I Rarely Saw The Plots Resolve
I've reached the age where I've become suddenly, inexplicably broody to give advice.
I tend to think this is dumb, and that almost-all advice is just people saying this is what happened to me and how I justify it, while incorrectly phrasing it as this is what will happen to you.
But here's a thing that happened to me, and which surprised me at the time: most of the plot-lines of my life never resolved. At age 18 or 22 there were a few Big Stories in my life, they each felt momentous, and the thing I feared was that they might resolve "against" me.
But what actually happened is that they never resolved at all. Some of the most important people in my life just dissolved from it entirely – whether gradually or all at once – and mostly I've never heard from or about them ever again. The stories we were co-writing never reached their crescendo. Often we reached the disaster, but not the transformation, or the atonement, or the return.
In the end, the people and organizations that most mis-treated me neither got their comeuppance nor crushed me under their boot but just.... stopped being part of my life, and I don't know what happened to them, and that's about it.
As I said, advice mostly feels like self-justification masquerading as mentorship. But I wonder if the hypothetical younger people reading this might not actually find this outcome as strange as I do, or find the outcome as bothersome. My expectations were forged in an age of books and movies, and maybe that's why I imagined that the stories of my life would have resolutions, whether good or bad or ugly. But if you grow up instead in an age of scrolls and reels, snacking on endless morsels of standalone media from one eternal feed, does that change how you interact with The Story Of Your Life? Are you maybe freed from the sense that a story "ought" to have a plot, and a resolution?