He told me he had no stories to tell.
That there were few—if any—that believed his life worth being written.
The bright, oft-intrusive backlight of my computer screen gleamed at me. The Facebook ping! notified me that he was continuing to send messages. Annoying, I thought. I shifted in my bed. Lying on my aching stomach.
I needed no external sound to inform me that a great friend was in a struggle. The struggle not with the physical world, but within him, the skirmishes of the mind, the great battle against himself. I tried to inform him that I understood his place, his position, but I was lying. My mental troubles have been meek compared to his, one of the few childhood friends I still have, one of the few that managed to circumvent the tedious nature of distance. Survived the many moves my family and I have made.
We continued to chat, him and I, as I saw multiple-paragraph length messages sent time and time again. Reminisced to my time in Vietnam, my deepest moment of weakness. 6:30 AM in Ho Chi Minh, sprawled out on my bed. The muffled cries of a child. In that moment I did the same to him, message after message, but mine were pleas, distinct shouts for help, for assistance. Yet he could do nothing, nor could my parents, nor could anybody, really. Vietnam is not an accessible place. So as he reciprocated and opened to me, I continued to listen and converse with him through his concerns, both concrete and abstract, and attempted to do the best I could to help push him out of the cage, shrouded in the depths of his mind and anxiety. The cage he had built for himself, the same I struggle with daily. The rusty, old, iron cage of the mind, the trappings of anxiety. The most incisive of shames upon realizing it is of your creation, yet cannot escape.
I had told him to write his thoughts down, to delve into the depths of his despair, and to think through the shrouding, opaque clouds that confused him, forcing him to a place he no longer recognized. I mentioned that I had found only solace in my art, in my pursuit of explanation through creation. I professed that I had never quite felt so vindicated, swelling with self-actualization. He agreed, but responded by saying he’d never actually written anything outside of a school assignment. Again I was floored. To write is to breathe, to exist, to comprehend the mysteries of the mind and of the world, both seen and unseen. But I quickly realized I was an exception to the rule. I imagine most do not write. In fact, I imagine most delve only into their work when the fruits have rotted. For others, alcohol, cigarettes, weed and other substances are their saviors. We all have our vices.
But still I attempted to convince him to write. I felt its usage so very pivotal to my understanding of myself.
Yet I remained stuck—blocked from truly proceeding and following the conversation, in a sense—on that comment. That he had no stories to tell. In truth, this was a man who taught me such terms as “cognitive distortion” and could, while stoned, deconstruct the mechanisms of society with incredible articulation. Our conversations usually ended with me feeling some sort of profound enlightenment. And as such, it racked my brain that he perceived he had no stories to tell. Or that nobody would care to pay the slightest of attention to them.
It is an unfortunate coincidence that my conversation with my old friend is not the first time I have heard or been told by someone that they feel their stories merit no audience. No eyes on their words. Not even their own. Many are too frightened to even put into text many of the most crucial moments of their existence. To me, it seems such a foreign idea, however I realize I am but one of many. One in the multitude of New York City, of the billions that dot all corners of the globe. Not all are as open in their writing or in their expression, I tell myself. Try to empathize, I think.
It is our fault, perhaps, that many find their lives to be meaningless, mundane, and lacking. We tend only to gravitate to the extreme moments, to the inexplicably fantastic tales that happen, by chance, to occur in our daily lives. People don’t even read nonfiction anymore. It’s not interesting enough. Unless, of course, you’ve had some life-changing, world-shattering experience in a foreign country. Some extraordinary event. This, I believe, is our nature. We truly only yearn for the extraordinary, while the ordinary is pushed aside.
I once held that my oft-odd and incomprehensible idea that my life was “Iconic” was a flaw. A tool for self-absorption, materialized in flashy Instagram photos and an outward persona of superiority. Many of those aspects have been, and remain, flaws. I fight daily against my self-absorption, vanity, and infatuation with my own being. Yet, the essence of my Iconic Life is in the story. I have grown believing, just as I viewed Kerouac, Orwell, and others—men whose lives seemed to have been in some manner immortalized like golden, gleaming treasures of experience—that long past my death the mundane daily life I lead would aggregate, days becoming periods of time, trends, and periods becoming building blocks for the final climax. The overarching plot of my life, the story in which I have half-written, the rest by those around me. The Iconic shimmer of a life, captured, noted, and its story told.
If written or captured correctly, any moment is iconic. When I feel my best, I truly do feel like an icon. A glimpse in the mirror during those lofty moods reinforces the theory. Perhaps for this reason I feel motivated and able to share my dark, depressing tales. For many others, no matter how well written, the story belonged only in the garbage. In most cases, that garbage is not even a physical one, rather a wastebasket in the back of the mind, where nothing truly is dumped out on the side of the street. Rather it sits, stewing, decomposing until its stench is too great to ignore. And in those moments when the stench is unbearable we seem to make our grandest and most irreversible of mistakes.
It is pivotal to understand that each, perceived-to-be-unimportant event is, in fact, utterly and unfailingly unique. This premise is what created the Oscar nominated film, Boyhood. A film about a family, a child, and the moments of crisis and jubilation we all wade through. The same, I believe should be said about our own tales.
If viewed as iconic, any moment then becomes pivotal. Nay, crucial to understanding the individual. Those around you, your friends, those who make your close-knit circle, become the external figures that become, too, immortalized. Dean in On the Road. I even admit that my inspiration in Kerouac’s legendary novel was, to be frank, his friend Dean. Renegade, reckless, and confident (even if in the most mind-numbing of ways). I yearned to be Dean for someone else. Also a likely motivator behind my careless attitude and perplexing substance abuse.
This life, so ignored, unappreciated, and frequently despised, is on the same token, swelling and bursting with characters. Screaming for a story to be noticed and told, no matter the scale.
I typed back to my old pal.
“I don’t write for people, I write for myself, and then when I think it has a good message or is vivid I post it.”
Continued.
“I used to also think nobody would think I had anything to say. But we really lead unique, unique lives. You have to see it as iconic because every moment is singular and fleeting. Nobody has your experience.”
I was on a roll.
“Like the stuff we went through in school in that horrible place, the stuff you alone went through, and furthermore the mental demons you deal with, that is powerful stuff! Stories that deserve and should be told, even if just to yourself. I know also that you’re in a dark place right now, which is when the best art comes. Maybe you don’t write, but if you have any artistic inclination, follow it and produce greatness.”
Our conversation ended shortly after. He was overly gracious for a favor which needed no request coming from a great friend. I went back to my day, disappointed at how beaten he seemed to me, and how I could do little but type to make the man feel uplifted. I began to write this piece—again, simply for myself.
And perhaps it merits no audience, perhaps none of my pieces merit any eyes. My story could unfold, in the most disappointing of ways, as a rather uneventful tale told by a man who believed every dull, average moment of it was iconic. But I know I must learn in the most difficult of ways, a lovely gift from my stubborn nature.
It may deserve no sharing, but the moments, the conversation with a friend, are true. Innocent. Genuine. Unique.
Unique.
Oh, how that word motivates.
“Unique.”
The story waits to be told. Different from all the rest, never to truly quite occur the same way twice.
Follow it and produce greatness.
INTEREST & INFLUENCE 