Actions Create Who You Are

Living Happy

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that people are the only objects that create who they are by their actions. A plant is a plant. It doesn’t choose to be a lilac. If he’s poison ivy, he’s poison ivy.

But a person becomes a truck driver because his actions prove him to be a truck driver. A person becomes a lounge singer because he’s singing in a lounge.

It’s all about the actions.

This is something I need to remember while I’m writing, especially when I’m writing middle grade for some reason. Our characters become something by their actions. 

Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie novels becomes a detective because he does detective stuff, not because he tells us he does detective stuff, or because he wants to do detective stuff. We believe he’s a detective because we read his actions of being a detective.

Life is like this, too.

A person becomes an artist by creating art. A person becomes a hero by doing something heroic, not by claiming to do something heroic or thinking about it. A person embodies the traits of their office, position, or religion by actually embodying those traits, not just talking about it. 

In life like in writing, it’s about showing not telling. It’s about actions not lip-service. 

“Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.” - Sartre

But sometimes, we are things that we don’t realize we are. We block it.

My Grammy Barnard never thought she was a poet or an artist. If you asked her about it, she’d gasp and say no. She kept her poems hidden away. She wrote them 100 years ago in the 1920s.

They are words fading, written in bright blue pen. Ball point. Some are typed.

The handwritten ones are words scrawling across the page, the closer in time they are to me, the messier they become.

They are words about being new, about birds flying across the Ontario sky, the pain and guilt of losing a cat to winter and the streets of Staten Island.

They are words singing upside down and across the paper. 

My father kept them in his rolltop desk and handed them to me in the kitchen where her china sat in shelves on the wall. His hands shook as he passed another journal of words over. I took their case, brown, cracked leather, opened the binding and peered inside at their mystery.

“Your grandmother was a poet,” he said

I held her words in my hands. “I never knew.”

“She denied it,” he said, voice cracking with pride, “but you can see she was, right here.”

Sometimes, in our pursuit of perfection or our overwhelming imposter syndrome, we deny who we are even though we go through the actions and creations that show the opposite is true. My Grammy Barnard was a poet and an artist, but she’d never call herself those things.

What are you? What do your actions define you as? Is it the same as the titles and labels you give yourself?

Big questions, right?