A 250-page rough draft is now awaiting my revision. It is lonely, and I want to share some of the process with you. I've been absent from this space because the draft has me. It's the kind of work that doesn't share well with other writing; it wants all of you. Those of you who support The New Glossary are the reason I can say yes to that.
As I half-know myself down the path into each of the 18 chapters, some sentences are ahead of me. They say what I don’t understand yet. Other sentences are behind me, still catching up to what I mean. You write the first bad, bad, not very good draft to deal with what you find about yourself. Eventually, an editor will get to it next and do the painful, beautiful work of making it better. But before that happens, I want you to see it like this — unfinished.
The book is a book about trusting oneself and the wonderful reluctance we all have to be seen and known by the world. The working title is The Visible Life: A Guide for Those Who Fear Their Story, and I’m writing it with wonderful Jordan Soliday. It’s about the fear of being seen, the cost of staying hidden, and what becomes possible when you let yourself be visible by articulating your life story. It’s the most personal thing I have ever made.
Here are eighteen passages, one from each chapter, in order. No explanation or setup, arriving at you the way I hope the whole book arrives: experience first.
If something lands, tell me. If something pulls, pushes, or puzzles you — I want to hear it. The comments are open. Your response can help me find my voice and shape the book! Thank you.
The Visible Life: A Guide for Those Who Fear Their Story
Samir Selmanovic with Jordan Soliday (18 Excerpts)
Part 1: The Unstoried Life
Chapter 1: The Fear of Being Seen
This Eastern Bloc car held us the way a fist holds dice or seeds — tight, dark, shaking with something it couldn’t contain. We were boys who couldn’t yet live the life we could already feel. We sensed life the way you sense a sound before it reaches you, in the bones first and then the ears. What can one do with all this glory bursting inside?
Chapter 2: Larger Than Your Life
I know this when I wake at three in the morning, caught in a recurring dream of the same shape. Usually, there’s something I want to prove. Or there’s something that has to be a certain way. Sleep returns only when I let the world have a story larger than mine. The joy I’m talking about here is in experiencing the world not being the way I want it. It is the joy of participating with, and often being defeated by, the forces greater than the life of my body, my emotions, and my oh-so-important ideas.
Chapter 3: Your Epic Ordinary
You go to work, you are at work, you come back from work. You eat, sleep, and talk with friends. You kiss him, he kisses you back. You say sorry. You say thank you. You say things you regret and say sorry again. All of it — the mundane, the repetitive, the Tuesday of it — is more magical than fiction. The other world is in this world.
Chapter 4: Living the Whole Time
An experienced heart surgeon and his apprentice are hunkered over an open heart when the teacher says, “Now you have to perform this sequence of actions before the heart gives up and the patient is gone. You have 60 seconds.”
“So, take your time,” he adds.
Hurry is not the same as urgency. Hurry keeps you on the surface, away from the depths where life quietly springs.
Hurry will slow you down. Hurry will force you into hiding.
Chapter 5: Harvesting on Time
Our lives change gradually, then all at once. When the time is right, they turn abruptly and completely, whether we can name the turning or not. Every four to six years, something recalibrates. When we miss the harvest of these seasons, we let the fruit die on the vine.
Chapter 6: Creating an Artifact
Between subway cars, when the train is running, the noise can swallow whatever you bring into it. I would step into the gap between cars, hold onto the chain, and scream with full lungs. Everything. When I walk back into the car to find my seat, my face is calm, and, at times, I catch a glance from a seated passenger, a small nod that says: I get it. What I was doing between those subway cars, without knowing it, was making an artifact.
Part 2: The Epic Ordinary Way
Chapter 7: The Act of Coming Out
This time, I was in a national park in Colorado, in the middle of my adult life. This time, the forest said nothing. It listened to me instead. After everything that had happened in those twenty years, after all the becoming and unbecoming, the moving and the staying, the years when I could not trust my own story, I spoke back to the forest. I am. So there.
Chapter 8: What Makes You Beautiful
The polished version of you is hard to see. The explained version of you is harder to hear. The version of you that has been carefully kept is, by that careful keeping, slightly out of reach. On the other hand, people experience your honesty as presence, the felt sense that you are actually in the room, no longer manipulating the distance between yourself and the world.
Chapter 9: The Decoy of Knowledge
Knowledge protects us from the danger of being seen before we believe we are ready and from the experience of showing up unfinished, uncertain, mid-sentence in our story. As long as we are still figuring things out, we have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why now and here are not the time and space to risk being seen. Knowledge is never complete. Knowledge is a room with very good locks.
