My sister made a comment, off this site, about my previous blogpost and it, along with a comment about my fiction, has triggered a serious breakthrough.
In my last blogpost, I passingly mention a story I wrote when I was in first grade. In the story, I teach my sister how to run because she afraid to do so. My sister commented that the story sounded like "The Scarlett Ibis," by James Hurst, which both of us read in our own due passage through Mrs. Geiger's ninth grade advanced English class. Interestingly, "The Scarlett Ibis" was the first story in which I was able to understand the idea of a literary theme.
I don't know if it was the sparks that surround my comprehension of that idea, but it made me realize that I've lost my ability to tell a good story. My sister ignored my entire narrative about myself as a writer and singled out the part that was most important to her. Telling a good story is all about knowing what your audience wants to hear. It's a way of making an argument that does not call out to objective fact, as academic arguments do, but which is a subtle use of yellow journalism, shared consciousness, and emotional intelligence. It is not an introspective act. Rather, at it's best, in my opinion. it encourages introspection and demonstrates a method of expression for those wary of the institution certified methods but who believe current conditions, whatever they are, can and must be improved. Telling stories, as any griot could tell you, is an exercise of community leadership.
Rewind.
I've lost my ability to tell a good story. Telling a good story is all about knowing what your audience wants to hear. What would they find interesting? What matters to them the most? And most important of all, who are "they"?
It takes me a long time to judge and cater to an audience. I watch and listen carefully. I start by talking to one person. Slowly, I infiltrate. Eventually, I become the person who knows and talks to everybody and thinks of them as all a part of on one large, dynamic, never-ending puzzle that I finally learned the key to solving. It takes me a long time but with slow and diligent work, including late nights spent imagining conversations with people I have yet to speak with and telling trial stories, which some people call "lies," to help me judge my audience, I can figure it out. And to be honest, it's the most interesting work in the world.
But I don't just want to study people like they are lab mice. And I don't do it because I want everyone to like me. I watch them carefully so I can function as best as I can in the community. I've mentioned my mom's self-consciousness about this before but I think it also has to do with having a sense that you are different in a way that most of the people around you might not understand. The difference between my mom and I is that I have never been ashamed of being different. In fact, I find it far more realistic to think of being different as something that's just, well, different.
Accordingly, people react differently to difference. As someone different, I realized I really needed to know my peers and accept their difference before I should expect them to accept mine. It's a trust breeds trust sort of thing. Also, because I feel more different than the usual amount, I felt it's something that needs to be done with extra care than the usual things I do. It is utterly important for me to be a part of a community. It is the only way I know how to function. It's only when I know everyone's stories that I can tell them my own and it's only once they know mine that they can properly become a part of it.
Once I am a part of a community, I am fully invested in its dynamic. Accordingly, the greatest pain I can suffer is the feeling that the community I am a part of does not have my own or even its own best interests in mind. If someone is doing something that hurts someone else in the community, I am restless until there is some resolution.
I have been a part of some toxic communities. I have also been a part of communities I did not feel utilized what I had to offer it and therefore, did not have either my own or it's own best interests in mind. Maybe that makes me sound full of myself, asserting that I can differentiate what is best for a community. To be honest, after a certain point, I become too invested and I can no longer tell. What I've never been good at is abandoning a sinking ship. I think of it as good as being my own and if it's going down, so am I.
Of course, it only takes surviving that a few times, probably fewer for some people that others, that you have the choice to not go down with it. I, on the other hand, took so long to learn that, that when I learned it, I decided to maybe just find a different form of transportation.
However, this blog is not called "Introspective Commentary." Despite that, that's what it is. And to be honest, when I write fiction, it is really nothing more than introspection, either. My number one fan, maybe my only fan anymore, has told me that it is stream of consciousness, which for some reason never occurred to me before he pointed it out.
As I said before, in my last blogpost, my sister singled out the part of my post that was most important to her. Introspection, which is perhaps my own opinion (and that explains away my personal dislike of stream of consciousness narration), is often done to figure out what's most important to a person. For some people, just figuring things out, anything at all, is what's their most important thing. For me, the thing that was most important was my function in a community. I do not believe it was something that came from being a self-conscious teenager, though being one helped me figure it out. I think it's something I honestly believe to be the most important thing that there is and my recent introspective phase has come out of disillusionment with the idea.
However, introspection is not a vehicle of achieving what the title of this blog seems to imply and what I have in previous posts implied is most important to me. I am not trying to define new values for myself. I am in a battle against myself to get back to the way of life I prefer over this one. I'm not trying to get things back to the way they were. I am trying to resist the disillusionment, cynicism, and general closed heartedness/mindedness caused by disappointments outside of my own control and return to learning from my mistakes and then moving on.
I am trying to be someone who tells good stories, again.
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