Life's a Book

As an English major at Muhlenberg College, I used "The Method" as a way to break down and understand literature. We were taught by our professors (who happened to write a book on it) to look for repetitions, strands, and contrasts in the text - to notice something, focus on it, and then notice it again in perhaps a different light. The goal of The Method is to train readers and writers to think analytically, a skill that was not limited to English Studies but applied across disciplines. Religion, Philosophy, Sociology, Biology - the key to my liberal arts education was knowing how to approach texts, think about them, and write about them.

When I graduated college, moved back home, and desperately searched for jobs and meaning in life, I found myself floundering, lost, and confused. For months I trolled job listing websites, and wrote endless lists on endless topics: where to move, what to do, dream jobs, realistic jobs, jobs that would suck in the mean time but lead to other jobs, how to land a rich husband and not need a job, etc. I was searching for the perfect thing - for my calling - which led me to really getting nowhere. "Excessive perfectionism metastasizes into chronic procrastination" says Lera Auerbach in Excess of Being, and in a way that was true.


These lists piled up in journals and notebooks, until one day I realized I had formed a text. And if I had a text, there was one simple solution for organizing all those thoughts and finding some answers - or at least arguments: I had to do The Method on my life.

I sat down and feverishly poured over all I had written the last two years regarding life goals and desires. I compiled all of these excerpts into one single notebook, and then picked out different colored pens which I assigned to different categories - location, intellectual idea, work idea, skills/preferences, dislikes/weaknesses, personal goal. With six colors in hand, I ripped apart the workings of my own mind and tallied up the repetitions, then the strands, and then the contrasts within and between each category. I was left with a colorful mess of things I wasn't qualified to do, or didn't have the capital to fund, or didn't have the money to go back to school to study. But, it was an organized mess, and that meant I could begin to notice things and make connections.

There were a lot of things that talked about food. Okay. Do I want to go to culinary school and pursue that? There were a lot of things about theology. Okay. Do I want to go to grad school to study that? And then do what? I had these strands. But what did they actually say about me, about the text of my life?

I started to realize that really, all my musings did not amount to fulfilling work, but to a fulfilling life. Traveling, cooking, writing, religion - all my major repetitions, strands, and even contrasts - could mostly be fulfilled from a non-professional standpoint. Which, since I needed job answers, was initially a bit frustrating, but from looking at what I wanted out of life, I could deduce what I would need to survive in a job.

I began to see the connections between these thoughts, the underlying qualities to which they spoke. Basically, it all boiled down to two things: I needed something that would stimulate my brain and allow me to think, and/or something that would work with people and give them something. That was it. And that could be applied in a myriad of ways, as I could see on the page - written, underlined, and highlighted.

Suddenly, I was a little more calm than I had been in about a year. Those were simple enough requirements, right? They at least gave me a starting point. I could survive something, and mostly I could survive knowing that I was fulfilling my real interests and real priorities in my personal life. The Method helped me realize that.

It may seem silly to analyze oneself in such a way, but being a self can be pretty overwhelming. It's kind of like Heart of Darkness - you are so far in the jungle you can lose a sense of perspective of the outside world. So why not approach a tough spot in life like how you would approach a tough spot in that book?

I could pick any of my passages and notice, imply, and question it. And then I could see how other passages related to and critiqued that. And suddenly I could see that my life was not just an answer but a series of responses and questions; not a dead end but an interstate with many exits that lead to more roads. And each passage, question, and road informed the whole. Informed me. I am the whole. I am not just a job; a job is not the only part of my life, or the defining part of my life. It is just part of the whole that is I.

So despite my despair that my English degree was useless and wouldn't get me employed, it taught me to think, and to analyze, and that got me employed. More importantly, that got me to live. Turns out, it was tuition well spent after all.