Choosing How Well

There is an idea inspired by one of our Issue #18 creative nonfiction writers that I keep returning to lately: a life well-lived is a better measure than how long one lives. It’s simple really—though so many profound ideas or quotes usually are—until you realize you are being asked, quietly or insistently, to account for the shape of your days. Joseph K. DeRosa captures this truth with unsparing clarity in The Diagnosis, one of the pieces anchoring Issue #18. His words have lived in my head since I first read them, because they put language to something I’ve been circling for a while now: we do not get to choose everything that happens to us, but we do get to choose how we show up inside of it. How DeRosa chooses to live through one of life’s greatest challenges is worth the read.

Choice itself is a loaded word. It means different things to different people. We tend to treat it as a single hinge point — the job taken, the road not explored, the commitment made or let slip away — when in truth, choice is the smallest, most ordinary unit of a life. It is the first breath in the morning. It is whether we meet the day with grace or grievance. It is the precursor to accountability. And it is whether we tell the person across the table what they mean to us or assume there will be another chance. There are unlimited second chances, I’ve said before, until we run out of time. Issue #18 is about that math.

Time is the number I’m paying attention to these days. Not in a mournful way — more in a holy shit way, or more gracefully, the way a horse shifts its weight to tell you it’s ready to bolt. I find myself less interested in things I do not love and more devoted to the ones I do. I choose the people I want beside me, and I tell them so. I choose horses, again and again, because nothing else in my life has taught me faster what presence costs and what it returns. I’ve long since stopped paying rent on a past I cannot rewrite–but sometimes I need a reminder. Horses do that. Regret is a tax on the present. Why pay twice? Besides, presence is so much more rewarding.

The writers, poets, and artists in this issue understand choice in their bones, whether they tackle the theme head on or were inspired by it. DeRosa’s The Diagnosis reminds us that the length of a life is a number, but the quality of it is a choice made and remade — at the bedside, in the waiting room, at the holiday game table with family, or on the ordinary Tuesday with the people that matter most. Poet Josianne Kouagheu chooses strength and courage by offering three unflinching poems calling out the evil done to her. Anna K. Ekim chooses to write about the trials of her own health and medical care for the first time. Our contributors make their choices visible. They show us people who choose to keep showing up despite the challenge, who choose to ask for help when silence would be easier, who choose to name what is hard and take a chance that sharing their story will make someone else’s life easier.

As you move through the pages ahead — through the fiction, the creative nonfiction, and the poetry curated again by Steve Granzyk — I hope you find yourself in more than one piece. I hope you find a writer who has said out loud what you have been carrying in private. And I hope, somewhere between here and the last page, you pause long enough to ask what you are choosing today, and whether you would choose it again tomorrow.

If the answer is yes, keep going. If it is no, that’s information to build on. The runway gets shorter each day, no matter how old you are. And the trite phrase “tomorrow isn’t guaranteed” is something to consider when choosing what each day looks like.

Thank you, as always, for being part of this community. For reading. For writing. For sharing your story and witnessing someone else’s. It matters more than the world often tells us it does.

With gratitude,
Tracy Granzyk
Editor-in-Chief, Please See Me

Tracy Granzyk is the editor in chief of Please See Me.