“So much angst! You need to just relax! Keep your perspective – as an amazing student, a daughter of God, a wonderful writer.”

Words from my professor, written inside my assigned journal for our nonfiction prose class. He gave me an A+.

Even with those words of affirmation and the grade next to it, I was beating myself up over the notebook full of angst I gave him to read. Angst about angst about angst.

I keep my journals and read them every so often to remind myself that my usual melancholy and desperate search for meaning are just a part of who I am, that I am not fundamentally broken in some impossible way, that things do, in fact, work out. That my worry often compounds a tough situation, making it seem worse than it really is. That there is no such thing as a time in my life that was “easier” or “better” or when I wasn’t worried, or when I was completely happy with every area of my life.

That in retrospect, I’ll understand why and how and when.

That Grace is real, even when I’m too close to recognize it.

That even five years later, those are the words I need to read –

So much angst! Relax! Keep your perspective.

You may have already stumbled across it, but I thought I’d share this rad infographic from The Slow Journalism Company. Longlisters of the 2011 Booker Prize wrote about a lot of things, but all thirteen books nominated for the award involved death.

Joe Bunting of The Write Practice asks really good questions about this :

Think about your favorite novels and films. How many of them involve death? Why do you think stories involving death are so popular?

Personally, I think that the mystery of death itself is one that humanity is constantly processing. What does death mean? Is death a spiritual experience? Is it just physical? Or is it both? Where does the soul go from here? Is it permanent or temporary? How do we, the living, cope with the deaths of those we love, and even those we hate?

You’ll notice that the second most common theme is love, which, similar to death, we can spend our whole lives exploring and never fully understand.

I think that when we write and read fiction, we are able to process these themes in a manageable, compartmentalized way. We want to master mystery, and there are clearly defined boundaries in fiction that help us do this : beginning and end, protagonist and antagonist, right and wrong. The authors hold all the power, and readers, desperate to understand these things, turn the pages hoping that the author holds the answer they’ve been searching for. Fiction offers a level of control that we will never experience in life.

What about you? Why do you think themes of love and death are so recurrent in fiction? Do you agree or disagree with my theories? Share your thoughts here or on Joe’s post over on The Write Practice.

~

book·ish/ˈbo͝okiSH/Adjective

1.  (of a person or way of life) Devoted to reading and studying rather than worldly interests.
2. (of language or writing) Literary in style or allusion.
3. (of art and all manner of lovely things) devoted to the written word as a form of art and as a way of seeing the world.
4. (of BethanySuckrow.com) anything of the aforementioned characteristics as they are found on the interwebs and reposted by Bethany, because bookish and writerly things always give reason for amusement.

So this is what I hope my freelance home office will look like this summer, weather permitting. Note the pot of impatiens that survived last week’s squirrel massacre. Does that make me a successful gardner? Because if the flowers survive, then we can get a dog… someday. Right?

We set all these weird little milestones for ourselves, building the strange, constant mix of pride and anxiety that we label adulthood. And it’s lovely and hard and crazy and terrifying, but we only get one shot.

On that theme, and in honor of  my freelance plans, here are some inspiring links.

“For me, becoming an adult hasn’t been a transition from one person to another: it’s been sinking into the eclectic, unexpected combination of everyone I’ve ever been, all rolled into one. Refreshing, isn’t it?”

Helena asked a really good question that forced me to think about a a personal weakness of mine : Were you taught about financial literacy? Or did you learn the hard way?

“It takes you to a place of non-conformity and non-complacency, keeps you on edge, helps you search and strive for something deeper, fuller, more true. Restlessness makes you a better person. Restlessness is godliness because God doesn’t want us to be stuck. He wants us on the move.” On restless and why it’s important.

“I spent the first couple of years just waiting for the ‘job of my dreams’ to come to me. I figured it would show up on my doorstep or something. I prayed a lot about it, but I didn’t do very much about it, and surprise surprise — not very much happened.” Is This the Life of Your Dreams?

“Young people in relationships tend to give negative things too much weight and underrate the positives…  But look at married couples in their eighties. Their little annoyances are often all they talk and joke about. ‘Oh, Miriam always says this…’ ‘Oh, Herb always does that…’ The little annoyances are acknowledged, accepted and part of the fabric of their relationship.” I love Alex and Jo’s thoughts on living and loving, even when they’re annoyed.

And last but best, how blogging changed her life. What decisions have changed your life?

We always lament the rain when we want sunshine, when we want the weather to match our mood. There are times, though, when a sunny day doesn’t quite touch our emotions, either. It’s June. Six months into the new year. It doesn’t seem possible. And I’m happy for sun and warm weather and dresses and the way that I always feel younger and the days always seem longer in summer. But this season can also feel nonchalant, detached, like the world around me has forgotten. I know it’s all in the process of grieving… and maybe that’s why I find such deep comfort in words, and this poem in particular.

When I Am Asked
By Lisel Mueller

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

Fun fact : it rained on my wedding day. Another fun fact : I lived with my in-laws for the first ten months of my marriage. Yep. It’s about to get real awkward over on Prodigal Mag today as I share thoughts on weddings, marriage, and what it means to be blessed. Join the fun over here.

P.S. My Prodigal Mag archives.