The Pen Does Not Expire

On the belief that your life was written by a deceived child, and all that remains is to live in it.

There is an idea so common in popular culture that nobody bothers to defend it anymore. It simply gets sung, and we simply nod along. It deserves to be stated in full, because stated in full it is remarkable.

The idea is this. There was a window — youth — during which the story of your life was written. Whatever got decided in that window is what you now inhabit: the town, the trade, the person beside you, the shape of the whole thing. But here is the refinement that makes the doctrine truly complete: even inside the window, you were not really the author. You were too small for the dreams you carried, deceived about the world, running blind, and alone. So the one draft you will ever produce was produced by a child writing under false information — and the moment the ink dried, the pen was withdrawn. Everything after that is administration. You live with what the deceived child decided, plus whatever fate cares to append, and neither part is yours.

Three Days Grace supplies the second half of the doctrine. The narrator looks back at a one-light town and sighs about the good times, when “the story was still ours to write.” Still — meaning no longer. A Bulgarian song supplies the first half: “Колко малки сме били за големите мечти” — how small we were for the big dreams — running away deceived, hurting, alone. Sing the two together and the picture is airtight. When you held the pen, you could not see. Now that you can see, you do not hold the pen. Sight and authorship are never permitted in the same room. At no age, on this account, does a human being ever actually write their own life with their eyes open.

It is worth sitting with how strange that is. This is not melancholy. Melancholy mourns something that existed. This doctrine denies that the thing ever existed at all — and then mourns it anyway.

The alibi

A serious philosophy must ask why an idea this bleak is this popular, this hummable, this comfortable in the mouth. The answer is that it is not bleak at all. It is the most comfortable idea on offer. It is a complete discharge of responsibility, issued in both directions at once.

Consider what the doctrine absolves. The choices of your youth? Not your fault — you were small, deceived, and alone; a defrauded party signs nothing binding. The condition of your present life? Not your fault — the pen was withdrawn; you are a tenant in a house someone else built. The future? Not your fault — that department belongs to fate. Past, present, and future, each with its own exemption, and not one square inch of the story left with your name on the deed. The Three Days Grace verse even shows its working: the comfort gained is the chaos lost. That is an honest ledger. Chaos — the open page — is frightening precisely because it implicates you. A finished story implicates no one. It only asks to be endured, and endurance can be sung about, which is more than can be said for the ironing.

This is resignation with better production values. Camus named it as one of the failed responses to the Absurd: the passive acceptance, the folding of the hands, the waiting. The songs have merely discovered that resignation scans nicely over four chords and can be dressed as wisdom — the hard-won, rueful kind, the kind that buys the next round. But it is not wisdom. It is a forged deed of transfer, signing the authorship of your life over to a child who no longer exists and a fate that was never consulted.

What is actually true

Wayfarism has no quarrel with the raw material. The young are partly blind — everyone’s first chapters are written on bad information; that is what first chapters are. Luck is real. Constraint is real. The choices of your twenties do sit in the room with you at forty, some of them heavy. All of this is granted, and none of it adds up to the doctrine.

Because the doctrine’s load-bearing assumption — the one nobody sings out loud — is that a life is written once and then lived in, like a house. It is not. A life is revised. The Bearing is chosen, not given, and it is not chosen once at nineteen in a ceremony that never recurs. It is chosen again, with corrections, every time the road proves muddier than the map — which is always. Revision is not a lesser form of authorship. Revision is what authorship mostly is. Ask anyone who writes: the first draft is the least authored part of the book. It is the part written smallest, blindest, and most alone. The authorship is in what you do with it after you can see.

And this dissolves the double bind entirely. Yes — the child wrote blind. But you are not the child’s tenant. You are the child’s editor, and the editor outranks the draft. The deceived nineteen-year-old handed you an opening act full of overreach and bad information, and that is not a sentence to be served. It is material. Meanwhile fate contributes what fate contributes — the diagnosis, the collapse, the stroke of luck — and that too is material, because what fate has never once supplied is the response. The response is written fresh each morning, by whoever is holding the pen, and someone is always holding the pen. Check your hand.

What actually expires is not authorship. It is the excuse for declining it. The young have the excuse of blindness. We have no excuse at all — which is exactly why the doctrine had to be invented, and why it had to be set to music. Some things can only be gotten past the mind’s defences in a chorus.

The funny part

And it is, of course, quite funny. The doctrine holds that no one has ever authored anything with their eyes open — a claim authored, with eyes open, by professionals, then revised in the studio, re-recorded, mastered, and performed nightly on a tour someone chose to book, to arenas full of adults who chose to drive there, singing in unison that they cannot choose anything. Every night the thesis is refuted by its own delivery mechanism, and every night nobody notices, and the not-noticing is somehow the best part.

Notice it. Find it genuinely amusing. Then go home, pull out the draft the blind child left you, thank them for their service, and start marking it up. It was always going to be an editing job. Nobody was lied to about that — nobody was told anything about it at all, which is different, and fixable.

The road continues. We go again tomorrow.

You are not the draft’s tenant. You are its editor, and the editor outranks the draft.