Taking account of your life

Pour one out for all the things that got you here (with journal and pen reco's)

A few years ago, I had to apply for a job. Let’s just say that the process was … complete. I had to take a full accounting of my professional path, which, if I were to assign it a word, could best be described as winding. This is the life of a writer who also wants to do things like eat, and enjoy shelter.

When I finished those application materials, I felt like I’d done something new. The world tends to push us ever forward, encouraging us to never look back. But I liked that exercise. I’d forgotten a lot.

Lately, I’ve been using that exercise in a different way. When I’m worried or anxious or wonder if I’m up to a task, I take a moment and consider what I’ve been through to get here. My fingers are hesitating to type the word “survived,” but that’s what I mean. What have you survived? Even now, this question dropped me down into a little quiet place where I don’t have many words but feel a certain gravity set in.

I was reading Anne Helen Petersen’s Substack last weekend, and it shed light on what happens when we are living through all the things—she calls it going through the portal, and follows her thinking through a lovely linked trail of citations that I highly recommend. If you’ve been through the portal, you know it, you feel it. And naming this experience opened something in me (another portal!). It puts life into context.

Maybe that’s why so many of us feel the urge to purge at a certain age. Maybe it’s because all the cumulative experience in our comet tail has grown to be much. Shedding material stuff, and what no longer truly matters, allows us to travel under the weight of a different gravity.

If this whole scenario speaks to you, I’d like to suggest a short, written exercise. A good journal will help. I have loved the feel and heft of this affordable little fellow from WalMart. Get a pen that feels good in your hand (my current #1).

On the left-facing page, make a list of what you’ve lived through to get here. The challenges, the tough stuff, the hard part(s) of your story. Pause at each item, and think about that time, how you got through it. Good ways and bad. The fact that whatever you did got you here, right now. Nice job with that.

On the right-facing page, make a list of what you have done well in your long life. Things you are proud of, moments of great importance to you. Pause at each one. Consider how these, too, have made you who you are.

Take a look at these two pages together. They tell a single story in which each has fed the other, to make the person who has shown up to the page today.

So, now is the time in an essay when the author is supposed to share a specific example to get you started. But to me, this exercise is between the page and the writer. It is a private reminder of the passage of our time on earth, its cumulative gifts, and the privilege of being allowed to continue on.

You have lived such a full life! A life of walking on grass, loving your friends, making terrible decisions, rectifying them, visiting incredible places, and being a real asshole your junior year. It’s all this one thing, all told.

These pages are your comet tail, and its sum is your gravity.

Happy almost-weekend.