I just started reading One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul. It’s a brilliant book, a collection of personal essays by the Canadian daughter of Indian immigrants. Obviously, in many ways I can relate.
But it struck me that Koul’s ability to take her own life and tell her stories with honesty and emotion while still being able to make fun of herself, her family, and her friends is an amazing, impressive skill.
I tried to do a similar thing yesterday, though it was less a story and more part of my mental health blog. Yeah, I thought to myself, I come across as too angry, pretentious, accusatory. How is it that Koul can write herself and come across as so self-aware and engaging, while I probably come across more like a child stomping my foot?
I think it’s a skill, and for me, it means having to train two separate skills.
The first is learning to explain my actions and thought process and behavior and emotions to myself. There’s usually an existing framework, an existing understanding of those things; but it isn’t always the best one. This is the element that makes autobiographical content easiest to write years in hindsight, when I can step away from the emotions and my then-interpretation of the situation to perhaps see more clearly.
The second is learning to talk about my life in a way that makes it fun and engaging and relatable for other people. Some may say this is just a generic writer skill, but I disagree. It’s rather different when you’re writing about someone else or a story in your mind, versus when you’re trying to write about yourself. Again, I think that this is something that time aids a great deal: if enough time passes, we can look at our past selves as if they were other people, and that distance makes it only a little harder than other stories. But writing about oneself in the present, when the person on the page is supposed to represent exactly who you are?
It’s terrifying, and it’s difficult. Just because we can accept that we are flawed in certain ways doesn’t mean we can write those flaws in an engaging and relatable way. If we’re appealing to the reader for their understanding, their acceptance—this probably comes across the page, or the screen. This probably is something that creates more skepticism in the reader, rather than less.
It’s these elements making my entire Keeping Ahead of the Shadows experiment the least relatable of the things I write, I think—unless you’re going through the exact same thing, and can give me the benefit of the doubt when I misstate something or misrepresent something.
It is a skill I’d like to train, though. My purpose, as a writer, is questioning assumptions—including assumptions about myself. This may seem to contradict yesterday’s post somewhat, but I want to be able to question things, without being thrown off balance and down a depression spiral if I lean a millimeter too far.
In a few decades, age will help me in this, I think. When my neurological pathways are more settled, less plastic, I’m sure I’ll be able to better hold myself firm. (At the same time, I’ll probably be less able to fold my mind against someone else’s, the way I still sometimes can.)
It’s a complicated thing to do, autobiographical writing. What matters to me? What would matter to readers? What seems important to me, that isn’t to readers? What seems unimportant to me, that is important—or even crucial—for readers to understand where I’m coming from?
This is one of the reasons why I’ve been updating this blog less and less.
Meh, maybe I should try vloging instead. Maybe I should stop trying to write about my own life, and focus on my fiction. Maybe it’s just one of those things I have to stick to, that will improve dramatically with time and practice.