PART VIII: Existential Space; Chapter 30: The Way of the Meaning-Maker
I make my meaning; none exists until I make it. All that exists until I make personal meaning is the possibility of meaning (191) .... While each of us is limited by circumstances and by our appetites, defenses and other frailties and realities, we are nevertheless free to choose what meaning we intend to make (192) ....you create your universe from your best understanding of what is right, what is good, and what is valuable (194).
I think I was 22 and in my first year of graduate school in English when I was confronted with the mind-blowing idea that meaning is not revealed but created. I was reading all kinds of post-modern narrative theory at the time and, one way or another, all those theories called into fundamental question issues about not only how I read books but how I lived my life.
What terrified me at 22 -- the possibility that meaning does not exist until you utter your own fiat -- saved me in my late 30s. I exchanged my life's master narrative of unspeakable childhood abuse and depression for one of gradual empowerment. I (re)created myself, over time, in the image of the person I hoped to become.
And I'm still a work in progress.
It's about more than who you are as a writer. It's about who you are, period:
That is the writer's existential position, her existential space, her existential shout. She makes the calculation that her best bet is to act as if her life matters and her writing matters, and she seals the deal by actually writing. At the end of the day she is repaid by the feeling that she gave life a bloody good shot. (195).
On good days your hear your own shout and write it down. On bad days that shout is barely a whisper and you may write nothing.
But sooner or later, don't you find yourself returning home to writing?
