During this month of graduating seniors, burgeoning plants, and creatures newly born, are you also coming into your own?
Are you just the same self you were last year at this time, or do you notice some small but significant differences in your inner landscape? It’s a personal question, I know, and you don’t really have to answer. But I can’t emerge from a year in a Memoir Incubator without asking it, at least of myself.
And then, once I start wondering about the nature of true becoming — developing into something or someone new– I also wonder whether it’s possible to unbecome, or if “unbecoming” works just as a pejorative adjective and not a verb.
Let’s not get too jumbled here too fast.
In the Incubator, one of our key texts was The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York; 2001). Probably the most important sentence in the little book is this one:
The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer; the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. (p. 13)
If you want to offer up just a situation with no real story, your readers will be bored stiff. It’s the “persona” – the narrator and the main character—who must be worth following, all the way through. A bit later in the book, Gornick articulates why anybody might care about anybody’s else’s account of lived experience:
Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of ‘becoming’: undertakes to trace the internal movement away from the murk of being told who you are by the accident of circumstance toward the clarity that identifies accurately the impulses of self that (Willa) Cather calls inviolable. (p. 93)
So memoir is all about bringing readers along on a journey that is just as real as any you might take in a car, plane or boat. How about real life? Are there certain days when we might say to ourselves, as darkness falls, “I experienced something today that makes me different from who I was yesterday”?
Not often, but there are those definite unmistakable lurches forward. And sometimes other people see them more distinctly than the person actually doing the changing.
A few weeks ago, the girl I mentor performed a mash-up version of the old classic “Singin’ In The Rain” with her hip-hop group on a big stage. It was about the sixth time she’d been there, and by now she’s relaxed about it all. The lighting, the costumes, the music— combined with all that rehearsal time for the choreography of the piece—made for an electric couple of minutes.
Naturally, when I pointed out to her afterwards how many skills she’s gained in her development as a dancer, she shrugged. She has steadily been in the process of becoming, but the “from here to there” nature of the growth is just about completely imperceptible to her.
For the high school seniors I’ve known — in two different locations this spring— it’s a bit different, because they feel the eyes of many adults upon them at this juncture. They can’t escape the notion that they are going through a major transition: like a vehicle heading into a car wash, with the deluge of water accompanied by all that swooshing and brushing. There’s nothing subtle about it when you need to make sure you have all your credits, returned everything to everyone, filled out the proper forms. There will be a full accounting before you move on.
During my early mornings coaching seniors at a public high school towards completion of their research papers, I loved the occasional moments when I got a glimpse of what they were looking forward to doing next.
“I already have a job—just got my certificate as a Dental Assistant and had three offers!” said A, with a sparkling smile. Getting feedback on her writing? Not crucial.
“I’m going to be pipefitter, “said D, as we walked down the hall together. I made a mental note to research what exactly a pipefitter does.
“Meteorologist!” exclaimed the studious and upbeat N, pushing his glasses back on his nose and answering my question with ease.
Seated in a church pew at the graduation ceremony for the Catholic school where I used to work, I watched 46 seniors receive their diplomas while their beaming families — with darling younger siblings all dressed up and trying to spot their particular brother or sister — cheered and held up cell phones. Each of these seniors had been assigned a “real life” job during their four high school years; each of them now had a college acceptance as well as the crucial financial aid they needed in order to attend. Many of them will be the first in their families to go to college.
They were, and are, becoming, all right. Nothing is assured, and they will stumble, maybe even fall sometimes. But they won’t stay the same.
Nowadays, we rarely say, “That shirt is becoming on you,” the way my grandmothers definitely did. Or how about the even more outdated, “She’s looking comely in that dress”? I recall that word from my old Nancy Drew mysteries.
Probably the only way to unbecome the part of our selves we’d like to shed is to keep on the path of becoming the full someone we want to achieve. Never too late for that.
As for behavior that is unbecoming, well, we all could provide plenty of examples, starting with people in high places. But it’s much too beautiful outside to get sunk in that dreary topic. Better to tend to our own gardens, our own souls. The summer is just beginning.