I wanted to tell them: freedom is a length of rope, God wants you to hang yourself with it.

[momebie]

I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Oh, I had the usual string of dream jobs on hold: astronaut, paleontologist, famous author, etc. I just never actualized them in my mind as solid possibilities. I was mimicking the people around me, as all children do. Until about the age of 17 it didn’t occur to me that I might live through my senior year of high school. It’s not that I was suicidal—that came later—it was merely that the idea of being an independent human being, separate of the structures I’d built for myself, didn’t appeal to me. So I dismissed the thought. Time would stop.

Of course, time didn’t stop. In the last ten years I’ve gone from ignoring the idea of the future to dwelling on it too intently. I can’t sleep some nights. (I didn’t sleep last night, which is why you’re getting this instead of more fiction.) There’s a tag in this journal for ‘the dreaded future’ for a very good reason. The future terrifies me. It terrifies me because everything is going to change and I am going to have to be the one to make some of those changes and I am ultimately responsible for where I end up. That crushing responsibility, above all else, is what I believe in now.

I took a lot of philosophy and religion classes in college. It was the only way to productively work through my fear of free will and how it related (poorly) to my Calvinist theological upbringing. If things are predestined and predetermined, why spend so much time dragging myself through life? I still haven’t found a reliable answer to that one. My solution was to eschew theology altogether, which is a tailspin of a feeling if you were raised with all of the comforting, violent, gilded words of a specific religion.

At that point it was the existentialists that caught me. In them I found the desperate explanation of life that I’d been looking for. It’s all on me. Regardless of whether there are gods in the sky or the earth or the perfume ads they stuff into women’s magazines, I’m still responsible for myself. I have to create a meaning. I have to create myself every day. Every day. Sartre is my boyfriend and Camus is my mistress and even though it means that sometimes I don’t sleep at night, I’m most comfortable when living through the illusion that I’m in control.

And it is an illusion. The world is large and dense and sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter how much of a path I manage to forge through the brambles, the Universe can come through and just as easily drown me out through no fault of my own. As a child I was taught that it happened to the people Noah didn’t have room for. It can happen to me. So even though I’ve built myself a world of lonely, commanding words, I have to leave room for eventualities. I’m not hedging my bets as much as it sounds like I might be, but in a lot of ways I still am and always will be a little girl, pretending to know what I want to be when I grow up.

There’s a tattoo I’ve been planning for several years now. And those of you who know me will raise your eyebrows and go ‘a tattoo? you want every tattoo’, which is true, but this one is special. This one I’m reserving for a moment when I take one of those large, startling leaps. Right now I go back and forth between deciding whether I want to get it when I move across country or when I graduate grad school. Both are things I’m feeling compelled to do. (Don’t you find that sometimes, as you’re making your way through life, certain decisions feel like they travel in well worn grooves in your soul? They come to you and you wonder in what life you’d ever choose the other option?) I haven’t settled on a design, but I know exactly what it will say.

Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.

It’s a quote from the Alan Moore comic Watchmen. (Yeah, not only am I an insufferable pretentious douchebag, but I’m also an insufferable pretentious comic book geek. You all probably noticed that by now, though. I just really like Batman, okay?) I wish I could share the panel the line comes from with you, but I don’t have my copy on me and my quick Google search hasn’t turned it up. (Thanks to edincoat it's now at the bottom of the post!) Long story short, one of the characters realizes time as being simultaneous, so he doesn’t feel he’s moving through it linearly so much as bumping up against events as they happen at all points. And I don’t have a giant blue penis, but sometimes, in spite of everything I believe about making me me, that’s how I feel. I’m a blank slate. I’m an ornate statue. I’m a weather worn, pock marked rock. I've blinked out.

I am already who I’ve made myself, and sometimes that futility will just keep you up nights.




This post was written for Topic 25: Uncarved Block at therealljidol. I know there's been a lot of meta lately about fiction vs. non-fiction and how some people feel like they don't really get to know those of us who write fiction. I'd be interested in knowing if you feel like this tells you more about me than my fiction did. As always, I welcome all comments and questions.

Comments

[theafaye.livejournal.com]

I had a completely secular upbringing, so I'm not plagued with having to overcome that programming. I also happen to think that we don't have Free Will, but that at the same time, the notion is not contradictory with predestination, so there's an element of both in how I view the universe.

And the fiction/non question, well, I think that fiction only reveals more about the author if you happen to know about that author on a personal level to begin with. I wouldn't even dream of drawing any conclusions about what Tim Powers or Guy Gavriel Kay are like as human beings based on what they write other than that they most likely have an interest in mythology and magick. So I might be able to get a sense of interest or themes from fiction but I don't get to know the individual behind those ideas at all, whereas if someone writes something more factual, even if they're lying, how they choose to lie about themselves is very revealing.

