Experiencing and Processing Life through Fiction

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It was a clickbait headline that got me thinking. This one:

“She’s 31 and may not live to 35.”

While I won’t go into the details, I will point you to the relevant cystic fibrosis non-profit: Emily’s Entourage.

But it got me thinking. If I only had 5 more years to live, what would I want to do? What would I want to leave behind?

I want to have some words left behind. But it is the anxiety tied with my crippling perfectionism that defeats my fiction before it even begins.

I have never been a big picture thinker. Overarching strategy in when I worked in a corporate business? That’s for someone else to decide. Themes in literary works? I was more of a decode-a-quote reader, breaking down the minute and working to make it add up to something bigger.

And it was that sort of realization that helped me figure it out.

I process life by taking my experience and bits of information and forming them into a fantastic narrative. That is how my life works. The longer I dwell on one story, the longer I am holding onto older growth and not looking forward to new growth.

Fiction is the medium through which I taste life.

Whether I share that story is up to me. Is it going to be a piece of published piece of fiction down the line? Who knows. But I have a responsibility to myself process through the story as it exists at a point in time, not dwell on it into infinity, unable to pin down and process the pieces I have alive in me.

And, right now, I’m a little behind. In five years, will I catch up? No. But I want to make a dent.

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