Continuity in our lives and our story

Continuity and Purpose

I've been helping a lot of great people with their graphic memoirs lately, in the Graphic Memoir Intensive Working Group and I've been realizing lately why we tell our stories.

It's to take our narrative for ourselves. And especially to find continuity in our lives.

Continuity means we had a purpose for being here. We were born to live out a life, and that life has a single line of action. It brought us here.

Here, where we are writing it, drawing it and telling it.

There are days when I can drift in and out of a funk, maybe depression. I think there's no purpose. (Especially nowadays! How many apocalyptic trends are we in the midst of?)

But then I turn on some music I liked in high school, and I realize, I'm still that person, who decades ago loved those melodies so much, or liked the thoughts in the lyrics so much, and that I've grown away from something, or more towards something, but definitely I have made it to this point.

To this point where I can look back and say, Yes, this is who I am. In this time, on this rock. And this is why.

In young adulthood (if we make it through adolescence!), our survival instincts are powerful. No matter how much we suffer, most of us (lucky ones) want to keep going. To change our world, to make our marks, to become somebody. Even the risk takers. We believe we were meant to be here.

Was I here to suffer? Maybe. Was I here to triumph? Maybe. A mixture? We all look back and figure it out.

Sooner or later we look back and realize there's been so much trouble.

But we weren't wrong. We were meant to be here.

And then we try to untangle the intentions, and the forces that clobbered us, and the will we've survived with.

And decode it.

And lay it out.

Our graphic memoir is a series of Aha moments.

These were the messages.

This is the story.