My Personal Narrative

My personal narrative is my life. Being as I live, I have a personal narrative. The two go hand in hand. This personal narrative of mine shows a bit with each and every piece that I write. Of course, it is a book that is growing with each passing day and I find that the most interesting thing of all.  With each word I write, I am leaving something behind even if it is something that no one will ever see. Most will never know my personal narrative truly and fully; perhaps that I will never know it in this intimate way, either, since my memory is filled with holes.

And yet, with each word I write, I start to unravel it and analyze it and, with that, I actually start to get somewhere.

We all have personal narratives but writers are some of the only ones to write it down. Non-writers will just flit through their lives and they will never think about their lives, never think about their personal narratives until they are old and they finally realize how insignificant they really are. They realize that they will perish and, within a century or so, no one will remember their name. And that gets them wondering, possibly, what their purpose ever was but they won't know. Writers will go through the same struggle, of course, but they will simply do so earlier and try to fix this problem before it becomes a problem.

I am perhaps the worst offender of this. I think and feel so intensely that it blows me away. I am constantly wondering what the point of existing even is, wondering how the universe hasn't wiped out humanity yet at all. And so, in my terror, I write to deal with it all, hoping that it deals with this problem.

Humans are intensely complicated beings. They might try to record their lives but they will never really be able to do so. When they try to make a mark, they only leave that: a mark. An imprint and a shadow. Most likely, they will never be able to leave their true self behind for others to understand after they are gone.

And so they make their personal narratives while they are alive with each action they do. They constantly leave imprints, shadows but it's only ever a smudge mark. Some humans bear themselves out to the world fully to try to leave as much of a mark as possible but most people try to leave as little of a mark as possible in their present state. They try to be invisible or present inhibited selves that they think look good. They never really leave the full pictures. For this reason, human beings will never truly be able to understand history and history will never ever be full because we will never understand history and the people within them; we most likely will never be able to hear the other side of that story, I guess.

It was after writing an essay to send to this camp I wanted to go to that I started to think of all of this. Funny how that works, I guess.

I am insignificant in comparison of the universe. Quite average too. I am a biracial (seemingly white) teenager living in upper middle class American suburbia who has lived a typical American life. I have done a few great things; I have done a lot of stupid things. I have not impacted the life of anyone in a particularly great thing nor have I done anything particularly amazing. I scribble poems in my notebook and I read a lot but honestly that is the only thing that differentiates me from my fellow humans. There is nothing special about me, nothing remarkable. I live and, one day, I will die. Perhaps I will be able to make a mark by donating my organs but those people will never truly know me.

We all have personal narratives and these personal narratives make us who we are and yet... Yet, we will never be able to see those personal narratives and so we will only be left to deduce it based off of the actions of others and the words of other people. We will never truly know our fellow humans.

And so we will keep making our personal narratives until we die and another is born to take our place, to start their own narrative...