chasing stories

There's never been a time in my life when I wasn't writing or telling stories.

When I was little, that meant every game of imagination that you can think of, from make-believe with my sisters to sitting with my grandfather, going back and forth making up stories together about being detectives or spies or stranded in the middle of nowhere, trying to find a way back home.

Once I got a little older, the stories hit the page, and I was constantly scribbling messy tales into battered notebooks with a reckless abandon. Novels and journal entries, short stories and angsty preteen poetry — trust me, I wrote it all.

It was the summer I turned fourteen that I made the jump into blogging, and suddenly the stories I was weaving together were about me, too. I don't think I fully realized what creative nonfiction writing was until that point, but I fell in love with it, fell in love with a community of people writing about life and God and all of the beauty and hurt that filled the cracks. This summer marks eight years of my corner of the internet, and I genuinely can't fathom my life — any facet of it, really — without growing up in this space, surrounded by these people. So much of me has been made from you, and I'm grateful for every second of it.

And yet, I would be remiss not to admit that sometimes, a part of me wishes I didn't always live life chasing stories.

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Being a writer is a beautiful, sacred thing. My life has been shaped by words, and I wouldn't change that for the world. But writing is deeply personal, too - so much of what you write comes from your own life, especially when you write nonfiction. And the thing that often isn't talked about in regards to being a writer is how quickly you can find yourself looking at life as solely a story you can tell.

There's a pull as a writer - especially when you're sharing your work online, because there's an added level of immediacy - to constantly have new stories to share. Life is a content well, and you'd better be bringing stories in by the bucket. If those stories involve a miracle from God, even better - you're succeeding tenfold.

And so, very quickly, you find yourself looking for stories in your breakfast cereal and signs from God in your coffee cup. Your brain sifts through your day as your drive home, sorting out what could be expanded on or twisted into a clever metaphor and what can be tossed aside. It can become all-encompassing before you've even realized it's happening - and by then, it's such a habit that it's second nature.

Worse still, what I realized a few years ago was that I was writing the endings to scenarios before they'd even begun. See, I'm someone who always likes to be two steps ahead - it's just how my brain works. I'm always trying to determine the outcome so that I can prepare should the worst case scenario come to pass. But if I'm not careful, I can quickly reach a point where I'm predicting the end of a situation that I can't possibly predict, and I convince myself that I know exactly what's going to happen, because narratively, it makes sense. It's just another story, and let's be honest - stories can become pretty formulaic. The more time you spend in them, the easier it becomes to see where they're going, and I was convinced that I had hit that point in just about every area.

I would find myself in a hard situation, and I would immediately jump three steps ahead, convinced that I knew exactly what God was going to do and what lesson he wanted me to learn.

"Well," I would think to myself, "x happened, which means y will happen next, and then z will get taken away because God wants to show me _____ and I need to learn _____." And it probably goes without saying, but the lessons I would find myself envisioning were never very pleasant - they all involved some horrible loss or disappointment or grief that I would have to endure for the sake of a lesson.

In a lot of ways, I think it was a defense mechanism. If the worst case scenario came to pass, it would hurt less if I'd already prepared myself, right? If I was never caught off guard, I might not have a very optimistic outlook on life, but at least the ground couldn't be ripped out from under me. It was a very desperate attempt at grasping onto a shred of control, and I threw myself into it with everything I had.

But the thing is, life is more than just a story.

And while I'm not here to claim I'm just a pawn, I'm not the one writing it.

I say all of this because I know that a lot of you who read these letters are writers, too. And I know that, as a writer, it is so incredibly easy to live life chasing a story. It isn't always a bad thing - we need stories. But when we step away from the pen, we need a life that isn't just content. We need a life that's ours.

Life isn't always going to be miracles and gutting loss. It's also laundry and taxes and cleaning the pantry on a Saturday morning. It's long walks that don't lead to epiphanies, and conversations with friends about things the internet will never know, and going to bed early at the end of a long week. And maybe there's irony in the fact that I'm writing about the fact that there are parts of life that aren't meant to see the page, but it's one of the truest things I've come to know. And I wish I could tell my nineteen-year-old self that as she walked through life desperate for a story to fall out of the sky. I wish I could tell my twenty-year-old self that when she was tired and afraid and desperate to never be surprised again.

I wish I had understood sooner that to write is to hold the magical and the mundane together. That life is more than a story dropped into your lap - it's a thousand moments of noticing. That you can't be present to the world around you if all you can think about is the end that you think is being written - that you won't notice anything at all.

Your life is your life - beautiful and terrible and boring and confusing and sweet and strange. And it's going to be filled with some absolutely incredible stories, but sometimes, they're not going to be for the page - they're just going to be for you.

Sometimes, those will be the best of all.