Massive stacks of mundane stories sit in a desk drawer — waiting to be told, or waiting to be tossed in the trash. To consider last Thursday, and deem your friend “a flake” is to create a thesis: “a flake is ___.” To leave a lucky penny on the ground, for someone else to find, is to make a decision: “Today, I don’t really need luck.” To remember your music teacher from kindergarten, and realize you have forgotten her name, is to substantiate the fact that 16 years have passed. Ordinary memories, with extraordinary value, wait in a messy pile to be sifted through and understood…or not.
Ambition, longing, love — all are charged with self-preservation and self-analysis. They’re protective of some inner dialogue, some identity, some thesis. To say “I need,” “I want,” “I will,” or “I am” is to make a hypothesis, and frame an argument that contextualizes the past.
Who doesn’t daydream about telling their life story? Who doesn’t follow an outline when they do? In personal essays, commonplace thoughts are the building blocks for sense. Personal tales are a staircase toward the universal. A stranger’s random story is the human story. And every driftless thought, every choice made — is evidence for some thesis, some belief system, some way of being, and some way to continue being.
We look at the past. We try to make sense of it. We write it down so that the story we tell ourselves is “truer”. We are constantly biased, but intuitive, too.
I love personal essays. I have since I took a class titled “The Art of the Personal Essay” during my senior year of high school. Growing up, I considered writing only a hobby because I’m not attracted to fiction. Then, personal essays solved my dilemma and non-fiction became the way to go. Here are four of my favorite essays of all time!
- The Question of FOMO
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This anonymous essay in the Yale Daily News drives me crazy. I cannot believe someone was able to pick through my mind and understand my own thoughts before I could.
“It’s not jealousy that lies at the root of FOMO, but confusion. We suffer from FOMO not because we really want to do a half-marathon in inner Mongolia but because we realize that somebody else has made a choice different from our own … And my anxiety stems not from having too many options, but from fear of choosing the wrong one, an anxiety inherent in any decision.”
If I am half as good a writer as this girl, I’ll take it.
- Steve at the Party – by Colin Nissan
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“Steve wears jeans at the party. Darker than his work pair, thinner than his everydays. These are his party jeans. Steve knows that wearing these jeans leaves the door wide open to intercourse.”
I use this piece as a litmus test for who I can be friends with. If the person laughs upon reading that mediocre Steve thinks he’s a sex magnet, they have friend potential. If they don’t understand Nissan’s humor, they’re on thin ice.
- The Death of the Moth – by Virginia Woolf
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Remember when I said the ordinary reveals the extraordinary? This is what I meant. That’s all the introduction I have to offer.
- To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This – by Mandy Len Catron
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This essay broke the New York Times. It discusses Dr. Arthur Aaron’s thirty-six intimate questions which have inspired test subjects to fall in love in a laboratory.
“Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.”
“But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.”
“I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.”
“I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.”
“Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.”
Freshman year of college, I ran with the idea that love is a choice because symbolically, I think it applies to making friends as well. You can care about anyone you bother to get to know. This may be scientifically proven. It also may as well not be. Relationships of any kind are a choice.
Each of these authors is imaginative, creative, and able to see the meaning behind an ordinary action. I think that’s the goal of personal writing: to contemplate, without stakes, and to prove something, without needing to prove anything.
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