ORIGIN STORY
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As I'm trying to add new people into my life, I'm realizing that I have about seven or eight stories that I've been telling and retelling for years and years. That's it. Maybe nine if I'm feeling sharp. Some of these stories are about obscure historical events that I think carry some analogous truth about why the world is the way it is—those are fun to tell. Others are the clever observations made by much smarter people that illuminate some misunderstood phenomena. Most of these I've just stolen from podcasts.
But some of my stories are just stories about me. And that's what this entry is about.
For example: there's the time I got pulled over by the cops when I wasn’t wearing any pants; my first weekend in college when I went shopping for knee-high white leather boots with my dorm roommate, a drag enthusiast who performed under the name Daphne Dubois; the time when me and a friend foolishly hiked the service walkway in between subway stations and nearly got killed. These stories all carry some analogous truths too, they're just truths about me.
Like this one:
I remember once accompanying a college girlfriend as she visited a childhood friend of hers who had just moved to Chicago. My college girlfriend admitted that her friend was pretty insufferable (wealthy, finicky, superficial) but my college girlfriend was forgiving as only a childhood friend could be. Also, her friend, being wealthy, had a swanky apartment in a downtown high-rise, so we might as well check it out.
I remember going out to the friend’s balcony, perched high above the Chicago River. Then, as they chatted with arms resting on the balcony rail, I found that I immediately needed to sit on the balcony floor with my back firmly pressed against the outer wall of the apartment building.
The snobby friend, who had a bad habit of talking about me as if I were not standing right in front of her (in her defense, I was a dirty little art school rat) said to my college girlfriend, “What, is he afraid he’s going to fall?”
And my college girlfriend, an art school rat herself who knew me well, said, “No, he’s afraid he’s going to jump.”
I usually tell this story to illustrate my personal brand of OCD-adjacent anxiety. It's a weird intrusive thrill that comes with potentially dangerous situations (bridges, trains, knives) and the unspoken fact that nothing is stopping me from doing whatever-it-is that no one else is thinking of doing. This story describes that tendency in a gentle and non-threatening way, through the insight of the first person who put it into words for me.
Here's one more. But it's not about me, at least not at first. It's about Ben Franklin:
Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography in four parts and over eighteen years, from 1771 to his death in 1790. Each part has a different tone and purpose. So much so, that if they were published today, each would end up in a different section of the bookstore.
Part One takes the form of a letter addressed to Franklin’s son. The letter is an origin story of sorts, worthy of the Memoir section, describing an ambitious young Franklin arriving in Philadelphia and acting out a prototypical by-your-own-bootstraps American transformation.
Part Two is more suited for the self-help section. And, depending on who's introducing it to you (for me, it was Dr. Sherman in his Early American Lit Survey Course), it’s the most well-known of the four. In it, Franklin lists thirteen very eighteenth-century virtues—things like temperance, industry, chastity, moderation. He then explains how he intends to focus on one virtue each week, with the intention of mastering every one and achieving a type of moral perfection. He describes his weekly struggles and includes tables and schedules that attempt to quantify, with little notations, moments of weakness and strength.
The whole thing is pretty puritanical and strange; however, it ends in a conclusion that our modern ears would find familiar to the point of cliche. He does not reach perfection. Instead he realizes that his quest is a lifelong one, and mastery is not the goal. The pursuit is the purpose, and in the pursuit he finds himself a better man.
This bland takeaway is not what I enjoy most about Part Two. What resonates with me is the virtue that Franklins says, “gave me the most trouble.” The virtue of “Order,” which Franklin defines as follows:
“Let all your things have their places;
let each part of your business have its time.”
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I always thought the first part of Franklin’s Autobiography was a little too American-dreamy to be emotionally credible. It conveys Franklin the myth, not Franklin the man. It’s clear he’s brilliant and self-possessed, a natural polymath, and unquenchably driven. But in Part Two, in his slightly manic quest to be better, to make life less messy, I see a person I recognize.
Here's the daily schedule Franklin resorted to when he was confounded by his own disorderliness. It's simple and sensible—a morning of contemplation, an eight hour workday with a two hour lunch break, an evening of reflection and diversion.
