The problem is, once you’ve fabricated an elaborate story, an elaborate life, and then your part in that story ends, you may become lost. The entirety of what you’ve created must end in one solitary moment and then who do you become? You aren’t who you were, the new life became too much of you. You have severed the new life, and now you don’t know where you’re going.

 

This can be true for storytellers, con-men and women, and even those who are entering or leaving college, a job, a marriage.

 

Some of these lives are fabricated amidst a series of small (and sometimes big) lies. These lies are pretending to be the glue that holds the pieces together, yet the pieces are wiggling and falling because lies lack the adhesive properties of truth. Lies don’t hold us together, instead, they whirl the spinning plate much faster, causing the risk of a big crash to increase.

 

When you don’t know who to become, and you can’t be who you were, what does one do?

 

Do you stall out and stop the forward progress of your whole life?

 

Or do you begin the fabrication of the next chapter even though you know not what the end will be?

 

As a writer, I spend my days and nights building characters, creating lives for them to live, giving them places to go, things for them to do, and people for them to love. At the end of the story, I am no longer the same person I was when I started, and I am not sure who I’ll be by the end of my next story. There is a time where I feel a twinge of sadness because those characters have reached a conclusion and no longer need me to point them in the right direction. But there is always a new character, waiting for my imaginings to give him or her breath and space to conquer or be conquered.