The infinite attempts of living

How we're all sort of essayists

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson, @asiwillit

Having now submerged fully in 2023, I’m looking around at my cohort of life journey-people and seeing a jarring zeitgeist of crisis. We are in a collective sorry state. A friend was laid off, a friend was robbed, a friend had a falling out with his father, a friend is in the midst of breast cancer treatment, a friend can’t afford the medical care he needs, a friend feels suddenly purposeless and listless, three friends just slogged through long and awful miscarriages, a friend was sick in bed for two months with a mysterious infection, a friend is going through the biggest heartbreak of his life. For my part, I am in my fourth year of an abusive relationship with IVF, which I both feel incredibly grateful for and which also exists in my life as a constant, ever-present thrum of fear, dread, and hopelessness, vacuuming up my time and energy (did I really have four vaginal ultrasounds last week? Yes, I did.)

My deeply ingrained knee-jerk reaction to all this bad news is: but we’re so lucky. We all have food and shelter. We have people who love us. I can afford IVF. Who am I to complain. There are so many worse ways to suffer. And that is all true. We are lucky. Things could be worse.

And yet, it’s still a relevant and interesting topic, the hard things in a life, in this case the types of hard things that seem to cluster around college-educated Americans in their mid-thirties. It’s also true that I don’t think I should be complaining, so I need an alternative mode of exploration, and that is why I turn to the personal essay, a method of investigation with intention. Given how personal and intimate my writing tends to be—indeed, the interiority of it is enshrined in the name of this newsletter—I wanted to share briefly why I do this, why I love the personal essay form, and how the principals behind the essay can extend off the page and into a life.

To essay

The word essay comes from the French essayer, "to try" or "to attempt," and in its first instantiation in the English language, “an essay” meant “an attempt.” This fact is passé in the essay community—it’s been said too many times already—but I still found it novel and illuminating when I first learned the origins of the word a couple years ago. Viewing writing as an attempt is liberating. I could say the same about living.

In personal essay, the way that we mount our attempt is by choosing a subject and then trying to approach it from all angles, in some cases surprising even ourselves with the new views we encounter. I had a writing teacher describe it this way: the subject is sitting in the middle of a room, and the essayist is a floating lens rotating around it, trying to see it in every possible way.

The goal of this exercise is only seeing, not solving. Yes, we aim to come to some greater understanding through the inquiry, but we do not try to tie it up in a bow and deliver the final answer. The personal essayist’s only job is to try and see more clearly, more wholly, to try and connect what we see to other ideas and derive meaning. Essayists tend to wax on about “the burning question,” and “struggling on the page,” never about finding solutions or coming to a resolution.

This is why the essay is such a powerful art to apply to hard things. IVF is not solvable, chronic illness has no final answer. Difficulty is complicated and nuanced, human reactions to difficulty unreliable and impure. I turn to personal essay in an age of life hacks and quick-fixes, and I feel replenished by the gorgeous richness, the infinite shades of purple, the peace that can be found in not knowing, never knowing, really, but continuing to make attempts.

Creating ourselves

A core element of personal essay writing is the development of the “I character,” the version of you, usually a past you, who is experiencing the events in the story. This “I character” is different from the “narrator,” who is also you, but with some distance, usually older, wiser, telling those events with the benefit of time and reflection. The narrator can make connections that the younger “I character” would not have been able to make. And neither of these is the author, the person sitting in the flesh at the computer, though usually the narrator is closer.

The act of writing an “I character” and placing her voice and experiences next to an older, wiser narrator is a profound experience, one I wish for everyone. How many versions of ourselves have existed? Infinite, you find, when writing personal essays. As an essayist, holding the tools of narration like a magic wand, you suddenly have the means to meet and interact with all possible versions of that earlier self, the fuzzy aura of memory inviting interpretation and imagination. Who was she when that illness hit, and who did she become? That is an open question, one that might be attempted, one that might be attempted many times.

The process of writing an “I character” is necessarily humbling, if done honestly. No one exists simply as a gleaming orb of light. The sharpness and darkness is where the interest lies, anyways. “You need to have—or acquire—some distance from yourself,” writes the modern godfather of the personal essay, Philip Lopate, “If you are so panicked by any examination of your flaws that all you can do is defensively when you feel yourself attacked, you are not going to get very far in the writing of personal essays.”

This is maybe the hardest element of personal essay writing, and of being human: acquiring some distance so that we can effectively examine our role in the mess. It sounds at first deeply unpleasant, but the reward is the immense satisfaction of expanding self-knowledge. For me, the ache of recognizing all those past (and current) blunders is more than worth it for the warm rush afforded when I can make of meaning from my missteps.

Revising

If you’ve followed me until here, then you can imagine how I might gush about the act of revision. Revision in personal essay is, essentially, committing time to revisiting over and over your own life events and ideas about those events, trying to render them more accurately, trying to unlock one more door in the hallway leading towards truth. The more time that elapses between revisions, the more trippy this experience is. It is enlightening to write an essay, put it away for five years, come back, and see what you think. I usually read an old essay and feel my increased maturity—I have new thoughts on the matter, I find some of my former statements cringe-worthy. But then I am also stopped in my tracks by a sentence with wisdom so brightly true, so well-stated, that I feel like I’m reading some other author I admire. Who was she, the woman who wrote that?

Mostly, encountering old work, I am compelled to take it up again, to re-craft and re-frame and re-consider. I am still a baby essayist, I do not have decades of writing to look back on, I look forward to the time when I do. Writer Kiese Laymon made the highly unusual move of buying back the rights to his first two books and revising them start to finish before re-publishing. He didn’t feel the books reflected what he wanted to say anymore, didn’t feel like they were true to him.

“Revision required witnessing and testifying,” Laymon wrote, “Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every god ever asked of believers.”

Witnessing and testifying to my former self does feel like a holy act for me. I see that this is a little over the top…he said it, not me :)

And so.

In some ways we are all essaying, all the time. We are attempting, creating ourselves, revising. I think this is an interesting framing for living, even if your chosen path in life is not to spend hours a day slogging through your past mistakes searching for gold (an activity that is, after all, comically adjacent torture). The hopeful part of this is that all events are open to interpretation, the story is never finalized, one’s thoughts on any matter are allowed to shift. In fact, if they didn’t, it would be concerning. “No regrets,” people declare, but I would never want that. As Laymon said, of going through life without regrets, “that’s dangerous for an artist. But it’s catastrophic for a human.”

So as my crew and I stumble through these hard times, I try to keep this in mind. For me, for everyone. This is not the final story. It will be a long time before that story can be told, and the act of telling will be fulfilling and painful and joyful, and it will be lifelong.

—Rae

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If this sparked your interest…

• The Introduction from Philip Lopate’s canonical anthology of Personal Essays, if you are interested in reading more about personal essay craft.

• An Interview with Kiese Laymon on revision

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