Night Thoughts

A lot of times I sit up in my room at night simply staring at my ceiling fan watching it spin. I’ve always thought that it was pretty weird but I just couldn’t stop myself from doing it. While I’m sitting there my brain is constantly just thinking and thinking about everything and anything: what i’m going to eat the next day, where I put my favorite hoodie, even the fact that the same water now is the same water like 1 million years ago. With these thoughts the same question arises: what is my purpose, my future?
With in the Book The Handmaid’s Tale I believe that I share a similar thought process as Offred within the text. Now I’m not able to understand the feeling of being in a totalitarian society where women are only cared for by their ability to have children but I am able to understand the feeling of not knowing what your true purpose is or feeling like your life isn’t in your own hands. “When I get out of here if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another… (134) This quote comes from chapter 23 where Offred refers to her “story” as a reconstruction that not everything she’s saying is 100% her own or 100% the truth. I really was able to see this within myself. Almost everything I tell people or others about me doesn’t feel truly real or authentic. I sit sometimes and think about everything that I’m doing under my own volition, do I really want to do these things? I still can’t fully grasp that feeling as most of the time I feel what I’m doing is right and what I want to do. If I were to try and go to other people they’d probably think I’m crazy which I guess is why I stay up at night just talking to myself in an empty audience.
Offred encapsulates this idea when anytime in the book the next section is called night. I paralleled that to myself as she sits in her room talking to the reader or thinking to herself. “ I feel very unreal, talking to You like this. I feel as if I’m talking to a wall. I wish You’d answer. I feel so alone.” (195) I never really could explain these thoughts to other people as it felt like I was talking to someone in another language. The idea that I don’t know my purpose sounds so foreign but is something that I definitely think other people think all the time. Yet like Offred I feel alone when I try to explain it, talking to an empty void with that void also being myself.
“Nothing new under the sun” my dad would say everything that you have thought of has probably been thought by someone else. Whenever he would tell me this I would hate it because to me it really meant nothing I could do would be original or my own thinking. It made me believe that everything I thought of was probably conditioned by someone else. Like when Offred brings up the stories she can and can’t tell. “It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along.” (39) When I first read this I immediately thought to myself how I constantly try to make sense of if everything I see, think, feel is truly me, or is it someone else. While also reading this I made more sense of how I better understand my place in the world which I think both me and Offred relate to.
This idea of a reconstruction or not being able to find your purpose is simply an idea that only puts forth what you put back into it. So constantly thinking about how your story isn’t your own is only putting you in the mindset of exactly that. Everything that we are living through is “Our story” even though it may not 100% feel like it. Almost like a reconstruction. Each person is living and contributing some way to their “story” even with the influences of others. Like Offred I see myself constantly asking these questions trying to uncover why I think this way even though for Offred it’s a bit more self explanatory. We both try to find the truth but also know that it doesn’t come in one nice recipe book but much more of one big jumbled mess with many begrudging questions in between.