If You Lived Several Lifetimes It Would Make Sense To Forget About Them. How In Hell Would You Ever Maintain

If you lived several lifetimes it would make sense to forget about them. How in hell would you ever maintain an identity otherwise?

"I used to gut raw fish with my bare hands and now I'm totally hooked on UberEats"

"Tell me about it. When I got married for the first time, my father sold me to a neighbour for two pigs and a cow. I gave birth without anaesthetic the next year when my husband was being beheaded by a local warlord. Now I'm looking for a soulmate on Tinder and battling anxiety."

You can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy.

k.b. // r.i.p. jane nightbird

At night, you feel like a failure.

It's true - you could have done better, and it's also true that you had not.

In times like this, I try to think of stories where flawless characters make no mistakes. There must be many - yet not a single one has a fandom around it.

I think storytelling is important because it is the origin of hope. All these characters we love - flawed and anxious and broken - have shit explode in their face and just keep going.

Star Trek has a myriad of themes but its main message is, still, hope. Kirk doesn't believe in no-win scenarios. Spock spends his entire life fighting an identity battle and ends up being an advocate for reunification. Picard gets consumed by the Borg and still goes on to order his fucking Earl Grey.

Star Wars has it, too. Obi-Wan loses everything: his family, his padawan, his place in the world. So he builds himself a new purpose in watching over Luke. Hell, even Anakin is motivating as a villain who could have chosen to give up but somehow didn't.

I think this is why these stories resonate with so many people. We are subtly reminded of the possibility to reinvent ourselves. Even if the odds state plainly that the Dominion War would be lost, even if the forces at play are bigger than us. We tell each other stories and we believe.