Intermission (9/30)

Thirty essays in thirty days, number nine

I promised Part 2 of Lacrosse: A Love Story today. This is not that. I got 812 words in and realized that the thing needed to be overhauled.

An interesting thing happens when you write about your life. As you reproduce the inventory of events and details that you associate with a given topic, you find your view of the relationships between those events and details start to evolve. You see causes and effects, connections and contradictions. You start to understand why things happened as they did in a way that you couldn’t when the events were just muddled images tucked away in the messy file cabinet of your memory.

This happened as I wrote about my years playing college lacrosse. Part of the reason the essay needs to be overhauled is that my understanding of those years is deeper than it was 812 words ago. I’m starting to see how all the pieces fit and what my role was in shaping them. Connections have emerged between the events of a decade ago and the person I’ve become. 

Such is the beauty of writing. We transmute the amorphous contents of our mind into little shapes on a white backdrop and our relationship with those contents, and thus ourselves, magically transforms.