Meta-post.

I was thinking about why I have a compulsion (sadly left unfulfilled these days) to chronicle the miniscule events of my life. I want it all recorded, every passing thought, every pleasant moment, every little story arc that stretches itself into my life. And I thought about the lecture my Continental Authors professor gave us last week about existentialism. Existentialism, he said, asks the individual, what do you have when you get to the end of your life? The existential mandate is to live responsibly—all we have are memories, so it is vital that we accumulate good ones. Life is nothing more than a collection of experiences.

I was packing things that I won't need this week, like the stacks and stacks of journals that I compiled from age 10 onward. Why did I keep such a meticulous record of the mundane happenings of my life? There was the idea that I, as a nascent novelist, was doing research for the future, so that when I wanted to capture a 12-year-old or 14-year-old or whatever, I could just go back and see what I thought at that age (because hey, I was never going to be this age again, so I might as well take advantage of it). But I wonder if it wasn't also a vague intuition of this concept, that a compilation of memories would somehow prove that I had had a good life, that I had lived and that it was good.

And maybe I want to do that still. Who else cares about what I write? I write for myself. I have always written for myself. I like trying on philosophies; I have all these ideas floating around caught from all the classes and books and people; I want to settle on something eventually. I want to assume a community understanding of personhood, to know that I am who I am in relation to others, to realize that I think therefore I am is just not true. But I am just so ingrained in the individual, so naturally existential, born knowing that existence precedes essence, that I am alone in a chaotic and absurd world, that I have the choice, the choice is mine, that it is my responsibility to make meaning out of my life. I wonder if these narratives can be reconciled.