Nailing the art of caring just enough

Joan Didion, who passed on December 23, 2021, is perhaps best known for the opening sentence to her book of non-fiction essays, The White Album:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Over a life of reading and self-storytelling, there are few specific instances that I can point to and claim as my own personal moments of revelation. I understand and absorb most of what I read as knowledge to be stored for some imaginary future use—I never expect it to bowl me over, to shake me out of irony and insincerity. I write to feel in control of the fragile narrative I create around myself: aloof and probing, cold and unbearably vulnerable all at the same time. I treat literature as an opportunity for escape, even when it is of a decidedly non-escapist nature. To live inside the mind of another person is a joy I cannot fully articulate, not in small part because it allows the opportunity to stop living inside my own. 

I recently came up with a name for this peculiar brand of relationship to one’s self: self-apprehension. Self-apprehension is self-acceptance soaked ten times in self-doubt. Self-acceptance is accepting that there is something wrong with yourself, so you better monitor and record yourself as often as you possibly can to avoid running the risk of stumbling forwards into blissful ignorance or backwards into plain old ignorance. Self-apprehension is refusal to commit to a side, to bounce between extremes of being. Ultimately, your head spins enough to splatter ink in just the right shapes onto paper, to arrange words in just the right order to mean something—while at the same time mocking their self-importance and attempt at meaning anything at all.

Commitment to self-apprehension has also led me to the fact that my take on this situation (or, really, most situations) is no fringe opinion; if there is one thing Joan Didion’s work has taught me, it is that most of the thoughts and experiences and regrets we guard as so intimately our own have already been thought, experienced, and regretted by a whole slew of strangers. As Didion says:

“One of the mixed blessings of being 20 and 21 and even 23 is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

The only thing that sets a person apart is their take on the observations they make; impartiality is futile, because the mere act of telling a story means a side has been committed to. The subject of Joan Didion’s New Journalism at the start of her career was always America. I found it absolutely fascinating to see an American dissect the country so sincerely; America was where most of my family immigrated to in the wake of crises at home. America was the reward for excelling at school. America was a refuge from regional and financial instability. America was the promised land, in every sense of the word. At the same time, America was hostile. America was merciless, and uncompromising. Joan Didion managed to soften its edges for me without letting me lose sight of the chaos at its center. From the other side of the world, she was able to show me that it is indeed possible to fall in love with a place you have never been to, and that doesn’t seem to deserve love in the first place. Her long-suffering New York, her irreverent Las Vegas, her hopeless Sacramento, her restless Miami, her panicked Los Angeles, her forsaken San Francisco. These were all characters in their own right that paint the picture of a country that is whole in its fractured state, that proves the sheer power of capital and will and greed and optimism at changing the very nature of the human soul.  

Didion’s death was one I was not prepared for, and yet knew exactly how to react to. In The Year of Magical Thinking, published in the wake of the sudden passing of her daughter, Quintana and husband, writer John Dunne, Didion commented extensively on grief—almost in an effort to grasp articulation. In an echo of her iconic opening sentence from The White Album, she acknowledges that the primal urge to retreat into our memories when faced with loss comes from the desire to keep the dead alive. To live in your head is to tell yourself tales, to do a disservice to the world by not allowing those stories to be critiqued and questioned, the way any good work of journalism is. To move on from grief is to come to terms with loss as it is; to move on from grief is to let go of the dead by letting go of the stories about them that can only be told to yourself. In Didion’s words:

“I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”