is it really a story of my life?

 now playing: Story of My Life by One Direction 

 

A recent fear of mine (if which you enlightened me of four years ago, I would have laughed in your face) has been none other than peaking too early in life. Accomplishing my greatest successes, then painfully descending into a valley. Yet similar to the climax of a story, a "peak" only really exists if life follows a rising and falling arc. 

Maybe that's where my fear rooted from: to name a peak is to view my life within a narrative frame, a fixed story where I am the protagonist, a very symptom of Narrativism that Strawson implies in his discussion of the human tendency to impose structure into life.

In that vein, I wonder if it's fruitless to continue trying to measure my life in peaks and valleys. On one hand, it makes things a tad less grey, a tad easier to see as cause and effect. Event A leads to Event B. This is how many forms of entertainment push it after all - characters like Tinker Bell, the mighty protagonist who faces hardship and identity uncertainty to ultimately embrace her talent of tinkering, or the Who Was...? series I devoured in elementary school that seemed to always follow a similar pattern of childhood curiosity to the great, defining achievement that secured an individual's place in history. Stories like these, though, are finite. They end. Thus, they almost necessitate a somewhat organized, meaningful form as they are constrained by only so many pages or minutes.  

That's exactly it. They're finite. Limited. Real life, however, is not a closed narrative.

Rather, my life consists of arbitrary bits and pieces I can't easily formulate into a meaningful narrative: think miserably failing at foot wars against my triumphant sister at the ripe of age six, taking a solo bike ride in my neighborhood last week after flunking my physics exam, oh, and overcooking my first packet of ramen.

Yet when I think of the "story of my life," these minuscule moments are seldom what come to mind. Until now, I've dubbed them too trivial to be part of my imaginary elaborate protagonist narrative. After all, I'm certainly not saving lives (let alone my hunger) or contributing to society with my poor attempt at constructing a...rudimentary noodle meal. But I wonder now: does that make this moment any less valuable?

To live as though I'm the main character in a story certainly feels comforting, but it also simultaneously waters down the very experiences that make me (boringly enough) human and not some grandiose hero. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that while I acknowledge in full my desire for purpose, for structure, I don't think it's plausible given the incongruent, ordinary more often than not, stories encapsulating my life.

So I'd like to contradict my childhood favorite boy band on this one: it's not that I'd like to live a story of my life, but perhaps I will drift among the plentiful, beautifully mundane stories.