Why a Personal History?

I read about a group of nuns who wrote their own biographies while in their twenties. I always think of writing as an enterprise for readers, but it strikes me that these biographies might have been most important to the nuns themselves later in their lives. Like looking through pages of old essays and stories from grade school, the value is not in the content, but in the marking of the thoughts of life.

Stories are how we make sense of life and ourselves. Eric Berne's script analysis (a form of psychotherapy that has now probably blended into the more standardized, empirical methods underlying cognitive behavioral therapy and its cousins) describes how the script we believe in for our lives shapes our behavior. If I believe I'm a born loser, I likely will be. It's the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy writ large.

I feel as though my own narrative is constantly being rearranged. Contemplating every new twist in priorities, career path, and social network feels to me like restructuring the facts to tell a new story. I am constantly reinventing myself as the quiet humanitarian, nurturing those around him; the brash playboy, alarmingly charming and eminently confident; the scientist, living a life of research and observation once removed from actual production; the talent, blessed with mercurial artistic gifts that dazzle everyone into forgiveness for my shortcomings; and more.

At the end of my life, I will know which roles I have been faithful to, and which narrative best fits my life. But now I can play in them and, according to Berne, change my destiny with each story.

There's a line from a one-act play in which an eccentric woman describes herself as "much too complicated to be only one person--or even two!" A girl I was dating at the time thought the line rung true; it seemed frustratingly pat to me--like an idea someone had borrowed from a work of real quality. Now I return to it and find it cutely relevant to my own world view.

And I suppose that's why I would like to write a personal history: to mark the spiritual and intellectual places I've been, to see where I will return and where I will abandon.

Remote as it seems, moments will come when I will not remember. I will think things were always as they are--I was always an old man with a few close friends and a deep commitment to his life's work. The personal history is a testament to a time when the commitments were not made, and the choices had not been chosen. Life may seem inevitable once lived, but now, in this moment, it is fresh and mysterious, with all the possibility of unrolled dice.

I would like to think my children will one day want to read what I have written. Maybe not all of it, but maybe enough of it to understand part of who I was; enough to understand that history is lived and not written. But even if they never do--or I never have children--at some point, past many years, I will want to read it. I will want to look back and remember.

A Work Poem

Today and tomorrow and tomorrows again

Sucking and selling and unquelling yen

Office unmoments never are "when"

First Post

I have mixed feelings about blogging. On the one hand, it might encourage me to write more--and to write consistently--because I'll have a forum for sharing my thoughts. On the other hand, it goes against my instincts of privacy and self-preservation.

I've created one, so you can see how this internal debate ended, but with the caveat that I will consider this an experiment. My writing here will be writerly, not readerly, or as writerly as I can be, considering my innate impulses for explanation.