Can a lifetime be summarized in a single word?
Sure, if the ups and downs are ignored and the trajectory is the defining element of the narrative—the same way a sprawling identity can be compressed into a terse name. Nouns are very stretchy containers.
Imagining narraives as simple comets of fate, with no zigs or zags or loops, was my exercise for this week. The graphs look like summaries of case studies, but can also function as overly-concise biographies of people, companies, or empires. The fewer words: the more interpretations of them.
The narratives we tell ourselves, abut ourselves and others, are tropes and metaphors stitched together from random data points, anyway. And what is the classic hereo’s journey, if not just moving from point A to point B in a single identity?