Why I write

Navigating life's obstacles with insights from a banana peel

I read a quote by Nora Ephron the other day that’s been circling my mind ever since:

When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

Photo by aboodi vesakaran.

I’ve spent the last year and a half diligently researching every master's degree there could be, from here to London to the ends of the earth. An over-thinker by nature, I haven’t spent this much brain power thinking about anything else in my entire life, and I’ve certainly never spent this much time planning.

I have spreadsheets with tuition comparisons, career outcome comparisons, PhD program comparisons, you-name-it comparisons. I didn’t even spend this much time comparing wedding dresses or picking out baby names or deciding which house we should put an offer on.

I have so many documents filled with possible thesis ideas that I could probably make more money publishing a book of thesis prompts than pursuing a master’s degree and then a PhD program and landing a successful job as a professor (according to the 1,239 forums I’ve read and the nearly 14,000 professors I’ve interviewed, the odds of landing a stable and financially feasible job as a professor are slim).

Still, I spreadsheet, make phone calls and spend another $75 on yet another application fee (in the year and a half I’ve been doing this, one application fee has doubled in price!).

Honestly, I've been on the verge of driving myself crazy. Why is it so hard to simply choose a program and move on from this incessant debate? In the time I’ve spent researching master’s programs, I could almost be finished with the degree—yet even though I’ve already been accepted into two different programs, I applied for another one just today.

Besides, I clearly enjoy researching. If I could pick a program and move on, I could then spend the next four years driving myself berserk while searching for the right PhD program. However, these will come with far more rejections, which, in my case, might actually be a good thing.

When you slip on a banana peel people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

I’ve been rereading Nora Ephron’s book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman. Though I have critiques of her work, she was absolutely brilliant and one of the most inspiring writers I’ve read. She’s witty, she’s honest, she’s sarcastic, she’s deep. And by talking about slipping on bananas, she’s reminded me of a truth that spreadsheets can’t seem to do.

I write for two reasons: to help me understand myself and the world around me and to have a sense of power.

I’ve never been great with speaking. I never seem to pronounce words correctly and feel myself turning red before even getting the word out. Spoken language doesn’t always feel natural to me, but writing does.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, filling thousands of pages with my thoughts. Embarrassing thoughts, mostly. I would gladly dig my own grave before letting anyone read any of my journals—especially the ones from my teen years and early 20s. Even so, the ones from my 30s are equally embarrassing somehow. With age comes wisdom, yet I’m still relearning the same lessons I did many years ago and writing about the same struggles I’ve been writing about for the past 20 years.

I wonder what I’ll do with my journals as I get older. I certainly don’t want my children reading them, as they tend to illuminate the darkest parts of me.

Once, years after a particularly traumatic time in my life, I mistakenly reread my journals from that period and was paralyzed by the pain I once let myself endure. I asked a friend—a brilliant artist—to take the journals and turn them into something else: mosaics, statues, pottery— I didn’t care what, just anything to make that part of my life no longer exist on the page, while still honouring myself through an art piece for surviving that time. I moved away shortly afterward and never had time to give her my journals.

Now and then, I reread some of my journals from less painful times, but mostly, I don’t go back through them, at least not after too much time has passed. It’s rarely by rereading them that I learn anything. It’s by the actual act of writing that I do,

as if my pen, a compass needle, guides my path through the thick forest into the open fields.

Photo by lil artsy.

There is power in the act of writing, even if no one reads it.

Which brings me back to choosing a master’s program.

Perhaps it was my upbringing and the pressure I felt to follow a moral path or face the consequence of literal damnation. Right and wrong, should and shouldn’t—these words stampede through my mind daily. It takes conscious effort to unlearn this—to change my natural way of thinking about the fear of choosing the “wrong” path and then having it affect my entire destiny (or, according to my previous beliefs, the afterlife).

Choosing a master’s program should not be that difficult, so thankfully, the banana peel has chosen for me (if only I had reread this book months ago).

There is no “right” or “wrong” program to take, but there is taking a program because I feel obligated to take it due to external pressures and then there’s taking the program that makes my heart sing. I haven’t known how to distinguish between what makes my heart sing and what I should be doing (again, the conditioning of the moral path), but through writing, I know I’ll get there,

because I write my story. Not anyone else.

Writing takes the banana peels and decides to use them as ice skates.

---

If you enjoyed this, please consider:

If you think someone else might enjoy this piece, please:

---

Read more: The art of wabi-sabi: Exploring the beauty in life's imperfections and embracing authenticity

Read more: Three things that changed my life