It was around 1966 that author Joan Didion began to question the integrity of her narrative voice, that is “the stories we tell ourselves in order to live”. Somewhere between the time she watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral from a luxe, Honolulu hotel room, the time she watched a deserted, 5 year old child pried loose from a fence of a California interstate, and the time she spent fulfilling her maternal and professional roles, she had come to realize that the storyline we are made to believe in, if once alive, had vanished. Time’s reckless path had positioned her into a scene she could no longer place; she could no longer cite. Without an alternative version of the present moment to refer to, it was as if life revealed itself in “flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience”.
Didion was thirty-one when she began to realize all this. It’s at this time that I offer up my experience in reading this passage at eighteen, feeling as if someone had been inside me all those years, transcribing the turmoil I had no name for. It was a moment in which I gained the context I needed. This diagnosis had come to make me feel less alone in this life I felt I had no script for. I was not forlorn in feeling that each day seemed to end without any meaning to the next day. Suddenly I had entered into what seemed a pitiful, grief group with a person I had never met, this odd and instant intimacy towards a complete stranger. That said, it was also a moment of irony. After confirming that life often lacks infrastructure, Didion had, unwittingly put in place the expectation that our days are disconnected. This was the grim narrative I believed in the following year.
1
Thereafter I began to reconcile with this understanding more directly, beginning with the following summer. I began a job at a local beach club where I worked as a lifeguard. Ungrounded still from my freshman year at an out of state college, I approached my environment tentatively. I rested on my ability to seem cheerful, on my toothy smile I used around others to falsify my discomfort. But to my complete surprise, I stumbled into a place that no longer required imitation, nor any sense of fluidity at all. The summer days where we would haul beach chairs and umbrellas up and down and up and down the same stairs were sweltering and inconsequential. They were also furiously, happy. The sweetest soreness covered my body. Happiness seemed to unravel the clock from which the sound had previously ticked most loudly at night. Nighttime soon became a routine of physical exhaustion tied with unearthly excitement. Everything was possible.
2
Another flash-cut. The heavy bass of an acoustic set ringing from across Saint George Street, while I struggled to be on a date. He was tired and well dressed and his eyes were lazily, panning the scene, deciding how I would fit into his life. I made nervous conversation about my brother and other things I found to be potentially amusing, but was was mostly dissociated from the entire evening. We laughed and smiled but it felt wrong. I was fixated on the summer that left me so coldly.
3
At 12:30 on a Thursday afternoon, dense silence in my women’s studies class sank me into my bi-weekly bout of heart palpitations. The opinions were inevitably nauseating, only compounded by the awkward prelude. 30 mg. of Vyvanse magnified every pulsation. Half of my brain actively criticized every overblown comment, while the other half criticized the to do list which failed to accomplish everything I wanted to in a single day. I was obsessed with efficiency but much more apt to self defeat. ‘Number one’ I would write, ‘stop and get gas’. Thereupon the obsessive thinking would fester: ‘Do I have enough money in my account? I wonder if my check was deposited. I need to start a budget. But that needs to happen after I work out and finish my essay. Is that more important than those things? I need to better prioritize my time…’ Exhausted and angry with the minutiae I generated, I began a different list.
4
My hair curled easily for the first time in a long time. I looked in the mirror and was pleased that I resembled myself in a photo taken in the summer and quickly frightened when I realized that I was needing to recognize myself. The fear didn’t dissipate...it only grew from my surroundings; surroundings that since summer, had new meaning. Throw pillows were sad. Something important had died.
5
The man on stage counted down from 120 seconds until 2016 began. 120 seconds was too long to anticipate another year. My feet ached in wedges that I should never have worn to a concert and people around me were smiling. It was hard to be everything I needed to be in that moment. The woman that was trying to channel Zooey Deschanel said something optimistic about the new year. I almost smiled but I cried instead. At 12:00, January 1st, soap bubbles christened the tops of our heads and things felt like they could be new.
Much like Didion, this year had made me feel a “sleepwalker”. Losing the narrative line meant an unwrite of every experience, pieces of memory so choppy they can only be stuttered. The story I used to tell myself had been lost in the senseless moments, and in effect, I used the singular moment as a frame of reference and ended with loose ends. In the process I learned that to believe in a certain type of life for yourself is not ignorant or naive of possibility but constructive; conscious of the heart as an assemblage. As such it is important to nod at those moments we deem unprofitable for the sake of our momentum. Ultimately the chaos may cause us to stammer for a while but we may take ownership of our voices as storytellers once again. Once again, we may “tell ourselves stories in order to live”
For some great critical essays on Didion visit the following:
Why Joan Didion Matters More Than Ever: http://www.vogue.com/4109205/joan-didion-essays-ma...
The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/0...
For more on Didion's works:
