The cynical optimist

I’ve had a very complicated relationship with the idea of Legacy, with the very idea that the stories that people tell about us after we die can define the lives we led on earth, but can’t those stories be tainted by jealousy, perceived slights against them, or even love? The stories people tell about us will be imperfect glimpses into the lives we led. So should we care about our legacies?

I’ve had various answers to this question throughout my life from not caring about my legacy, to needing to have a good one. If I’m not mistaken my first real brush with legacy was reading “The Fault In Our Stars.” and reading the following quote:

“People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. but it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First do no harm.”

I think that quote confirmed in myself a life I had been living for awhile. When I was in high school I made myself invisible. If I melted into the crowds, if I became insignificant then I could hurt nobody and I couldn’t be hurt myself. I kept to myself and chose my friends very carefully, I was trying my best to do no harm.

As I moved through high school I became the person people came to if they needed to vent, to air out their problems though I’m still unsure why, but I listened to and absorbed their problems and tried to teach and preach hope in the darkness and get them to see the future they had. But each time they came to me they left with a piece of me. I was giving those pieces of me away, and trying to heal others, all the while opening up wounds in myself and the sad truth is I didn’t realize the harm I was doing.

I was becoming defined be the problems of others and losing everything about myself in the process. I ended up spending years trying to understand who I was in the terms of other people. I was allowing my legacy to be written by others. I had to learn to put myself first and write my own legacy if that’s what I even wanted anymore? Was it worth being remembered if the person people remembered wasn’t you?

From this change in myself I started to not care about my legacy, I didn’t want to leave a mark, I wanted to be okay with not mattering, I wanted to be okay with being insignificant because if I was happy and small at least I was happy? At least I wouldn’t  be leaving a scar on this world, but then again I wouldn’t be leaving any sort of mark at all, I will have existed, but was existing simply enough? This way of thinking even inspired characters in books I was trying to write, like the following excerpt from a book I will probably never publish.

“I want someone that I can sit out by a campfire with and look up at the stars and think about life and how small we are, and revel in that fact, not let it make us feel unimportant. We are small, we spend our whole lives thinking that we are the center of it all, the main event, but we are just insignificant little grains of sand in a fucking gigantic sandbox. I want someone to help me feel okay in the smallness of myself and not want to be big in spite of it. I want to accept my small life, and feel big in it.”

I’m still not sure if this is a healthy way to think about things, and I’m not sure if this still reflects how I feel about legacy but it has been a long time since I’ve thought this much about it. It wasn’t until hearing a song from a musical called Starry that I started trying to understand what my own legacy will be again. The quote below is from Starry and it has become my newest obsession lately.

“Are these the colors of my legacy, when what’s hanging on a wall is the only thing that’s left of me? Do the answers wait for us afar until death takes us up to a star. What happens when we die? The answers in the sky!”

I don’t have an answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this post and I don’t know what will happen when I die, I don’t know if the stories that people will tell of me will be good ones or bad ones, or if they’ll tell any stories at all and I’ll just fade into forever never having left a mark and I’m not even sure I should care, I guess I’m learning to just live my best life, live my truest life and then hope that’s enough to tip the scales in my favor.