Happy birthday, me (or, approach to life and identity and truth in writing)

I turned twenty yesterday. A few days prior, I was talking to my dad about what it means for me, now that I'm a "proper adult" (not the phrasing we used). His opinion on the matter was surprisingly simple - I should just continue doing as I have done previously. I have, he told me, consistently done my best at everything, and if I continue doing my best and continue doing as I can, then I will be a perfectly good adult simply by doing what I did to be a perfectly good teenager.

A few days prior to that, I had to give a presentation in my Human Development crisis about the developmental stage of adolescence and what goes on during that time. I talked about Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial stages and how adolescence is characterized by a crisis of identity versus role confusion. I learned in my studying and emphasized in my presentation that, while adolescents can't figure out who they permanently are at that stage (no one can, really; we're always changing and it's futile to have a permanent sense of identity), they can have an idea of who they are at the time and an acceptance of the fact that they will change, knowing that they can still know who they are during whatever stage of their lives they're currently in.

It's a bit like that for me now. I'm entering my twenties and I suppose some people might expect me to know who I am and what I'm trying to be in my life. And while I do have some understanding, there are some things I'm still trying to work out. They're finer points, admittedly, but they're important finer points and I want them worked out. Though I know I'll never fully have them worked out, or if I do, it'll only be for a temporary phase of my life.

I hesitate to talk here about the novel I'm writing, because the last times I blogged about my projects, they ended up going uncompleted, but the novel I'm writing coincidentally deals with themes of identity when coming to the end of an important phase of your life. It's funny; it was on total accident and yet here I am, asking myself questions (or not so much asking as watching them become answered) about something I didn't realize I was writing about. Writers often say their work surprises them, isn't that right? My work's surprising me by being very timely as far as my own life is concerned.

I've also heard it said that writers should talk about their own truth - that is, their own experiences, the things they know to be true because of their own lives. I've tried to talk about other people's truths for so long because I didn't think I really had a truth myself. Now I realize that I have a truth - multiple truths, really - simply by being a person and living in a world where everything that happens is true by virtue of it happening in a real place. The conclusions my reality have led me to come to are not conclusions that are shared by a lot of people, and they're not the conclusions that most other writers seem to have come to (judging by what people seem to say, or mean to say, in their writing), but I suppose that there's nothing wrong in writing my truth. It's the only truth I have, after all. It's selfish perhaps to write about a truth that no one else shares, just as it's selfish perhaps to want to do or talk about things that no one around you much wants to do or talk about, but what can I do?

If I understand who I am, I can write my own truth and the truth my experiences have led me to accept. Naturally I'll never know who I am really, who I am fully, I mean, but if I have a good enough idea, I'll be able to do that. And I think I have a good enough idea. I have a good enough idea of who I am to the point where I can write a novel about identity, and to do so on accident and then realize it, eh?

My approach to my life up until this point was to do whatever it was I was doing and do it well, even if I didn't want to do it or even if it was hard (or, in many cases, both). That's who I am, I suppose, a person who does what they're doing and does it well. It's worked for me through some of the more difficult times of your typical person's life as well as some of the more difficult times for me personally, and I suppose I can keep going like that as time goes on and I grow older and the things I have to do become harder.

It's an awfully funny way to say "happy birthday" to yourself, but I suppose what I'm trying to say is, happy birthday, me.

Decisions.

I've been thinking about it, and I've decided that my life is not characterized by bad decisions so much as it is by decisions that, while not actually bad, were not the best and did not get me to the best place in life overall but that were still understandable and even completely acceptable (and in some cases totally logical) when I made them, but I either wasn't thinking that far ahead into the future or else I couldn't have possibly understood what effect they would have had on my future given that my future hadn't happened yet.

That's how my life works. Or at least that's how my decisions work. And I know that I'm still making decisions like that, but what else can I do because how can I know what's going to be good to have done in the future?

Living the dream

I have an aunt who has three little children. I was at her house today, and I somehow ended up being encouraged to use the kids' puppets to put on a puppet show.

The result was a really existential thing regarding identity, states of being, and the concept of things outside our plane of existence and understanding and whether or not there is anything OUTSIDE outside our plane of existence and understanding.

Also, one of the kids joined in and the events that followed are the reason I now have a mental image of a koala bear with a stuffy semi-English accent reciting Shakespeare's "Oh what a piece of work is man" speech.

I'm living the dream. I'm convinced I'm living the dream. I don't know what sort of dream but I'm living it.

I had a stroke of genius this morning in the shower.

People should make shampoo bottles that have poems on the back.

I found myself reading the back of a shampoo bottle while in the shower this morning, because I was bored and I was showering and I like reading things to keep my eyes and mind occupied. (This is why I read the backs of cereal boxes when I was a child.)

Then I realized what I was doing, and I went, "You know, this is kind of stupid. Why have I stooped to reading the back of shampoo bottles?"

And then I went, "It's because there's nothing else to read."

And then I went, "You know, that's kind of stupid."

I then tried to figure out how to solve this problem. I immediately thought that shampoo companies should print shampoo bottles with short stories on the back, but then I realized that most short stories are probably too long to put on the back of shampoo bottles. Short stories that short are just not that common. But then I realized that there is an abundance of short poems in the world and an abundance of people who are willing to write them.

Think of it. They could have a different poem for each scent/variety of shampoo. And it could vaguely correspond to whatever impression they think the scent/variety of shampoo is trying to give off. And since everybody uses shampoo, it would be really great exposure for poets. It would be a really prestigious (or at least impressive) thing to get your poem on the back of a shampoo bottle. Maybe it would become a trend. Maybe poetry would spread to other sorts of packaging, and society would engage in a mass movement to put poetry in places where it wasn't put before.

Maybe I'm really onto something here.

What I'm doing

Working on a new novel right now. I haven't abandoned the previous one but I am writing a new one, and I can justify this because I'm young, I'm still trying to figure out what works, I'm still trying to figure out how I write and what I write and what I want to write and what conditions are best for me to write in.

Thus essentially everything I produce during this time is going to be experimental in some way, in the sense that I'm experimenting to try to figure out what I can settle down with. I think it'd be wrong of me not to experiment with my writing during this time because if I don't try a lot of things, I won't figure out which of them work best for me, and then I'd find myself stuck writing things in a way that wasn't conducive for me writing things.

I've been aware of this for a while and this explains why I've been starting a lot of novels that came to nothing (or nothing yet) lately. I'm aware of my situation. There's a reason for this senseless waste of writing. I just haven't expressed this fact until now.

I'm not indecisive, it's not that I can't finish things, it's just that I understand my current situation of being young and not understanding how I write due to my prior assumption that I already knew how I write and my refusal to acknowledge that I didn't already know how I write.

My acknowledgement of how young and immature I am is the most mature thing I can do right now and being apparently irresponsible with my writing is the most responsible thing I can do here. Through not knowing what I'm doing, I know exactly what I'm doing.

That's all.