamations points ensued. Picking fights. Fights I could win. Asking questions I already knew the answers to.

Maybe it was less that I didn't need to read the conversations, and more that I didn't want to. Maybe twelve-year-old me was more familiar than twenty-five year old me would like her to be.

I'm still pulling the same shit. Sure, I'm better at it, but it's the same. The same hard-to- detect manipulative tendencies. The same admissions of "wrong" that are part and parcel to an absolute need to be right. The same regard for drama as sustenance. For me, upheaval has always been a life force.

Talking to my roommate (and best friend of eight years) about some fall-out from a recent break-up, he looked me in the eye and said, "You know sometimes I can't tell if you hate this stuff, or if you live for it."

But the question remains-- did I chronicle all of those letters and conversations in anticipation of the nostalgia that would agitate my future soul? Or was it for someone else? If I was going to look back on these things (not-so) fondly, couldn't I have just put them in a shoebox, like so many ticket stubs from Paris? These documents bear the distinct trace of an archivist's hand. I doubt that I would have been so naive as to assume it would be for posterity. After all, I always wanted to be the architect of the story. Let us not forget, it was a puppet theater my parents gave me. One in which I was to be both co-performer and director. And of course, story-teller. I preserved these pages for myself-- I was offering future me material.

Let's take a minute to acknowledge that this is posted on a blog that I keep about my own life. Moving on....

Little did I know how pertinent the exploits of yester-me would remain. The pages I found from high school are works of fiction, mainly short stories and plays, some poetry, a couple of short films. The script for one particularly embarrassing video-art project involves a girl and her (shaking, hollow) animated alter-ego. The girl keeps talking about how OK everything is in the wake of some unspecified event, and how it's "sucks" but she's "fine". The animated alter-ego interjects with quickly cut-off emotional outbursts about being not fine.

My senior year of high school, we were assigned the task of writing a letter to our future selves, with the promise that our teachers would mail the letter to us in four years’ time. Amongst the love notes from middle school, the letters tucked into yearbooks, and the angsty short stories was this letter from my 2005 self. “Things are going swimmingly,” she says, “they’d be better if…” a slew of revisions to my then-life ensued. “I have no idea where you’ll be later,” former me says in closing. “In the city maybe. Writing, hopefully, or doing something at which you excel and basically I just want you to be happy. Assignment complete.”

The letter is awash in cynicism, tempered by a lot of forcedly-optimistic back pedaling: “You have more work than you should and less free time than you need but summer holds a lot of promise. Graduation is exciting and prom is even better.” I seemed to have a deep aversion to admitting that I was any less than in control, at least emotionally.

The most recent script I've written is about a young woman on the day her boyfriend breaks up with her. Most of the scenes end with her friends saying things like "You'll be fine. You're always fine." The end is someone telling her "You know it's OK that you're not OK, right?" A script I wrote last year ends with a character (based on my roommate) solving months worth of failure to communicate with the line "You know what? I'm not fine. I'm angry. And I'm really fucking sad."

And I thought I was creative.

Evidently there is nothing new under my sun. Not even the notion that I would be trading in memoir. Maybe I needed to keep track of all of these documents so that I could come to understand the only character I seem capable of writing: myself.

It’s like the recently-viral website that generates facebook statuses based on things you’ve already written. Everybody likes to see an analysis of who they’ve been. It’s almost like someone is paying enough attention to offer insight, even if it’s just a robot.

But can that sort of self-indulgent excavation help us become better people? I thought that I had grown in so many ways. I've been patting myself on the back for all of these steps in the last few years: Becoming less judgmental, less uptight, getting out of a toxic relationship, taking charge of my career. Cleaning out my bedroom from high school. And then I realize that I'm still up to my old tricks. Maybe what the robot does is force us to confront our habits. You are what you habitually post on the internet?

Recently a gig took me to LA for one night. They needed to make a life-cast of my body for special effects on a TV show that I'll be shooting this month. There is now a silicon mold of my entire body and head. There will soon be another me. A replicant. Twelve year old me would have had it made purely as a reference.

Anyway I called J, my boyfriend from high school, you can read about him in "We Go Way Back". He lives in LA, and who can resist the "I'm in town for one night" card? So as my fifth grade crush, my prom date, who I reunited with nine months ago after eight years apart, stood next to me on a mountaintop overlooking LA and the dying sunset, he said "at least this makes a good story, right?". And I thought quite simply, don't fucking tempt me.

That night we had dinner with J’s roommate, who described the arc of our friendship as an hourglass. I couldn’t help but appreciate the metaphor.

I care about J. I always have. What our relationship will be, I don't know. What I do know is that some sort of life-long overwhelming devotion to the narrative could in this case prove blinding. If J and me are going to be part of each others’ lives, we have to just be us. It's not some fairy tale. It's not that simple.

This poor guy has already been subjected to me writing an epic essay about him. I also vaguely based a short film on our interaction last January. When you see someone sporadically, it’s easy for them to become more myth than muse, and perhaps more muse than man. Or at least, things get blurry.

Driving down from the mountain, J and I talked about lessons. We talked about learning and changing and growing. We talked about how you can say the things you need to say because you know you're supposed to say them, and how it can mean nothing, it's just going through the motions. It's rote. It's sex with someone you don't care about. Maybe if in my letter, I convinced future me how excited past me had been about prom and graduation, then I would somehow be insuring my future happiness.

We also talked about not buying into your own bullshit. How humans have issues and that's not an excuse. We discussed processes for dealing with our own faults, even if they don’t work a hundred percent of the time. It's progress. It's learning, kid, we're all just learning.

What I am learning is that nostalgia has its place—in this case, a trip down memory lane showed me just how far I have to go. If I’ve been frustrated by the same things since I was a teenager, maybe it’s time to let those things go. And if the characters I write when I’m in my twenties continue to have so much in common with the characters I created when I was in high school… well, that would make me a pretty boring writer.

I'm always going to want there to be a story, and I'm always going to appreciate that the role J has played in my story. But I have to cut the impulse to act in the interest of serving the narrative. It’s hard for me, because this is who I’ve always been: a compulsive chronicler. It turns out that my identity is wrapped up in… well, my identity. And believe me, the snake-eating-its-tail nature of writing about this at all is in no way lost on me. But I think it’s about time I learned that, while life events can lead to movies, one cannot live a movie.