On not writing

Half-written stories sit unshared because they have no tidy beginning or ending. They're just snippets, really, but I can't stop myself from writing them.

For as long as I can remember, I have narrated my life. Often I narrated in the third person, which drove me crazy but my brain just wouldn't stop, wouldn't stop silently telling the story of my life back to myself. Even the most mundane details ran through my head in story form:

"She headed to the bathroom, emptied her bladder, wondered once again how many squares of toilet paper the average female used afterwards. It irritated her not to know - is she typical? efficient? wasteful? With all the ridiculous studies out there, has no one bothered to study this?"

As though my trips to the bathroom needed narration. Or my choice of breakfast cereal. Or the things I noticed as I wandered through the halls at school. As though anything in my quiet average life even warranted narration.

Even as a little girl, both the narration and the annoyance with the narration were there in my head:

"She sat down with her Barbies, trying to decide which storyline to act out today...Oh STOP, just let me play!"

And then - then! - the most irritating of all, when I would third-person narrate my annoyance with the running stream of third-person narration:

"Why couldn't she turn it off? Why couldn't she just wash her hands or observe an interaction or pay the cashier without her brain mentally writing it down, as though she isn't already aware of what she herself is currently doing? Maddening! Infuriating! And most of all, unbelievably annoying."

I remember spending weeks trying to at least shift to a first-person narrative. I was a teenager by then, already in love with writing. I had my pen-and-paper diaries, my online diary, my secret poems that I have never shared with anyone because somehow I find poetry to be the most intimate of all forms of writing. There were stories for English class - one particularly dark one was passed around by friends and classmates, my quiet shy self enjoying a bit of attention for a few days. Even essays were a pleasure to write, choosing just the right words, transitioning from paragraph to paragraph, topic to topic, presenting my arguments and sources and oh, it was satisfying.

I did manage, at last, to get rid of the third person in my head. That first-person narration continues, though, and tiny blog posts continually draft themselves without my permission. Even when I'm not writing, I'm never really not writing.

It feels good to let those words out, but sometimes it feels better to simply keep them to myself. Let the story write itself, silent and unshared, and hope that the words will still be there when I'm old and sifting through memories of the past.

Onward we go, ever onward, as the story unfolds around us.