Living in storyland

I hadn't cried in months.  Yet there it was.  The salty globule snowballed down my cheek and thudded into my shirt.  I couldn't believe she had died.  I had gotten to know her so well.  She was quirky, strange, and a bit psycho, but the 240 book had allowed me to see into the soul of this character.  I knew her fear, her hatred, her anger, her dreams, her love, and her tenderness.  And I felt her death deeply.

The above paragraph recounts an experience I had two weeks ago as I finished a book.  It made me think about one of the central questions I've wrestled with in the past few years--why are we attracted to fiction and story?  What about story is so powerful?  Why can stories inspire and influence, terrorize and frighten, warm and encourage?

I've heard many accounts that have given 'functional' answers to these questions-these accounts say that humans like stories because they serve a function that improves our evolutionary fitness.  For example, stories are an emotional simulator-they allow us to read about how other people deal with emotions and go through life and we can learn and be better at coping and surviving because we become more emotionally mature.  Or that stories help us cope with really difficult situations.  The reason why stories always have conflicts is that we are learning how to overcome such conflicts in our lives, and again it gives us a survival advantage.  Another is that stories teach us good moral lessons, so we learn how to cooperate with other members of society.

I'm not convinced by any of these accounts.  Sure, there is some truth in each of them.  There are shards of truth in every thought.

Might it be that it has something to do with the longing of the human heart for intimacy?  Books are special when it comes to intimacy.  You get to read about characters from all angles.  You get to read their thoughts, all of their conversations, their actions, their desires, their dreams, their hurts, their shame.  How often do we get to do that in real life?  How many of my friends' inner thoughts do I know?  Their dreams?  Their wounds?  Their vulnerabilities?

We become attached to characters that we read about because in a way they are more real to us.  They are more real in the sense that they become dynamic characters who we see as whole pictures throughout the course of the book.  In 'real' life, we interact with others in chaotic, frenzied episodes.  We rarely get the opportunity to meet someone else who opens their souls so that we can read them like a book.

But we long for that sense of intimacy.  We want to be fully known and fully loved; we want to fully know and to fully love.  Maybe that's why we love stories.

Deserved Love

I'm sitting down to write something, but I have nothing to say in the sense of conveying a message.  I have nothing to say, because I have too much to think about.  So here I will think, but not say.

What's been on my mind is this phrase, "We accept the love we think we deserve."  That phrase resonates with me.  Whenever I went to assess the odds of crushes I had throughout my life, I would analyze if I was "falling up" or "falling down."  Were they cooler then me?  Were they popular?  Were they smart?  If so, I was probably falling for someone on a higher social level than me.  I was falling up.

I don't think I ever dated anyone for whom I thought I was "falling up."  I wouldn't have had the guts to ask them out.  I also don't think they would have ever been interested in me.  They were clearly on the "off limits" shelf.

I tend to date people who I find on my own shelf.  We were equals.  I "deserved" their love, and they "deserved" mine.  It made me comfortable.  I didn't feel like I had much to earn in the relationship because I deserved it.  I'm just reporting my broken thoughts-I cannot and will not defend them.

But is this the way relationships ought to be framed?  Is this the way people ought to be framed?  Are they to be placed on shelves and categorized as higher, lower, or middle?  Also concerning is the question of 'earning' and 'deserving.'  Can we really "earn" or "deserve" another's love?  When I chose people who were on my shelf (in my mind), I chose them because it meant that I didn't have to better myself to earn anything.  Can love be "earned"?  How does one earn it?  Is it through the same shallow process of changing our stars (climbing the social shelves?).  Is it still love if its something earned?  I like to think of real, true love as something unconditional.  It cannot be earned.  But that's how I like to think of it.  How is it really?

Resurrection

I'm back.

It's been exactly 824 days since my last post according to the calendar calculator I just googled.  Its weird the things you can find on google these days.  Anyways.  I'm back.  Why am I back?  I'm back because I want to write.  I love writing.  I'm terrible at it, but I love it.  Why do I love it?  Because it allows me to process the things in my mind that get jumbled up in my mind like my too many sheets and pillow cases in a dryer.  They get all tangled up and inside out and you have to slowly pull them out of the dryer and tease them apart one by one and turn them outside out.  Writing allows me to put my tangled thoughts out into the light of day, to turn them over in my hands, to squint at their different facets, and to hopefully be able to sort them.  Not that every thought can be sorted or even should be sorted.  Sometimes the mess is fun to live with.  I tried convincing my mom that that principle held with my room as a child, but that never worked.  Here's to better luck being able to control my intellectual life.

Why did I resurrect this blog rather than start a new one?  Blogger makes it pretty easy to own multiple blogs from one account.  Plus, this blog was created at a specific time and place for a specific trip to Great Britain which inspired my unending wittiness to birth the magnificent pun, "Great Written."  I think there were two main reasons why I decided not to shed this vestige of my poor taste for phrases.

1) I want to improve my writing.  Great Written makes it sound like whatever is being written is great.  I like that sound.  It really makes sense to me since one of my goals in writing this blog was to improve my writing.

2) If I started a new blog, I'd have to find new followers.  As of right now, this blog has 13 followers.  I have no idea who you are, and I doubt that any of you still read your blogger updates.  I didn't really want to advertise my new blog, so I'm getting the best of both worlds by not having to advertise my new blog, while feeling that I'm writing for someone when in reality those people don't really read blogs.

3) There's so much to share in life.  So much: from the incident with the barista who I swore I was going to marry two weeks ago simply by the way she smiled when she took my order to my constant grappling with how to live the values I hold dear to my current search for a new church and my ongoing reflections on spiritual truths.

So many new things are starting.  The green leaves are out and the oranges and yellows are invading Baltimore.  I'm hopefully going to be in another city next year.  By the time I wake up tomorrow, I will forevermore only be able to sing Taylor Swift's "22" as a non-22-year-old.  And, yes, Great Written is back.