Question:
How the heck is one supposed to write an autobiography when one hasn't even yet reached fifty, let alone half that? What could one have possibly done is less than a quarter century to make merit of committing words to paper?
We do it all the time. It's called a diary. A stream of consciousness set-of-thoughts that I once used to write on black paper with gel pens. My hard-bound book is still hidden in my sheets drawer at my parent's house, second row from the left, bottom shelf, under the dark blue tie-dye sheets I stopped using in middle school.
I could say that I want to write things down now so I won't forget them later, but I have a ridiculously good memory. I can walk through my apartment in complete darkness. I can walk though my parent's house in complete darkness, despite having not lived there in three years.
And, in that darkness, get a glass from the shelf, turn the tap on, get water, get ice from the cooler, and a granola bar from the pantry, eat, put my trash in the garbage, spill the ice into the sink, and either put the glass in the dishwasher or clean the cup and leave it face-down in the drying rack. And then go back to my bedroom.
I can even walk through my best friend's house in complete darkness, despite having only slept there one night. I remember the reason why I was staying there, too. My parents had a printing convention they needed to go to that weekend in Boston (it was the same weekend and in the same con center as Anime Boston, actually), and had to leave on Thursday. They wanted me to not miss school, but also not stay home alone (it was four years ago, when I was a junior in high school), so I got shipped off to Cat's.
There's a lot more to that story but it proves my point- my memory is too good. I sometimes repeat things just to pretend I forgot I had said them.
Here's the crux of the problem, though. It's not that I have a really good memory- no- it's that I can't forget. I have an incredible irrational fear that I've hurt others, caused them pain, and every little thing that I've done incorrectly-ever- even if it was the tiniest little innocuous mistake, gets permanently etched in my mind. I have a lot of trouble sleeping at night, thinking about everything I did wrong. The could have, should have, would haves.
I did try writing in a diary, once, but it didn't seem to work. I wrote things down and they just sat there, wilting and dying the minute I closed the book and shoved it back in the drawer (second row from the left, last one on the bottom- the drawers were pink once, but they're twenty-two years old now and a sort of ugly off-white). And once the words died in the page, they were back in my head.
It's about time that I started leaking my mind out to the internets. Somebody'll read them, and hopefully that will ease some of the pressure.
More after the page break.
