The Plot

May 2024

But here we are.

I have recently been asked what inspires me to write. A few times, and by unrelated people. So I’ve let this question slow-cook for a bit in the last few weeks. My answer is simple: I write what I need to read.

I remember wondering whether what I wrote on this blog last year would serve me in the future, or whether I would read these back after a year or more had passed and feel another girl in an alternative life had been the one who’d sat on a church stoop and strung those sentences together.

But, good news! What I/she wrote has continued to serve me. Some of the posts I penned, though reminiscent of a time of life that already feels long left behind, now simmer: they serve as reminders of core values and lessons learned that started as wet concrete poured and have since become the sturdy sidewalks I walk on daily. Those posts are the memorial handprints I stamped every few blocks along the way.

So I'd rather not stop. I hope to continue writing myself through the lessons life is teaching me. Here is one I am learning (one I am highlighting, studying, and surveying):

Life’s not the Plot.

If life were the Plot, this year, I would have been speaking Spanish each day at work. I would have kept in equally close touch with each person I knew and loved last year abroad. Liturgically speaking, he would’ve stayed silent through Lent and come back on Easter Sunday. If life were the Plot, you might be famous. I might be planning next year’s apartment lease in Madrid instead of a little closer into downtown Chicago. We would all be best friends with our random roommates, twice promoted, published, in love, settled, and still on a plane to Lake Como or hitting checkout on season tickets to next fall's football on campus. Logically.

And tears would still come, but they’d come perfectly timed—when I’ve got no calls at work, and when it’s already raining.

I would feel on top of the world when the sun is shining, and I would religiously shut my laptop tight at 4:00 on the dot on Fridays to foxtrot (the dance) off and start adventuring. Likely, Foxtrot's (the store's) doors would remain open for business, and I'd be writing this post there, by that window looking out at the intersection of LV and LP.

But life is not the Plot.

Or, to clarify: life is a plot already in play, a story—but you are not the author. And no amount of prayer or “manifesting” can force the writer to surrender the two-ton pen into your t-rex hands. (*I can tell you that when I have tried to write with this pen, it has only been painful, embarrassing, and exhausting). When you acknowledge that your life will wobble far from the friendly little circle that is Vogler’s Hero’s Journey—that your ego is written nowhere on the copyright page of this little book we call life—you free yourself and your peace.

Life is not a book you can skim.

You are not the author of your own story, but this doesn’t mean you can sit back and let life happen to you. (*I can tell you that when I have tried to do so, I have felt lost and lazy). You have to stay heavily invested in the progression of each chapter, the things you do during the ellipses, and the characters who suddenly appear and steadily re-appear. The speed and the pace may change, but at no point can you be a passive player in this game. You must be agreeable (in the Austenian sense) to the progression of the plot, an accomplice of the writer. Sometimes, so keyed in, you may need to go back and re-read and pull out your highlighter. I find this is best done in lamplit conversation with friends past 11 PM on a couch, or a solo review perched on the “concrete beach” by the lake in the morning.

Lately, I have suffered the consequences of racing around too fast and too recklessly. (*My friend could play you a voice-recorded text where I was crossing train tracks last week and filling her in on my weekend schedule without looking or listening and nearly got steamrolled; my boss could show you a stray column header that didn’t quite align). These are page-turner moments, but they need not be bolded so frequently.

So I am cooking in cahoots with the writer now, taking heed with these very words to seduce myself into slowing down and stirring the way the writer plays with syntax and semantics—to better heed the need for a bookmark rather than those haphazard dog ears that, over years and years, do add bulk to my bookshelf.

Life may not be the Plot—your Plot—but whether they feel gossamer-thin or 50 lb each, you have to keep turning its pages.

I look forward to someday peering down upon my own hero’s journey once this life is complete and smirking in admiration as I realize, silly me: it wasn’t a circle, and sometimes my words ran off the margins…but it did have an intelligible shape all along.

With love for left alignment,

Ellie

P.S. I cannot lie; I love the beta AI art generator. Writing 20 versions of a description to get me close enough to what I want is pretty cool for an illustration or two to change things up. Thanks, Wix. xoxo.