Trying to write myself into existence until I desperately needed to stop
A personal crash course on writing personal essays
.
I feel most real about two to three seconds into a hug with someone I love
when I am being thrown around and pickled by the waves of the ocean
when I am crying or laughing so violently that I can barely breathe.
When do I feel least real?
It might be a tie between every other moment.
I am obviously real.
But is it possible that there’s some invisible film that separates me from the rest of the world? Could I possibly be disconnected in some unique way that’s obvious to everyone else?
Is my existence as irrefutable as it seems, or is it possible that I am somehow just pretending to be real?
Maybe I am the only person who isn’t really real
probably not
but I haven’t been able to rule it out yet.
What I am is a writer, so I have a loophole to lean on
because I am the subject of my own nonfiction work.
..
My first experience writing a personal essay was in middle school.
Before this, writing was a vehicle at best and a task at worst,
and I was pretty sure there was nothing special about it.
I had some journals
I didn’t mind the essay portions of tests
I wrote thank you cards (when someone reminded me)
I sent letters to my grandma, even though I talked to her on the phone often enough that the letters arrived relatively outdated.
I was annoyed to receive the assignment and unexpectedly thrilled by the process of completing it.
I described my first sleepover—a night I spent at my best friend’s house when I was five. The essay focused on how surprised I was to find that my discomfort with the dark, in the safety of my own home, morphed into an all-encompassing and animated terror when I woke up in the middle of the night to the unfamiliar darkness of someone else’s.
And even then, I wrote from the perspective of someone outside of myself. Not as an artistic choice for the narrator, but as a (self) critic with poor timing.
I wrote truthfully, but also defensively. I was aware that I wouldn’t just be turning in an example of my writing, but an example of me—who I am, or who I was. I typed it up on my boxy desktop computer, my fingers clicking away, weighed down, ever so slightly, by the gravity of that knowledge settling in for the first time.