Honestly, Nobody Knows Not Even a Human Working in a Genrefied Library

What kind of a story are we in?

Last semester, I became slightly obsessed with a pedagogical school of thought I encountered in a paper by Stacey Waite in her essay “Becoming the Loon: Performance Pedagogy and Female Masculinity” in Writing on the Edge. She talked about how we read the body as a text that whenever a student sees you, they read your body. This popped into my mind when considering the question “What kind of story are we in?” because it reminds me that we are all not in the same story. We are all in a different story, one of our own individual creation. 

When people “read” Waite’s body, they are creating their own story about Waite. They are placing a narrative upon her based on her clothes, her walk, her voice. They create a narrative for her.

I’ve always heard people say that intentions don’t matter. What matters is the impact of your actions and words. What you meant to happen has no impact on anyone. They’re not in your head. They don’t know what you meant. Thus, the only thing that matters to them is what they saw happen or participated in. 

Waite may have a particular intention in dressing herself in a masculine manner. However, her intention in her dress doesn’t matter to her students. They do not incorporate her intention into their narratives. 

We each have individual narratives that we create and shape every day. Effectively, each person is living in a different kind of story, and those stories change daily. They shift genres and types. Today if I go on a date, I might describe my life story as a romance, but tomorrow, if I go on a hike, I might describe it as an adventure. (I work in a high school genrefied library, so I contextualize stories based on their genres). 

My type of story changes daily just as my story changes daily. This reminds me of a science fiction novel by Christopher Pike called Starlight Crystal. Without going into too many spoilers, within this story a young woman named Paige shapes her own life, her own story, through time travel paradoxes. She shapes the whole story of the universe, as, for her, the story of the universe is her story as its creator. 

I first ran across this book in freshman year of high school in the book trade basket in the library. I devoured the book, and it messed with my head and how I understand stories and time. Yet, per the rules of the book basket, I could not keep it since I did not have another book to trade for it, so I returned it. However, as time went on, I forgot its title and author. All I could remember was the story and the cover, which showed a red-haired woman in an odd space suit touching a large hourglass filled with bones. 

I described this book again and again to librarians, friends, and booksellers and no one ever had any idea what I was talking about. Then one day about seven years later, I ran across it in the YA section of Recycled Books here in Denton. 

I reread it and again had my mind blown. I began looking it up online to find so many people had had a very similar experience with the book as I had had. Where they’d read it and lost it only for it to turn up years later. Their lives, their stories, were impacted and changed by this text as mine had been. 

However, no one’s story had been impacted in the exact same way. We had similar stories, but never the same story. This made me think even more about how we all share experiences and repeat experiences just as Paige did in her story. Yet, we never experience the same thing in the same way and no one can truly experience the same thing as we did at any one point. 

We are all unable to have the same story. We may appear in other stories, but that is not your story. That is someone else’s and it is impossible to be in a story without having your own version of it, your own narrative of it. 

So when you ask what kind of story we’re in, I must have say I have no idea. I know that I am in a story that has been shaped by trauma and privilege. I think I might be living in a realistic fiction story. Though sometimes I’m convinced it’s a supernatural story with all the ghosts in my life. Other times, I’m sure it’s a sci-fi story when I hear about Facebook being used to pull our data through the 10 year photo challenge to do age progressions through photos. 

In the library I work at, my boss gets frustrated with me because I’m always questioning why certain things are in certain genres. Such as why is Twilight in Supernatural instead of Romance? Sure it’s about vampires, but at its heart it’s a love story. This has led to me to wonder if stories can really be catalogued by “type” or “genre” or anything else. Are we able to understand what type of story any story is much less understand what type of story we each individually are in? I have no idea.