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  • Writer's pictureCharlotte Frost

What I Wish for Everyone

Updated: Feb 20, 2020

To tell their life story.

I know the first protest is, "I don't know how to write!" And the second is usually "My life is boring! Who would want to read it?"


Telling one's life story doesn't have to involve writing with complete paragraphs. It can be a poem or series of poems. Drawings. Cartoons. Audio or video tellings. Perhaps, for one who runs a structured life where their calendar is the center, obtain calendars from earlier in their life and mark the significant events, and just write a sentence or two about why that event is particularly memorable.


As for the boring part, what makes something boring is the event itself. What makes it interesting is how any particular person feels about a particular event. An estimated 350,000 babies are said to be born throughout the world every day. Therefore, the simple fact of a baby's birth has to be one of the most boring events imaginable. Yet, I've no doubt that all those hundreds of thousands of mothers -- and lots of the fathers, too, as well as grandparents, etc. -- have a particular feeling or myriad of feelings and point of view about that everyday event which feels unique to their own lives.


Howard Stern is of the strong opinion that the reason Hillary Clinton lost the last presidential election is because so many saw her as a robotic-like politician that they didn't know very well. She always had proper, canned answers to any specific question. He wanted to interview her before the election, so he could ask personable questions like, "What were the things that mattered to you when you were a little girl?" "When your husband was president, did you sometimes think 'I could do this job better than him' or did that thought never cross your mind?" He wanted to humanize her by having her answer questions about her life, from the inside out. I agree that it could have only helped her chances, but she didn't want to be interviewed that way.


I have a friend that I used to do a few rides with each summer, when she had multiple rideable horses. Most of our conversations revolved around other horses we'd each ridden, and other people we knew with horses. I know that her parents had a home in Maryland. I know that she used to be an airline stewardess and that the man who became her husband used to be a pilot. Before being a pilot, her husband worked in the call center of LL Bean, and once took a call from singer Olivia Newton John. The latter wanted to order dog beds as her Christmas gift to all her friends and relatives, so it was a long call, inputting all those shipping addresses. My friend also once told me that she used to hate small talk, because she did so much of it as a stewardess, but she eventually got over her aversion to it.


Still, despite knowing this friend ten years, I wonder: What made her want to become a stewardess? Did she yearn to travel? Did she just fall into it, perhaps because a good friend was going to become a stewardess? Why did she quit? If she got into it for the travel, did she find that traveling really wasn't all that special? Or does she have fond memories of it? For that matter, did she go to college? I don't know. If she grew up in Maryland, what prompted her to leave?


There's some friends I've known a long time, who I feel I know very well in terms of whatever connection we had originally. But there's often huge segments of their lives that I know very little about. If I knew those other things, I feel like I would know that friend so much more. I don't feel that anyone can ever be diminished by understanding something about someone else.


I have friends who know absolutely nothing of my fandom writing. There's just never been a reason for it to come up. I once had friends who knew as lot about my relationship with my long-time boyfriend, but they're all dead or we lost touch long ago. What little bit current friends know about the relationship leaves them shocked that I ever let someone else tell me what to do, or was a person who obeyed the "shoulds" of life.


In Conversations with God, the point is made that we humans are human be-ings, not human do-ings. Yet, we so often describe ourselves in terms of our activities and the exterior events we've experienced. Even with biographies and autobiographies -- which are usually heavily edited to appeal to the masses -- we often see very little of how a person feels about particular things. In fact, sometimes, when someone asks us, "How do you feel about situation X", we reply with what we think about situation X, not how we feel about it. As though our own feelings are foreign to us.


So, I just think it would be really cool if, at will, I could access the life story of anyone who I wanted to know more about. Not just the celebrities and the social media wizards or any of that. But the everyday people. Not Facebook pages where they just say, "Today's my grandson's birthday" or "We had a great trip to Italy" or just forward all the cutesy or political stuff they come across. All that peripheral stuff says very little about how the person feels about anything.


Even if one likes the idea of creating their own life story, often the first road block is, "I don't know where I'd even begin." I have a solution to that. I've never read Dr. Phil's Self Matters, but I recall him being interviewed by Larry King when it first came out. There are two exercises in the book that I've always been intrigued by. One was to write down the five most influential people in your life, whether that influence was positive or negative. The second is to write down the five most influential events in your life, whether positive or negative. He has said on his show that he has every guest do those two exercises, presumably because it's such a quick way to getting to what motivates a person into whatever behavior they're trying to correct by being on his show.


I've never actually sat down and done those exercises. I've always been a very introspective person anyway, and I chafe at the idea of limiting either list to just five items. But I do sometimes wonder if I might actually surprise myself with some of the things I would list, as opposed to the ones that I wouldn't.



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