Chapter 10: The Decoy of Happiness
The cruel irony of the Western world today is that it forces you to want to be happy. If you’re not happy, you are under suspicion. “How are you?” has never been a question. You’d better be fine. For my first five years in the United States, this kept me from experiencing sorrow in public. I began to miss the sorrow.
Chapter 11: The Decoy of Meaning
We are meaning-seeking creatures. As far as we can surmise, animals don’t ask why. The stone does not ask why. We can’t help it. We wake in the morning, and the first thing the mind does, before coffee, before language, is reach for the thread.
Chapter 12: HEAR (Stop Talking)
About a million years ago, we invented fire. 780,000 years ago, we began cooking. We could rest. We could gather together and stare into the flame. With the scent of charred meat in the air, and in the hush after the communal chewing, we encountered something that later civilizations would treat as a problem to be solved, and the first doorway into human depth: boredom. Blessed boredom.
Chapter 13: IMAGINE (Enchant Yourself)
We imagine what is. Not merely what was or could be. We imagine what is. Say you’re watching a film with no sound. The same film, the same images, the same faces — twenty people watching together. Ask them afterward what they saw, and you will get twenty stories. Not twenty opinions about the same story. Twenty different stories, each internally consistent, each entirely plausible. Imagination is the way we receive reality.
Chapter 14: EMBODY (Make It Happen)
It is like a morning Catholic mass. But holier. Like a Protestant prayer. But holier. Like bowing down together in a mosque. But holier. Like a shaman dancing around the fire. But holier. This is the liturgy of ordinary life. Not a metaphor for it, but rather the thing itself, happening in a Harlem apartment, between two people who chose each other in a moldy basement in Chicago and have kept choosing their lif.
Part 3: Living Alive
Chapter 15: The Visible Life
The Solingen knife is in my kitchen. Gnarly but still cutting. When I pick it up for a special occasion, my father’s hands are on it. My mother’s hands. My sister’s reluctance to hand it across the ocean. The tomato salad and the amber light of a sunset on the Adriatic Coast, everything that was ever held by the thing that held it, all there. This is what the visible life makes possible. Not a monument, but an artifact that carries love into the future long after the initial lovers have passed.
Chapter 16: Give Us What’s Yours to Give
You have walked in the dark and sat on a chair that holds you. You have made a truce with fear. You have learned that, over time, your honesty becomes your story. You realize that your story is not a decoration of your life. You may have said to yourself: I want it all. Good. Have it all. Now here is the part you did not expect: your life story is not about you or your life.
Chapter 17: You in the World
Most people change their story when they get tired of it. That’s not a failure. That’s the organism doing what organisms do — growing past the container that held them long enough. The old story goes slack. You feel something is off before you can name it. You start thinking: I can’t keep repeating this story; I don’t like who I am when I’m telling it; others are tired of it; I am tired of it. All the while, you don’t even notice that the bigger and more honest story is already here. Its current is already floating you out.
Chapter 18: Lifelong Skill
Now close the book and test it: one scene, one conversation, one choice. The smaller the step, the better.
May you find the courage to let yourself experience being different. Count on undignified moments, welcome some humiliations, and discover you are made equal to it all. May you dance more so that the angels in heaven will find themselves lucky to work with you.
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If something in you wants to tell your own story or a loved one’s, start by downloading our 5 Principles of Telling Your Life Story guide at www.epicordinary.com. It’s free, but you won’t feel like it.
I just read your recent post and it was SO wonderful - even as fragments, the words you wrote carry such power, and I'm excited to see the completed book when it has fully ripened.
This piece expressed a current 'growing edge' of mine that I've recently realized:
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Chapter 8: What Makes You Beautiful
The polished version of you is hard to see. The explained version of you is harder to hear. The version of you that has been carefully kept is, by that careful keeping, slightly out of reach. On the other hand, people experience your honesty as presence, the felt sense that you are actually in the room, no longer manipulating the distance between yourself and the world.
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I have started to see how I've been so professional and 'appropriate' for so long that I can have a reflexive response to people and life that is effectively filtered - or 'slightly out of reach' as you say so well. Thank you!
Recently, I listened to David Brooks in an interview with Scott Galloway talking about the transition Brooks is making from author to podcaster. Brooks said his writing has become more like his public speaking as he ages. And now that speaking will become more of what he does in the form of podcasting, Brooks guessed that the story/point pattern he learned in his public speaking will be what he uses in podcasting. Story/point is the pattern in the presentation. Tell a story, make a point, over and over. It's hard to read the points without the stories. What you've presented here, Samir, is point after point. What I'm missing are the stories paired with the points. But I understand you've given us just a glimpse. I'm hoping the stories are coming.