The most famous line in The White Album is its first: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today it is so often quoted that it is almost cliche. Twitter bios, LinkedIn descriptions, admissions essays—you name it—this most ubiquitous of Joan Didion quotes is liable to be there. At first glance, Didion delivers writers a mandate. If stories are survival, then we must cling to them! we hear her say. We must pursue them relentlessly, catch them by the throat! And so we write, wielding The White Album as a battlecry, chasing some singular veracity or, at the very least, verisimilitude. However, as I’ve learned all too well, this is not what Didion meant at all. 

It was election day in Louisiana the first time I noticed my face was drooping. Democratic incumbent Governor John Bel Edwards was facing off against Trump-loving challenger Eddie Rispone, and I was sitting in the Jefferson Parish Clerk’s office working as a stringer for The Associated Press, watching the votes come in. I had been active that day, which is what I preferred. Before driving to Jefferson to earn $60 confirming vote tallies, I had spent the day at a yoga teacher training, and after I would go to a party, then a bar to watch a band.

Between my calls to The Associated Press to confirm, yes, what I saw on my screen was the same as what The AP saw on theirs, I decided to take a Snapchat. 

Click. As I examined the first selfie I took, I noticed my right eyelid hung lower over my pupil than the left. It was slight, but I thought it made me look dopey, so I deleted the picture and tried again, resolving to keep my eyes equally open. 

Click. The droop persisted. Maybe if I just strained harder. 

Click. Still droopy. 

In image after image, no matter how hard I pulled the muscles of my face, no matter how much might I summoned, my eyelids stubbornly and perceptibly mismatched.