I Know Exactly Who I Am

Someone Compelled to Write an Ode to Bluey

Life has shaped me in its random and haphazard way, as it does all of us. But stories, and more specifically the written word, have given me the tools to recognize the shape that’s been left behind, and to recognize what’s been at work to make me who I am.

I don’t mean to say that I know every ounce of my being, nor do I know who I will always be; it’d be clear I haven’t been paying much attention to books if I thought that for a moment. But I’ve spent the vast majority of my life throwing myself into narratives, learning how dots connect, seeing causality at play, and being swept up in prose’s insight into character, into the way the world works. And because of that, I think I can take a big-picture view of myself and my life and come up with a semi-clear picture.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s the only way to get a picture of yourself. All art probably helps, as does therapy, or just prolonged and repeated bouts of self-reflection coupled with a little bit of guidance.

Since I’m saying stories are how I learned about myself, it’s fitting to use one of the central conceits of a movie to give structure to the answer. Inside Out is widely accepted as a delightful, tear-jerker of the kind Pixar regularly churns out. The film establishes a concept of “core memories”, five crucial moments in the main characters life which shape who she is.

There is, of course, trauma. Like most lucky and privileged people, life has generally left me alone and let others do the shaping. My parents and siblings, my friends, stories. But tragedy is doled out to all of us, and I’ve written before about one that likely had a heavy hand in shaping me; an unfortunate snowmobile accident that killed my best friend when I was seven. While the reasons for my response to this trauma are hard to pinpoint, the ripple effects have long been clear to me: a fear of death, and an appreciation for life. Some of my predisposition to loneliness might have stemmed from that, but based on other stories about me, I think that might be more of an innate trait.

From my recollection, Inside Out makes a glaring omission. Which is that while we are shaped by our experiences, we also absorb the lessons of songs and movies and books (and other people), using words as the lens by which we process the things that happen to us. Maybe not the lens, admittedly. And it’s not everyone’s lens, but it definitely does shape some of us.

For example, I was sixteen when I was rummaging through a used book sale my school was putting on. I happened across a book called Timbuktu by Paul Auster. I’m not sure why it called out to me, though if I were to venture a guess it’s that I started reading the first page and was intrigued enough by the prose, and the fact that this literary novel seemed to be told from the perspective of a dog.

At the time, I had just started a document collecting quotations from books I was reading, and Timbuktu quickly made an appearance in the document. I’ve now been keeping this document going for the past twenty years (with considerable gaps in activity), and in all that time, the entries from this short little novel are some that have made the deepest impact. They’re not just sentences I can recite from memory. These quotes have lastingly shaped my worldview.

That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab, humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do

There’s also the not-quite memories, but the moments of our lives that fade because they’re so everyday, and which nonetheless shape who we are. Like this fabricated image composed from various stories of my childhood: my mom reading on the couch, my dad on a chair scooted up close to the TV to watch Larry Bird lead the Boston Celtics, me on one of their laps, joining in on one of the two activities. My mom’s love of books and my dad’s love of basketball repeated day by day, parental examples that guided me toward two activities that would dictate much of my life.

Then, another memory from when I was seventeen. I had recently joined a basketball team and was present for a talking-down the coach was giving the other players. I felt it didn’t entirely apply to me because I’d only been on the team for a couple of weeks. And I forget exactly what the transgressions the team had committed that had led to such an onslaught of attempted life lessons by the coach, but at some point he said something along the lines of, “You make one mistake and then that’s it, you’ve fucked up your life forever.”

A possibly true statement to make in a few circumstances, especially rhetorically. To a group of privileged teens getting ready for a Jewish basketball tournament, it is at the very least comically hyperbolic. I also remember thinking, even as a teen, and perhaps due to the wisdom of books, that it was utter bullshit. Human beings are incredibly good at adapting to our ever-changing environments. Evolutionarily, psychologically, there are very few mistakes (other than the Big One—see my first mentioned core memory) that can’t be adjusted to. A life might change course, shape, form, flavor, sometimes dramatically based on one mistake, and maybe tragically too. But human beings are adaptable, able to bend to new circumstances and still find joy.

Which brings me to another quote from my quotebook, and another innocent sentence in a book that has shaped my worldview, that makes me adept at brushing things off when they don’t go my way.

“Life is short in the long run, but we humans, for better or for worse, are rather absentminded when it comes to our mortality. Perhaps this is that which afflicts our civilization so horribly. What injustice, avarice, laziness, or bad mood is conceivable if death is kept in mind?” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

See? I keep referencing quotes rather than life events. I was shaped by so much more than books, obviously. But books and movies and songs are how those events are remembered for me, they give voice to the lessons I’ve taken from life.

All of this to say, this is who I am: someone who brushed up against death when he was young, and through the lens of stories, parental influence, and perhaps genetic predisposition, has a knack for optimism. My basketball-heavy childhood has made me a disciplined person who enjoys competition, and my obsession with words has made me prone to sentimentality and self-reflection. I’m a middle child, making me a peace-keeper among my family’s strong personalities, someone who likes to placate others to mimize conflict (for better and for worse). My views lead me to be forgetful about things that I feel are less consequential than death (so I’m quite forgetful), and I approach new scenarios with the view that they could all be enriching, a perspective either established by similar quotations, or which was already there and simply given a voice. Occasional bouts of childhood/adolescent loneliness have turned me into an eavesdropper who suffers from FOMO, but who’s learned that appreciating others doesn’t always have to happen up close.

