a full life
Wikipedia biographies, goalposts: what should we really fill our lives with?
Earlier this month, professor, poet, and activist Nikki Giovanni passed away at the age of 81. Many (in my social algorithm) rushed to express their condolences. “She lived a full and impactful life. May she rest in power,” they said.
I was unfamiliar with Giovanni’s work, but was particularly moved by these sentiments to look more deeply. As anyone with a million different designations after their name, Giovanni indeed lived a full life. Her Wikipedia page details her early entrance and subsequent expulsion from university, her beginnings in writing after her grandmother’s death, her ultimate professorship at Virginia Tech University. The list of accolades, of course, were also long.
All of this made me think of what society often puts up as the ideal life: you go to college, get a good well-paying job, get married, buy a house, raise children, etc, etc. And in my little circle of people in their 20s and 30s, there is this common sort of shame of not reaching those goalposts, or floundering once an item on that list is checked and things don’t look a certain way. It’s like there’s this belief that we’re not fully realized human beings if those things are not achieved, that we’ve failed if life doesn’t inherently feel easy.
But what stories like Giovanni’s demonstrate is that living a full life, perhaps, was never about those goalposts. Giovanni was a single mom, and fought against the criticisms by putting her energy into writing children’s books and starting her own publishing company. She stood on her principles about wrote truths about Black lives and experiences. She didn’t get a steady job or meet her wife until the age of 44. It’s life stories like these that always leave me in awe, to make me curious on what comes next in my own journey.
I sometimes think about my life choices in reference to my future Wikipedia page, not because I actually want one, but because it reframes perhaps what I should reach for. The cookie-cutter existence feels like not enough, or even to say, it doesn’t feel realistic. I want my life to be full of mistakes, wrong turns, the eventual coming of age into my own personhood. I don’t know — maybe it’s better to chase the interesting Wikipedia page, rather than to stress not having a life that appears to be perfect on the outside.
Of course, life, too, is about the mundane, as I often need to remind myself. The everyday little details are just as important, because life does not have to be extravagant to be full or meaningful. More realistically, Giovanni’s life was likely dominated by the quiet moments, punctuated by the bigger achievements that the media, and Wikipedia, often hold on a pedestal. It’s the cumulation of all of that, the big and the small, perhaps, that leads to the fullest kind of life.
Related readings: commitment is the only secret knowledge | Mind Mine, The impossible promise of “making it” | Vox
From the reading list: Science journalism becomes plain old journalism, A generation of journalists moves on | Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism, The Immigration Gordian Knot | Democracy Journal, How I became 'collapse aware' | What Do We Do Now That We’re Here?
Some of my recent stories: mysteries & paradoxes (coastlines and black holes), the bird version of Pantone, dark oxygen in deep mines
Thanks for reading and for being here. Talk to y’all in the new year :)