The magic of nonfiction

       

  Two Christmases ago my husband bought me a new journal. Its spine was stiff, the pages yellow and filled with empty gray lines, waiting for the magic of pen touching to paper, connecting thoughts with words and becoming matter. The blank page has always inspired me. More exciting even than beginning to fill it up was when I got a new notebook or journal and I sat down and decided what I wanted to use it for: Lists? Hopes and dreams? Learning? Poetry? Stories? Often, the notebooks became a mishmash of all these things, like our lives are, a combination of the mundane and extraordinary, the prosaic and the whimsical.

Despite my obsession with blank pages, I viewed my own life as more of a fill-in-the-blank type of story. Or possibly one of those choose-your-own-adventure books. I fully acknowledged that my choices impacted my future and shaped who I became; I didn’t acknowledge that my choices were almost limitless. I could never be a rock star, for instance. I was both too practical and too talentless. That was not an option for me. I could never move to New York and work in the publishing field; that was too far from the familiar safety of the west coast and far too competitive of a career – I would be like Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada, only with books instead of clothes. That just didn’t seem like it would ever happen to me.

Then one beautiful winter day…everything changed.

Until this particular day, I upheld a secret, unuttered oath never to read and enjoy nonfiction, especially of the “self-help” variety (condescension dripping from every unuttered syllable). December of 2013 I saw a video online about the 10 item wardrobe and I thought, “how very minimalist and what a perfect excuse to spend money on nice clothing.” I found a book that described the 10 item wardrobe, along with many other suggestions for how to live your life and (gasp!) I requested it from the library (I couldn’t buy it, it was nonfiction) and my oath was snapped in two because I accidentally enjoyed it.

It wasn’t quite a self-help book; it was more a book of…lifestyle suggestions. I read it and was completely taken in. It was inspiring. I felt the tingling of possibility. I felt like boring little me, the girl who will never be fashionable, who rarely wears make-up, who lives a humble life that no one particularly admires could become Storybook Me, the girl who has always existed in my mind as a daring, confident young woman who surrounds herself with beauty and is admired by men and women alike for her simple but stylish dress and unassuming but lovely appearance. It was intoxicating and addicting. What other inspirations waited for me in the world of nonfiction? What other books might expand this chink that I had made in my concept of myself? Could I possibly chip away until this small crack became a large passage, allowing light to flood in and reveal my hidden potential?

I won’t go through every evolution that followed this initial affair with nonfiction. The long and the short of it was that I found myself gravitating toward books that offered me guidance: books on pregnancy and parenting, books on spirituality, books on friendship, and books on self-acceptance. Slowly, even as I became disgruntled with one book, unimpressed by another, bored by some, and swept away by some, I began to change the way I viewed myself and my life.

By far the most influential of all these was the book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. It was this book that taught me that life was what you made it; your story was yours, completely, and if you didn’t like the story you were living, you could and should change it. Dream big, this book whispered. Stop aiming low.

To a certain extent, the fill-in-the-blank story still feels true to me, despite all that I’ve learned. We are born into a certain social class, with specific demographic information working for or against us. But too many of us fall into these lives that we feel born into without ever stopping to ask if this is really what we want. There are many things that we dream of doing, but feel, that couldn’t possibly happen to me. Other people get published, other people start nonprofits, other people…Not me.

This journey through the world of the realistic, the oh-so-drab world of nonfiction, has taught me that my own reality can be as magical as any piece of fiction. My life is a blank page, an empty canvas. The difference between other people and me is that they were willing to try and pursue their dream; they didn’t assume that it couldn’t happen to them. Life, it turns out, is not like the board game – you don’t get a list of finite options and then spin a wheel to see if you get lucky. (With 30k a year, I better marry a doctor! I won’t be a billionaire at this rate and will probably have to review other retirement options at the end of the game!)

There is no wheel of fortune. There is just a notebook filled with empty lines, and every day from the moment you wake up, you make your imprint on those pages, inking in your identity, your world, your stories.