Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Last week was spent slog­ging away my latest assign­ment: Life Writ­ing (auto­bi­o­graph­ies, bio­graph­ies, travel writ­ing, mem­oirs etc). I mis­takenly assumed that Life Writ­ing would some how be really easy because: #1 “me” is my spe­cial­ist sub­ject and #2 I write about me all the time in this thing called ‘blog’.

Except, it wasn’t easy.

Actu­ally writ­ing about my past in a non-anecdotal way was much more dif­fi­cult than I had expec­ted and I don’t think the prompt for the assign­ment (“Los­ing Some­thing”) helped alle­vi­ate that in any fashion.

Whenever people ask K what I “do” (besides study­ing), she has a tend­ency to feel the need to men­tion my blog. She doesn’t really “get” blog­ging and her eyes glaze over whenever I speak about it using more than one short sen­tence, but she real­ises how much talk­ing on here means to me and appre­ci­ates the time and effort involved, if not the actual pro­cess itself. I might not be tak­ing over the world, or offer­ing much of any use, but I can’t help think­ing it’s really cool when I Google “Claire” and my site comes up THIRD (It goes: Claire’s Accessor­ies, some com­pany that uses CLAIRE as an acronym, then little me!)

Sadly, oth­ers don’t see how cool that is, instead K is met with “What’s blog­ging?”, “What does she blog about?” or “That’s a bit nar­ciss­istic isn’t it?”

Er, well no actu­ally, I don’t think it is. Really, when you think about it, most social/conversational situ­ations are spent talk­ing about ourselves. When people greet us, they ask how we are and we pro­ceed to tell them. And, through the pro­cess of con­ver­sa­tion, we swap notes on what we’ve been doing since we last spoke and any­thing else that has been going on in our lives: who we’ve spoken to/seen, how our job’s going, what the kids are doing, the hol­i­day we’ve planned, the week­end just passed, the shoes we’ve just bought, the room we last dec­or­ated, the feud still on going. And we think noth­ing of it. No-one says, “Now hang on a minute there Jenny, you’ve been talk­ing about you and your Bobby’s hol­i­day for 10 solid minutes, that’s very nar­ciss­istic of you, now sit and give me hints and tips/your expert advice on a niche topic, whilst I fin­ish this cof­fee”.

I don’t neces­sar­ily think blog­gers talk about them­selves any more than any­one else does, it’s just that when they do it, it’s in a more per­man­ent way. A way that’s recor­ded and can be referred back to, a way that can be shared with people miles and miles away without rack­ing up the phone bill.

In fact, in many ways, blog­gers don’t talk about them­selves at all. By the time names, dates and spe­cif­ics are masked, wheedled out and wool­ied over to pro­tect the innocent/their live­li­hoods, there’s often not much of “them­selves” left at all.

Writ­ing the assign­ment really brought home actu­ally how much “me” I leave out when writ­ing online.

Entire exper­i­ences, memor­ies, rel­at­ives and rela­tion­ships have never even been men­tioned here and yet in real life, they con­sume a very large part of my exist­ence and are in many ways fun­da­mental to who I am. Hav­ing to sud­denly drag up uncom­fort­able memor­ies and exper­i­ences and spill them out onto paper for the sake of this assign­ment was a drain­ing and alto­gether undesir­able exper­i­ence. It’s one thing to sum up a shitty day with a witty one-liner, it’s quite another to seri­al­ise the event and to focus not on the oddit­ies of the human race and my love/hate rela­tion­ship with it, but on how I was feel­ing and how it wounded me.

I’ve always had quite a dry, black sense of humour, favour­ing to see the irony or tra­gic com­edy in an event as opposed to the pain (for the most part); a trait shared par­tic­u­larly by K and her fam­ily (see my last post). It’s a cop­ing mech­an­ism. If I didn’t laugh, some days I would never stop crying.

How­ever, given the mater­ial I had to work with, I laid-off the punch-lines, the can­did com­ments and instead chose to account things as they were, work­ing and writ­ing through tears and con­fu­sion and bit­ter recall. Read­ing it back now is alien, it doesn’t sound like me and in truth, des­pite its inher­ent hon­esty (as a res­ult of the con­tent) it actu­ally feels less so, which is upset­ting given all that I dragged myself through in order to write it. In try­ing to find a truth and a sense of “what actu­ally happened”, I seemed to lose my voice.

I can’t help but think that my brief and (very) mod­est for­ays into fic­tion writ­ing have in fact had more hon­esty, integ­rity and said more about me, my life and the people in it than my raw and naive attempt at writ­ing an auto­bi­o­graph­ical account. My char­ac­ters are more “real” than my lop-sided per­spect­ive and frazzled frag­ments of memory could ever be and whilst this reju­ven­ates my enjoy­ment and enthu­si­asm in fic­tion writ­ing, it leaves me won­der­ing what the out­come of my assign­ment is going to be.

It’s so much easier to speak as your­self when you are using the voice of someone else.