Ultimately, we're all presenting an edited image of ourselves to the world whichever way you slice it, so I suppose it comes down to the individual what lens they want to look through.

tl;dr answer - yes, I feel that I got to know YOU better because of this entry.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

There's definitely an element of both in how I now view the universe as well. I honestly don't know whether or not free will is a real thing, but I don't think for one minute that predestination would trump it. Those two concepts can work hand in hand, just like creationism and evolution can. (Which, I'm not a Creationist, but I was raised in the Bible belt, so you know, I've had all kinds of practice smiling and nodding.)

I would argue that you can get hints of how the author sees our world even if you're reading fantasy. You can definitely get more out of it than the mere fact that they're drawn to those types of stories. It DOES help if you know a little about the author, but if there's one thing school taught me it was that you shouldn't shy away from drawing initial conclusions about the way people might see the world, because it could help you relate to them. If your conclusions turn out to be wrong that's also just as well, but engaging an amount of real world context with the text is educational. That is, though, different from drawing conclusions about what they're like as people. What we observe and what we are are very different things.

Of course, how people choose to lie about themselves IS very revealing. It's kind of fascinating, really. And I agree with the sentiment that we present our edited selves. It's almost a necessity. Even the people who know me best can't know me the way I do. Sometimes I edit myself in ways I'm not even fully conscious of. That's very much tied to the question of who I actively make myself.

I feel like I should send everyone who reads this entry a basket of chocolates and some condolences, because I'm really kind of frustrating to know. I think so, anyway. I'm frustrated with me all the time. :p

[comedychick.livejournal.com]

You did not come off as frustrating when I read this :P

[momebie.livejournal.com]

OH GOOD. :p Mostly I'm aware that I worry about a lot of things other people don't seem to, and I've been called out on it before. Not in an altogether unfriendly way, but in a way in which the person couldn't understand why I'd waste my time and energy, which is kind of annoying.

[comedychick.livejournal.com]

o.O How odd! I over-analyse a heck of a lot of everything and theorise and so forth (I mean, take for example how surprised you were how much I thought about all these Idol stats and other such meta!) but I don't think anyone's ever said it was a waste of time to me before.

[theafaye.livejournal.com]

I asked on a friend's meta thread what they thought my bats in the belfry entry revealed about me because I was curious to see what conclusions they drew. They were quite interesting. They did caveat it with the fact that obviously they know a bit about me so couldn't be going to it completely fresh, but still, some of the things they got from it were pretty good. There was only one thing that was off (I don't have any real interest in genetics or transhuman issues). Having said that, I've come to the complete opposite conclusion to you about drawing conclusions as to how they view the world from fiction unless they've written something which is very clearly designed to make you look at a particular issue in a particular way. I've done too much creative work that was creative (i.e. doing something new that wasn't about me) to be comfortable having someone think that they knew me because they'd read my stories. For example, if someone had only read my bad_evil_echo stories, they'd think I was a very different person to if they'd read my a_cheese_fan stuff but they're both written by me.

To be honest, until I've actually met someone, I don't think that I really know a person if I've only encountered them through a written format. There have been too many people I've been way off base about to feel that my conclusions could be reliable. The best example is my husband who I first met online and was COMPLETELY different in real life when I met him! Had he been how I thought he was from his writing, that romance would have been doomed to failure.

And on the editing front, it's very interesting how we are different people depending on who we are surrounded by. I'm pretty constant regardless but my mother and brother were very chameleonic and would be completely different dependent on who they were with. My mother in particular was a very different person in different relationships as she adapted herself to the man she was with.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

I will certainly agree that you can't use every piece of creative work for it. I've done advertising campaigns and things that were creation purely for the company and therefore should have held no reflection of me whatsoever. I do like to think that fiction holds some of the writer, though. That's just a belief of mine, not something I expect everyone else to feel. Even when writing two very different types of stories, because while mine sometimes have common themes, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're purely fluff or silliness, but they're still facets of me, you know?

Also, yes, it is almost impossible to wholly know someone through a written format, even if they WANT you to know them. There's a lot about look and touch that are important in relationships. I love my online friends to pieces, but I would still prefer if I could meet up with them from time to time and get to know them better. Sadly, I do not have millions of dollars for plane tickets and nothing else to do. ;)

I try to stay constant, but in some situations I just feel really, really awkward. Like with strangers. I'm very uncomfortable around new people in the real world and will simply not say much at all. And at work I don't talk about fandom or share my opinions as much. That sort of stuff. I actually think I'd make a pretty bad chameleon in that way, though. I am me, pretty much, for better or worse. Some people find that relatively charming and some people find it really, really obnoxious. It happens.

[comedychick.livejournal.com]

I think that fiction only reveals more about the author if you happen to know about that author on a personal level to begin with.

I was thinking this recently myself, actually. Reading something fictional a friend of mine wrote, I drew certain conclusions, but there's no way I would've drawn those conclusions without background information.