People are Nosy…and That is the Point

I used to read nothing but fiction. I couldn’t get enough of it, really, and the more it pulled me in, the better. This usually meant something YA, often of the fantasy ilk. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series was an early favorite, as was the Sisters Grimm and The Mysterious Benedict Society. The Series of Unfortunate Events broke and then remade me, and I could not get enough of the Divergent series until it, too, broke me. That one took years before I felt like it remade me. If you also finished Allegient at the ripe young age of 13 or so, you understand.

I read Harry Potter in eighth grade and I got around to The Hunger Games when I was fourteen or so—waiting long enough that my parents were less worried that the idea of children murdering other children would scar me for life. It did, but in the right kind of way.

Later, I Tahreh Mafi’s Shatter Me series, everything (and counting) by Sarah J. Maas, Hafsa Faizal’s We Hunt the Flame and We Free the Stars, and Rebecaa Yarros’ Fourth Wing series.

I positively could not get enough of stories set in other words, better yet if they were filled with magic, and better yet still if there was a little bit of romance mixed in. Reading was an escape for me. The more fantastical a story was, the more I could lose myself in it. Stay up wayyyy too late, read wayyy beyond the chapters I promised myself I would stop at for the night.

But lately, YA, fantasy, and fiction as a whole don’t really call to me.

That isn’t to say I don’t still read them; in fact, I am currently reading Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm (catch my thoughts about it in a later post). I read in from those genres what naturally crosses my path, but am not seeking them out.

Lately, my eyes stray elsewhere.

They stray to the nonfiction shelves.

That development is fairly recent. I was near-insatiably into fiction for so long, but college introduced me to creative nonfiction and I fell in love. It quickly fascinated me and as I learned to write it for myself, it captivated me.

Creative nonfiction is putting a literary spin on true stories. It is writing truth, but there is room to play with the form, language, style, and so much more. You know, be creative with it.

Creative nonfiction is an avenue for truth and for design. Creativity flows alongside the vulnerability of sharing. It is powerful and it is real.

These days, my attention goes to the books with the faces of real people on them. Memoirs, largely, but the faces on the cover is not a prerequisite for a memoir. And creative nonfiction is not limited to memoir alone, either. Not even close.

These days, I seek stories that have a real, bleeding-heart person behind them saying, “This is what happened to me. Hear it.”

 I will. I do.

I admit, I am nosy. I want to know. I want to know what hurt you. Show me who you fell in love with, show me who broke your heart. I want to know. Share the hot gossip and the sordid secrets and the heartbreaking truths. Tell me what broke you and explain to me what rebuilt you and tell me all about how it was actually you who picked up your pieces and put them back together enough to step into tomorrow and then the next tomorrow and the next.

As a child, I read to escape. I sought a break from my own life and I found that with reading. I wanted to read about swashbuckling heroes because I needed one, and I wanted to read about princesses and about girls with magic powers because I so desperately wished for circumstances better than mine, problems wholly different than mine. I looked for the problems of someone with the power to fix them.

I did not know that the hope in my heart was all the power I would need. I did not know hope would carry me from day to day, that it would allow me to build for myself, obstacle by obstacle, a grit-your-teeth-get-back-up resilience that would allow me to limp towards better days, towards becoming the person I needed. I was a long time away from understanding that.

What I did understand was that there was power in stories; I knew they were a was a safe place to rest.

Stories still are a safe place to rest, but they are more than that, too. Stories are expressions. They are truths distilled into words, into something we might digest. People are nosy. My evidence? I am nosy. And I know I am not the only one. We want to read about secrets and confessions and drama and we want to see ourselves reflected in the pages. Seeing ourselves tells us we are not alone. Stories are a reflection of life, not the other way around. Stories, fiction and nonfiction alike, are acts of art meant to connect us to one another and to existence.

That is what I seek now.

Connection.

Community.

Learning.

Growth.

Introspection.

Presence.

Experience.

To escape is no longer my aim. Instead, I want to dive deeper into this life. I seek the hearts others have placed between the pages, offering up to anyone who will read. They offer their hearts for me to hold, actually, and my hands are cupped and ready.

Give me your truths. I want them. I will grab them and inspect them and keep what I need and keep what I want and keep what angers and saddens me, too. Share what you experienced and share what you learned.

That is what I am trying to do here. I am running this blog on the premise that humans want to connect. I read nonfiction because I want to hear about the lives of other real people. I seek the feelings of others splayed out in their own bald words, their very lifeblood dripping from their wrist straight to their page. I soak up their stories, get lost in them, and I let them change me. I am nosy and that nosiness sought connection. It taught me I am far less alone in this world than I thought. It is a balm to hear that someone else shares my secret feelings, that my wants and dreams are common. That might have made me feel insignificant a few years ago, but now I see it as connection.

Seeking the words, experiences, thoughts, and feelings of other people led me to think that maybe I could try sharing my words and maybe, just maybe, there are people out there who might like to read them. I write because maybe there are other people out there who need to know that they are not alone, that someone else feels and thinks like they do. When we share, when we self-disclose and let ourselves be vulnerable, we reap the rewards. I offer my own vulnerability. I offer the nosy piece of me, but also the lonely one, the hopeful one, the sad one, the joyful one, the contemplative one, the dreaming one, and the one that feels so impossibly lucky to be alive at all.