Thoughts I Never Intended to Share

Meaning

Throughout high school, I always struggled with analyzing literature. My teachers expected a certain "correct" interpretation of whatever we read, and more often than not, I would arrive at something completely different than what was "acceptable." Now, as someone who spends a lot of their free time (limited as it may be) writing, I rebel against that idea. You may have noticed that I title my writing rather vaguely, often a word or a phrase that relates to an idea or thing within what I have written. I do this purposefully. We are all different people with different life experiences and different dreams and different memories. We have all lived our own lives in our own way, thus if we were to all read the same text, it is inevitable that we would come away with different interpretations, different message that we had gleaned from the same words. Thus, my titles are only suggestions that hint at my own interpretation of what I have written, and these suggestions are tenuous at best. I may spend the rest of my life puzzling over words that I have written, only to find myself at the end, never having arrived at a concrete answer. My point is this: As a writer, it is not my responsibility, nor my right,  to tell the reader what to think of what I have written. Once the words are on the page, they belong to the world, and we all have the right to find our own meaning hidden between the words. Vagueness has the intrinsic quality of leaving room for thought. So, all that I ask when you read my writing is that you think about what these words mean to you, not what they mean to me, or anyone else. We must derive our own meaning from life's subtext. In some ways, that is the end to life: To find meaning, to find something that gives us a reason to live and to be better people tomorrow than we are today. So please, I implore you, find whatever meaning is your own in every word you read, whether it be mine or Tolstoy's or Angelou's or the word of a friend. Meaning is one of the only things in life that we can claim as our own, so I spend every day trying to grasp what it means to me to live. What does it mean for you to live?