The above paragraph doesn’t capture me entirely, but it’ll have to do for the purposes of this post, since who wants to hear all my flaws laid out before them. And, as Susan Orlean wrote in The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup:

“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.”

What does any of this have to do with Bluey, you may be asking, if you read this post’s subtitle and it’s beeng niggling at you this whole time. And why, you may be further asking if you are not a parent of small children who watch television, is everyone so fucking obsessed with this goddamn children’s tv show? Why is it on every bit of children’s merchandising, and why does every adult who talk about it immediately use the phrase “we love Bluey” with stars in their eyes?

Let me tell you, from my specific lense as a storyteller. Every episode manages to convey a delightful story in 7 minutes or less, which is succinctness that I’ve been striving for since I began writing, and which almost every writer I know would sell their souls for (save for maybe Lauren Groff, who already possesses that Blueyesque gift). And in that succinctness, it packs silliness, parenting tips, ideas for games, insight about the modern world, and relentless wonder and joy, nearly always sticking the landing with a laugh or a tug at the heartstrings.

There’s the episode where Chilli, Bluey’s mom, is recounting her mad desire to have Bluey meet baby milestones like walking before anyone else, and which ends not with just a well-delivered message about letting kids advance on their own schedule, but with a reveal to the audience (and not to Chilli herself, or to Bluey, for whom she’s recounting the story), that Bluey took her first steps while reaching out for her mother. This payoff is perfectly set up by occasional glances from Bluey’s perspective throughout the episode of her arms reaching out for Chilli.

Or there’s the episode where Bluey’s dad Bandit pretends to have been born yesterday, and allows his daughters to take him around the world explaining everything to him. A romp, mostly, a Seinfeld-esque opportunity to see a child’s deconstruction of the world. It leads not to a lesson about trusting people who have been around longer, but with Bluey and Bingo deciding not to explain the wonders of a living thing (a leaf), and rather letting their dad just enjoy the leaf. The episode ends with the game already over, and Bandit is sitting on the grass looking at a leaf with the sheer awe of someone appreciating life for the first time.

These are not just life lessons bundled in a cartoon, they are extremely solid examples of properly structured stories. It is why Bluey has the ability to surprise, delight, and engage a slew of emotions, and why the brief episodes nearly always end on a pitch-perfect note.

From a non-storytelling perspective, there’s plenty to love too. There’s the fact that the show is so encouraging of joy in parenting, while acknowledging the difficulties. Like the episode where everyone is just slogging through another day, looking forward to the weekend, until Chilli suggests a game called musical statues. Picture musical chairs but with dancing, freezing when the music stops. Eventually they drop the pretense of stopping the music, ending the episode with the line “You’re just supposed to dance while the music is being played.” A not entirely subtle metaphor for life itself. It’s an element that might go over the heads of children, but—if my readers will allow the sentimental turn of phrase—not their hearts. They might not absorb the lesson of the metaphor, but they absorb the lesson of dancing, and perhaps start to comprehend the notion of metaphor.

Or there’s the episode where Bandit is trying to make a cake for Bingo, chosen specifically because it made Bingo’s tail wag with joy (a reminder that the characters in the show are dogs). Bandit is struggling mightly with the cake while Bluey insists on playing rather than cleaning up. With the cake falling apart and the house still in disarray, Bandit sinks to the floor with his hands covering his face, a familiar pose to many a parent in the grips of despair. And in a moment of empathy, Bluey decides to clean up, her tail wagging not at the joy felt while playing, but at the sensation of helping her dad feel better.

I sit on my couch in the mornings and allow my toddler to have a few precious moments of screen time, precious to him because they are rare and valuable, precious to me because I can prepare his lunch for the day, or take a 7-minute shower, or sit beside him with a cup of coffee and read. I push down the guilt that there is relief in letting the television parent for a while (but I don’t push that hard). And then I remember how much I have been shaped by stories. How, in a world that to many is meaningless, unknowable, and dark, stories have shaped my view of life into something that often holds wonder. Again, nature, nurture, who knows which is to thank. Was it an early brush with death? Picking up the right book at the right time? Thinking critically about an overzealous coach’s messaging during a halftime peptalk?

Regardless, there is something to the fact that during times of hardship or struggle, I remember lines from stories. If I am tempted to lean into selfishness or greed, I think of Timbuktu. Over the past few weeks, if I find myself in a funk, worried about the state of the world, I picture myself as Bandit sitting in the grass and studying a leaf with fresh-eyed wonder.

I said at the beginning that I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that we all continue to change. We may grow old and stubborn in our ways, but we are still changing (growing more stubborn, for example). And as ridiculous as it may seem, Bluey often manages to strike the same chord in me that the books and songs and movies of my past have. It’s shaping who I am as a parent, yes. But who I will continue to be. How I will view the rest of what life throws my way.

My little lump of screen-time-loving clay sitting next to me during these mornings is going to be shaped by a lot in his life. Some in my control, and most of it not. But others’ words are going to be a part of what shapes him. And so I click on ‘next episode’ one more time, for myself as much as for him. If stories are going to be a part of who he becomes (and god do I hope that’s the case) then there are worse lenses to view the world by than Bluey-colored ones.