One night eleven years ago, my best friend came over for dinner. We were chatting along as usual when I began chopping a sweet potato, and she interrupted herself to say, “What are you doing?”

I stopped. “What do you mean?”

“The pieces are so uneven,” she said (not critically—just neutrally, surprised, curious).“You’re just, like, chopping at random.”

I looked at my pile of different-sized wedges. “This is how you cut sweet potatoes,” I said.

She shook her head, took the knife, and proceeded to show me how she cuts sweet potatoes: slowly, into tiny, perfectly even cubes.

“But why?” I said. “Your way takes forever.”

“But they’ll cook evenly,” she said.

We went on to list the various merits of each method, both of us marveling at the reality that our way was not the only way—maybe not even the standard way.

In my case, I loved that she just said what was on her mind so candidly, even rerouting the conversation entirely to crack this mystery, to bring light to the things that were in darkness, to validate what she was seeing. (This was radical—no, inconceivable to me. It had never before occurred to me that it was possible.)

In her case, she told me years later that seeing me chop vegetables any old way, surrounded by notes and drawings from my first novel taped all over my walls, she felt like she was in a “wonderland.” (her words).

“You can do that?” we’d both thought.

There’s a story made famous by David Foster Wallace: an older fish swims by two younger fish and says, “Water’s mighty fine today, ain’t it, boys?” and swims away.

One young fish turns to the other and says, “What’s water?”

It’s the things we do—the way we think, act, reason, imagine, manage emotions, cook vegetables, etc—that are so obvious or second-nature to us that we don’t name them.

Sometimes, we don’t even know about them.

Yet they’re the things that are shaping our experience.

Sometimes this water is shared—culturally, within a family, or by virtue of being human.

Sometimes the water is personal. Our individual habits, our knee-jerk ways of thinking. The things we assume are universal (if we know they’re there at all), yet really they’re specific to us.

While I was researching for my second novel, which is about a teenager who hears voices, I read about all sorts of variations in cognition: people without an internal monologue; people who can’t visualize. As terms like ADHD and neurodivergence become more mainstream, we’re learning that not everyone perceives time passing the same. Not everyone has the same spatial awareness. Some people can’t focus in certain conditions. Some have difficulty identifying their emotions. As a culture, we’re beginning to accept that we all have our own personal “water.”

Naturally, this has myriad implications for how we can live our lives in more harmony. When we understand our own “water,” we can work with it, not against it.

It also has implications for those of us who want to write.

I just read a great nonfiction book called Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. In the afterward, LeBlanc says the protagonist’s neighbors asked her “Why you writing about Coco? She regular.” Coco grew up in the Bronx during the War on Drugs and had 5 kids before age 21. She’s not regular to me. I loved reading about even her most mundane days. 

Your “regular” is not my “regular.”

So many people believe their lives aren’t interesting enough to write about. That their experiences aren’t “enough,” or that they need to be more dramatic to be worth writing down.

(This is often true about our talents, too. We take for granted the things that come naturally to us, believing that they come naturally to everybody. But often, therein lie our strengths.)

“Water doesn’t try to be wet!” shouted a random guy I met once on a hiking trail in New Mexico. “It just is! Cultivate! Cultivate your inner goodness!” 

At the time, I found it funny. Now I find it wise. 

Water doesn’t try to be wet. We don’t have to try to be interesting or original. We already are. 

If we can learn to understand and value our “water,” we will find that we have many valuable things to say.

If you’ve been thinking about writing your memoir, but could use some structure and guidance, talk to me.

I’m a ghostwriter and book coach and I’d love to help you bring your story to life in a meaningful, beautiful way.

Learn more about my services here.