On Being Relevant

An Essay about Belonging

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and as always, it is completely altering and reshaping my perception of moments, my awareness of longing, and my undeniable love for the shadows and dark places, that in the “regular” world, is a bit too grim to be seen.

I say ‘as always’ because Joan tends to have that effect on me. At various points in my life, I will read the same words off pages I have touched and laid tears upon countless times, and I somehow still find new stories within it. It’s almost as if the tissues I use to wipe my eyes also soak up meanings of realities I wasn’t quite ready to see. And when I read back, its suddenly very loud and staring back at me, like a mother, anxiously watching for and awaiting her child.

“My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Joan has this way of being able to capture an inescapable and yet incomprehensible thought, and turn it into a story that we can all relate too. Even as I write this, I am overwhelmed with pure adoration and simultaneous agony, as a part of me is always longing to be her.

That line is from her essay On Keeping a Notebook, and its gotten me thinking about the countless notebooks and journals and pieces of scratch paper that I have laid my heart onto since I knew how. I want to believe that I do it because it brings me clarity, it brings me closer to whatever the term ‘faith’ means, and I think its mostly that. But a lot of it, that I am slowly unlearning, comes from this agonizing desire to be seen, to be relevant, and to have important things to say. It comes from this desire to be somebody in a world full of, somebody’s; when all I know how to be is a nobody.

What is being ‘relevant’ anyway? I can’t seem to shake it, this lingering essence of desperation. A desperation to be important, to have intelligent and novel and necessary things to say. To be seen as a person who writes stories we can all relate to.

I loathe it.

I loathe this part of myself that longs for this recognition, and I also deeply empathize with it. I loathe the part that uses the thing I love the most: writing and creating, against me. And I deeply empathize with the little human that never was seen for their magic, was never seen for their ability. But was only seen for the holes they carved in all that places that held pain.

Yet now, I am learning to unlearn this dichotomy. I am learning to unlearn that I must be relevant in order to be valuable, and I’m learning that I don’t want to write and create to be relevant.

I want to write and create to live, and continue on living.