There's a book I've been living in this month. The narrator survived some terrible years, and the way she holds her life together is horror movies.
Not watching them. Reading her life through them. Every threat gets a genre, every moment maps to a scene she already knows. The films gave her a language for the unbearable parts, and the language kept her alive.
(The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones, if you want the ride.)
Everybody does this. Most people just never look at which genre they picked.
Some of you are narrating a comeback story, and it keeps you moving. Some of you are narrating a cautionary tale where you're the warning. Some of you have been running a courtroom drama for years, prosecuting the same decade on a loop.
The genre isn't neutral. It decides what counts as a plot point, what counts as filler, and how the story is allowed to end.
Horror kept her alive. Some genres do that. And some genres keep replaying the same scene because the genre needs it, long after you don't.
The one thing for the weekend:
You've been telling your life in a genre. Name it. Then ask if it's still the one keeping you alive, or just the one you know by heart.
Josh
P.S. I'm doing the 30-day Ash Journal myself right now, in public. One page a day, no edits.
Five minutes. One prompt. One line of ash. The first seven days are free: truevitalyou.com/journal