Here I Go Again…
Have I been writing the same blog post for seventeen years?
I usually start with something ordinary and absurd that happens in my day.
The grocery store cashier asks if I found everything I needed.
I say, "Yes," even though I haven't found inner peace, a flattering pair of jeans, or the reason I walked into the laundry room twenty minutes ago.
Then I move on to some observations that I hope are hilarious.
Then, like clockwork, I arrive at the existential crisis.
Who am I?
What am I doing?
Should I have become an accountant?
Do accountants lie awake at night wondering if they're just rewriting the same emotional essay with different opening anecdotes?
I don't really have any other tricks up my sleeve.
Give me some ideas, people.
I have a list of scenarios:
Something mildly inconvenient happens.
I overreact internally.
A joke.
An unexpected confession.
A brief philosophical detour.
A conclusion that sounds hopeful but remains suspicious of hope.
I fear I have a style and a voice with only a few notes.
Maybe this is all I've got.
Maybe every writer has a tiny handful of obsessions and spends an entire lifetime rearranging them into different shapes.
Maybe Jane Austen had marriage.
Maybe Kafka had dread.
Maybe I have grocery stores, anxiety, and jokes about death.
What to do? What to do?
Most writers have a small constellation of obsessions they orbit for their entire careers. They just change altitude. One year it's funny. Another year it's grief. Then it's aging, parenting, ambition, regret, hope. The questions evolve because the person asking them evolves.
The fact is that being a person is deeply weird and nobody seems to know what they're doing. That's an inexhaustible subject.
After seventeen years, maybe I'm not writing the same post.
Maybe I'm documenting what it feels like to be the same person becoming someone new.
At this point, my readers aren't surprised by the existential crisis. They're probably checking their watches wondering when I'll get to it.
If I suddenly wrote a blog post about offshore tax policy, everyone would assume my account had been hacked.
Readers don't come back because they're hoping I'll suddenly start writing geopolitical analysis or detailed reviews of power tools. I suspect they come back because they want to hear me think out loud about the strange business of being alive.
I looked over my shoulder at seventeen years of writing and thought, Oh dear. It's me again.
And there's a brief moment of panic in that realization.
Shouldn't we have become someone entirely different by now?
Shouldn't we have developed a dazzling new set of tricks?
Shouldn't wisdom arrive with a complete personality upgrade and a surprising expertise in subjects we've never cared about before?
But then I realize something else.
Of course it's me again.
Who else was it going to be?
Photo by Luis Machado on Unsplash
The person who notices the absurdity in ordinary moments.
The person who can make a joke and then, three paragraphs later, quietly break your heart.
The person who asks the same questions not because she hasn't learned anything, but because the answers keep changing.
Seventeen years ago, I wondered what it meant to be human. Maybe you did too.
Today, I still wonder.
Only now I hope I have better punchlines.
I suspect that's true of all long-term writers. We don't move in straight lines. We spiral. We revisit the same territory with a little more tenderness, a little more humor, and a little less certainty. We notice details our younger selves missed.
The grocery store is still a grocery store.
The existential crisis is still the existential crisis.
But the woman pushing the cart has changed.
And maybe that's enough.
Maybe that's more than enough.
So perhaps I don't need new tricks.
Perhaps I just need new Tuesdays.
New grocery stores.
New reasons to stand in the kitchen wondering why I walked in there.
The questions remain mostly the same:
Who am I?
What am I doing?
Is any of this normal?
But I keep changing, even when I don't notice it.
Seventeen years ago I asked those questions as one version of myself.
Now I ask them as another.
Maybe that's what writing is.
Not finding entirely new things to say, but returning to the old things with new eyes.
Still wondering.
Still laughing.
Still here.
nina
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