Stories of Your Life and Others

(with apologies to Ted Chiang)

One of the things I've been wrestling with since last year's election is the problem of empathy, and of understanding, and of how to bridge the gap between lives.

I don't mean political views, although I think that exposure to other perspectives and personalities tends to get you there anyway. I mean lives.

There's been a lot of talk about how people live in self-segregated silos now, and don't talk to people on other sides of the political divide(s); there's talk about how exposure to diversity tends to reduce fear and divisiveness because people come to understand that We're All Human; there's plenty of earnest soul-searching about what each of us might do in answer to these challenges.

I think part of the answer must come in the form of each of us considering, and offering, some openness about our selves.

Who are you? Why are you? What are the things you wonder about in your idle moments? What are your little curiosities and whims? Hopes, fears? What are the textures and rhythms of your days, the things you see, the things you smell, the voices that you hear? What are the memories you carry each morning, the ones you wish you could bury, the ones you wish you could hold closer? The friends you wish you knew better, the passing strangers who pique your interest?

What are the stories of your life? The ones you'd tell about yourself, and the ones that others might tell in your passing?

I ask these questions because I'm curious. If you are reading this -- a stranger on the internet, a member of my own immediate family -- then I am genuinely curious what the answers are for you.

Who are you? Why are you? What is a story of your life? Not the story, because there's never only one. But a story.

Pick one out. Tell it. A small one, if you like, as brief as a haiku. Or a great one about an earthquake that shook your foundations. Whatever you like, whenever you like, as opaquely or transparently as you like.

But tell it honestly, or as close to honestly as any of us ever really can. Allow for uncertainty, for imperfection, for humanity and mistake. Avoid platitudes and easy endings and the just-add-water formulaic sentiments that come packaged in words that aren't your own. Tell your story. Open a window into a world that is deeply familiar to you, but unlikely to be known to others.

Because that's the value of the exercise. If we want to know each other better (and I think that we do, some of us), then we have to be willing to reveal something of our selves to the world. We have to share those stories for others to hear.

And they have to be real, not airbrushed clean of flaw. Which can be scary: you open yourself to the judgment of the world, and also to its indifference. You expose yourself for what you are: a person, an imperfect creature fumbling through an imperfect life. You confront the limitations of your skills as a writer and a thinker (or at least I do, constantly).

But it's the only way to learn, and the only way to help others learn what your life is like. Perhaps the only way to answer questions that you might not have considered in such bare terms.

These things are worth knowing. For yourself, for the world, and for those close to you. I don't think it's any accident that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his son; I think that's a useful way to sharpen your focus as to what matters and what you wish to say. I wish my own parents would write letters of their lives to me. Perhaps someday they will.

I can hope. And I can encourage you, as I would encourage them, to write such letters of your own life. Put them on the internet for all the world to learn, and put them aside for your children or parents or unknown strangers to read someday in the future, quietly, when they look back on these days and want to know who you were.

What were the stories of your life? Who were you? Why?