Dying Without Regrets (How to See Yourself Like a Writer)
"If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story." - Terry Pratchett
The top five regrets of the dying as collected by Bronnie Ware:
1) “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
2) “I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
3) “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.”
4) “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
5) “I wish I had let myself be happier.”
These are all worth pondering for what could be better than to look back at life without regrets. One of them seems more challenging than the others.
“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
It’s not the courage that stuck out to me, but the fact that this regret insisted on a second part — the expectations of others.
You can bend your way to success but not to happiness. What makes this so difficult is that the world keeps pushing you to abandon your truth.
There is a paragraph in the Lyndon Johnson biography The Path to Power that drove this point home to me like a gut punch.
I’ve mentioned that Robert Caro was obsessed with discovering the truth, the truth hiding behind the carefully curated image of President Johnson. Caro spoke to two people — Latimer and Jones — who Johnson recruited from the high school debate team he had coached. Latimer worked for Johnson all his life, Jones left for law school after a few years. Here’s what Caro wrote about Latimer:
For Gene Latimer—sixty-five years old at the time he spoke, sitting alone in a little apartment in a little town in Texas, a tiny Irish elf with sad eyes that often spill over with tears as he describes his life as an employee of Lyndon Johnson, so that he periodically excuses himself and goes into the bathroom to wash them off—understands, even if he was unable to cure, his own psychological dependence on Johnson: to listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that during his sixteenth year, he surrendered—for life—his own personality to a stronger personality. To listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that he has been used as a tool.
Man, that broke me.
“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Johnson was a force of nature. He had what we today call a reality distortion field. “He could talk you into anything,” Latimer recalled. “He can make you cry, he can make you laugh—he can do anything. … You felt like I belong to him, and he belongs to me. Whatever you do, you do it for him.”
It’s easy to marvel at people with such energy and charisma. I guess it’s fun to imagine ourselves bending the world to our will. It is more useful — but uncomfortable — to ponder what it means to live around people with such drive and force of personality.
“Your time is limited,” Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech, “so don't waste it living someone else’s life.” Well yes. What he doesn’t mention is how many people it took to stage the story in which he was the main character.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can of course be true to yourself working for other people (and getting Apple stock must have been a sweet deal). I’m not saying don’t compromise. I am saying the world is ready for you to cast you as an extra in someone else’s story. To avoid this regret, you have to build something like an anti-force field around your truth.
We’re so used to doing the opposite. We’re rewarded for pitching ourselves, for condensing our lives into easily digestible tiny Hero’s journeys. But words shape reality and the stories we tell get etched into our minds. One day, we wake up and think that’s us. Decades later, we wake up and regret.
Life doesn’t follow a simple template. Life — my life at least — can be messy. It’s filled with contradictions and detours. You can only connect the dots looking backward, as Jobs used to say.
What is more interesting than the hero’s journey? What grips us about a drama is when the characters feel so real that we can see ourselves in them. Watching a real person confront the challenge of life and wondering, ‘Well, what are they going to do now?’
This is where the anti-force field is hiding, in a kind of anti-pitch. We must also learn to meet ourselves the way a writer would: with curiosity and the right questions. A writer does not care about a character’s success but about its truth. What would it mean to place this character in the story? What questions, challenges, and energy do they offer?
“It’s the business of writing,” David Milch wrote in Life’s Work, “to get all the things that are spinning inside a person going at once.” Milch was paid to create entertainment, but his mission was to capture the “irreducible obstinate finality of a human being.” His “first and primary obligation as an artist,” he wrote, was to stay true to the “reality of the characters and their situation.”
That’s exactly what we’re talking about. The question we must ask is how someone like Milch would sketch us as a character. Fortunately, he offered a little example that we can turn into an exercise.