However, when Franklin tried to tackle "Order" using this schedule, he found only his old self. He would still misplace important papers (a byproduct, he strangely claimed, of having such a good memory), he would still skip meals, and he would still feel a need to conduct business at hours beyond those strictly scheduled for it. Yes, Benjamin Franklin, like everyone else, could not strike a work/life balance, no matter how he tried.
This plague of disorder resonates with me, but not because I’m an ambitious workaholic like Franklin. I feel this struggle because I’m an anxious person who is prone to decision-fatigue and overwhelm. I can only do so much in a day, especially when it comes to interacting with other people. My mind is likely to wander and study and fixate (remember the story about the balcony?) and eventually freeze, so I tend to move slowly through the world, at a pace that usually doesn't match its demands. And, as a result, I have trouble holding on to all of my experiences, cataloging what they all mean, and coming up with adequate responses. Without any assistance or strategies, the world gets slippery, like an impressionistic dream that's all emotions but no plot.
Which is why I plan a lot of my life in advance, and have for a while. I have many documents on my computer that look very similar to Franklin’s, only much more exacting and rigid. I have endless journals for different seasons of my life that summarize, assess, plan, and predict. I have spreadsheets to track goals around diet, exercise, and finances. I have calendars to divide time between my work life, my family life, my leisure life, and my creative life. These are all documents that, if you read them all like a novel, would tell a story of a person not quite sure how to live in his brain and body but trying earnestly to figure it out. By documenting, reflecting, tweaking, planning, complicating, and simplifying, I am engaging in a lifelong quest to try to get myself out of my own way.
So when I tell the Benjamin Franklin story, I'm explaining something about how this all started. Reading him in that undergraduate classroom was a strangely formative moment for me, a little blip in that otherwise dreary period of American Literature—a period full of slave narratives and political treatises and Natty Bumppo frontier fantasies—that sparked a tiny urge that became a type of lifestyle. Franklin gave me some permission, in his grandiose self-examination, to get a little strange and puritanical myself. And his basic description of "Order"—everything in its own place and in its own time—became a type of spiritual goal that rang through my young adulthood.
So today, I plan a lot out. I know when and what I am eating and wearing for the next few weeks; I know how much money I am projected to make and spend for the next year; I know how many hours I have set aside specifically for reading, writing, exercising, socializing and sleeping, and I can see it all at once on color coded calendars; I have interval timers that take me though my morning and night routines and little alarms that tell me when to begin them.
An onlooker might see a disorder in all of this, but there's an important paradox behind my planned out life. When I reach this goal of order, only then can I be spontaneous. Only then can I potentially meet people on their own terms. Only then, when life is ordered, can I tolerate a little disorder.
Franklin ends this section in a very forgiving state of mind. He famously writes that he was, at the end of his project, like a man with a speckled axe. A man who goes to his neighbor, a blacksmith, and says, “make my axe perfectly shiny!”
To which the blacksmith says, “Sure thing, neighbor. Just turn that wheel for me.” But with all the blacksmith’s strength pressing down on the grinding stone, the wheel is a bitch to turn.
So the man eventually stops turning, fatigued and weary, and says, “You know what neighbor? I think I like a speckled axe best.”
Now, what does that story mean?
For Franklin, it seems to mean that he should lighten up on this "Order" business, because, after all, he's a self-made genius who low-key invented America.
But for me it means something different: only when most of my things have their places, and when most of my business has it’s time, can I see that some flaws aren’t really flaws because the cutting edge is still sharp.
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References:
"$100". U.S. Currency Education Program. https://www.uscurrency.gov/denominations/100. Accessed 16 July 2023.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Digitized Ed. Japan, Cassell and Company, 1897. Google Books.
Lewis, Rachel. "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/autobiography-of-benjamin-franklin-the/#:~:text=He%20began%20writing%20The%20Autobiography,his%20third%20sojourn%20to%20England. Accessed 16 July 2023.
Mills, Charles E., Artist, and Publisher Detroit Publishing Co. Benjamin Franklin, editor and writer. [Between 1909 and 1920] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2016818284/>. Accessed 16 July 2023.