Clichés don’t bother me as much as the next guy.  In high school, and even college, we are taught that clichés are bad.  Wikipedia tells us that a cliché is “overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially when at some time it was considered distinctively forceful or novel. The term is most likely to be used in a negative context.”  (I cite Wikipedia because I can — no teacher is going to deduct points from me here.)  I am not saying that we should use the term “pretty as a picture” more or that there should always be an evil twin, but I do think we shouldn’t discard something just because we’ve heard it a few times before.

We all fancy our lives to be different and unique from everyone else’s; we were taught at a young age that we are all “special.”  The truth is that we are not.  All lives are generally the same: we’re born, we have a childhood, we go to school, we work, we retire, and then we die.  We all get out of bed in the morning and go to sleep at night; we all brush our teeth, eat, shower, and shit.  Along the way we have experiences — the experiences are universal, but they are important to us.  We experience happiness, we experience loss, we experience love, and we experience grief.  These experiences have been around forever, but they never get old.

Looking back to my childhood, it’s funny to see how people played along.  “Mom, I lost my crayons.  I lost my crayons!”  “I’m so sorry, honey.  We’ll get you new crayons tomorrow.”  When we’re little we think everything is a big deal, and the people around us indulge us.  They agree — it is a big deal.  Now that we’re older, we don’t get so much sympathy.  When someone breaks up with their boyfriend or girlfriend it is as if their life is shattered, but we know it is not.  We’ve seen it time and time again; they’ll get over it and move on.  Even when someone loses a parent, it breaks our heart, but we know that their world will continue.  We’ve seen other people go through the same thing and we’ve heard other stories — we have proof.

There is a book my mother once told me about (hi, mom!), but the name escapes me.  It is about the stages of life and how they are similar for all of us.  I think the aim of the book is to teach you how to navigate life, but I am more concerned with the breakdown.  In our teens we all feel insecure, in our twenties we are afraid of growing up, in our thirties we are scared that our life is not heading where we want it to, and so on.  I’d imagine that once we hit sixty we all wonder if the life we led was one to be proud of, and after that we worry about dying.

My point is this: even though the same things happen over and over again, that does not make them insignificant.  If your grandmother moves into your house because she can no longer take care of herself, if you think you might be failing out of school, or if your friend just died, I still want to hear about it.  You can talk about it, make a movie, or write a book; I’ll listen, watch, or read.  Everything that happens to me is important, so everything that happens to you must have meaning.  It doesn’t matter if it sounds “cliché.”  Share your story, and don’t let anyone tell you not to.  And if you’re really stuck, tell me – I’ll listen. I think my email is in the lower right-hand corner.