To begin with, a PSA: For those who do not know, I mirror all my Facebook posts here and on Blogger. Do follow and engage. I am doing this with the fear that one day, Facebook might either ban me or lose my data in some random hacking incident or shut down or delete data before a certain cut off date or some such random thing that would affect my personal diary.
Now, for the subject at hand: I use Facebook (and now, Blogger) as a personal diary to note my thoughts. Much of them are filtered purely from an articulation and syntax point of view, so as to present them better, but with no other filter applied to them. My life, I would like to believe, is what those who were introduced to computers and programming in the 1980s and 90s would call WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get.
Some of what I write is unpalatable to some of my friends. Some of it seems to some other friends as directed at them. Some might look like I am faking it. Some may seem bold while some, cowardly. Some might seem convoluted, and other, rather simplistic and naïve. Some might even be conflicting and self-contradictory, as I change my mind, or say things that do not agree with each other in different reference frames or contexts. Some may be charitably put down to an evolution of my thinking, while some might give the impression of an ideological regression. However, regardless of what my writing reminds (or convinces) you of, the one thing I can promise you is that it is heartfelt and honest, if nothing, at least in intent, for as some wise person said long ago, and I paraphrase, ‘There are no good men, merely good intentions.’
What is true though is that I write exactly what I feel at that particular point, with the intensity and passion I feel at that moment. Nothing more (which is obvious from the length of my posts!). Nothing less. I am who I show myself to be. This may be good or bad. I think only hindsight (if I had delusions of grandeur, I’d have said ‘history’) will tell. Or judge me and my thoughts.
But why do I do it? Now, that is an interesting question.
I could, very flippantly, but equally honestly, answer it with a ‘Why not?’ Because, at the end of the day, it is my life, and if I choose to share it with the world, or at least the parts I choose to share, as long as it is not hate speech, I should be well within my rights to do so.
But I won’t be flippant with the answer. I shall be more forthcoming on my reasons. However, before that, I shall start by explaining why I write at all.
So, here’s a theory I have: Everything any human does, or so I believe, one does for one or more of the following three things:
1. Greed/Love: I want more than I have. All humans have this by nature.
2. Fear/Anger: I am afraid I may not get what I want/someone else may get it. This, as we know, is hard-wired into us too.
3. Adrenaline: It gives me a rush. This could even mean philanthropy. Or a hobby. Or anything that one has a passion for. This could mean a pursuit of happiness, or of relevance, or even immortality. This covers everything that is not greed or fear. This is not so obvious, but I do believe it is as base an instinct in humans as the other two. Indeed, this could be applied to the ‘some people just want to see the world burn’ type of people as well. But let us not go there.
Further, I believe that we developed the above three instincts only when we stumbled upon consciousness. Before that, as animals, our sole reasons to exist were (in that order):
1. Eat sugar.
2. Reproduce.
3. Die.
This isn’t my list. I merely read it online somewhere (and it made sense to me). But I agree with it in toto. Of course, for the past 50,000 years perhaps, we have moved away from this hard-wiring, evolved consciousness, and have built for ourselves, a set of different drivers; which is just as well, because that helps me explain why I write.
The reason, unfortunately for those expecting something profound, is rather simple: I write exactly why every other writer writes. There is no drum-roll. No profound epiphany. I write to scratch an itch. To douse a fire. To quench a thirst. To satiate a pang. To breathe in oxygen. To straighten a cramp. To calm a storm. To share a smile. To demonstrate love. To ease pain. To generously give. To gracefully take, To prove a point. To convince a doubter. To ask questions. To offer answers. To grieve. To console. To share my life. To hide my fears. To keep a record. To prove I was there. Indeed, to live. And to lay claim in hindsight (or history, if you prefer) that I did indeed live.
Yes, I write so I may live. And be known to have done so.
But this is the greed part. There’s fear too.
My greatest fear, indeed my nightmare, is losing the ability to communicate, by either losing my vocal cords or the use of my fingers and/or eyes, or, dog-forbid, my ability to think and observe, my brain’s function itself. I fear some wasting disease will take these away from me someday. Or somebody in authority may suddenly bar me from writing or speaking by whatever means authorities have to enforce their will. I fear that I may lose my ability to write. Or my mind. I fear no one I care for may read me. I fear I may die before I run out of things to say. I fear I may run out of things to say before I die. So many fears come together to make me write. I thus write out of a sense of urgency. And from a deep sense of mortality.
So, that’s fear. Now, to the adrenaline part.
Yes, I write because it gives me a rush. Not so much the part where others read what I have written, and least of all the part where they engage with me. That part is the amusement that comes later; much later. The rush is in the process. The part where something happens in my presence or I catch something from the corner of my eye or if I am caught up in the middle of something and a germ of an idea about that incident pops into my head, when I have to decide whether to plant it, water it, fertilise it, nurture it, and watch it grow with great love, or to strangulate it, burn it, kill it, bury it, and forget about it. The part where once I have decided to let it grow (or even more exciting, sometimes when I have killed and buried the idea and it STILL peeps out of the ground with a green shoot), the part where I gently harvest it when the time comes, then get rid of the stuff I can’t use, and then shape it, chisel it, discard everything but what I want to say, take it apart, put it together, paint it, lacquer it, and then set it out in the sun to dry, the part where I then pack it up and take it to the exhibition of my life online and arrange it just so, the part where once I put it out, I forget about it. Because I have a new one I am working on. The part where I rediscover what I wrote long ago and it still either makes sense or seems so old as to have crossed that thin line when things become just about old enough not to be embarrassing. The part where I wonder what the germ of the seed was that led to that writing when I wrote it then. The part when I feel joy about the fact that in spite of what it feels like now, after all this time has passed, I am so joyful to have made what I did. Yes, THAT rush.
OK, we get it, you would say. You write. Fine. But why do you write about your reality? About your struggles, and your family, and your trials & tribulations? Why do you have no filters? Why do you bare your innermost soul to everyone? Do you have no shame or concept of privacy or even secrets? Are you showing off? Are you making stuff up? Are you lying? How honest is all this? And why? Why? WHY?
Good question(s), all of them. Unfortunately, the answer (yes, there’s only one) is not as glamorous as someone like me would have liked it to be. The real reason I write about me, and things that happen to me, is that I am a horrible fiction writer. I find it tedious, complicated, and extremely hard to make stuff up, especially interesting stuff that is worth writing about. No, this is not me fishing for compliments. Because I do not feel inadequate or guilty about this. It is simply something I know I am not good at. Like I am not good at Lacrosse, for example (I don’t even know what that is; I just read about it somewhere long ago), or mountaineering, or quantum physics, or violin, or Python. It’s OK. No one is good at everything. For me, it is just one more thing I am not that comfortable doing, mainly because I have no clue how to do it. There is no shame attached to it. It so turns out that I have a limited imagination and can only write about things that have actually happened around me. Do I embellish some? Sure. You won’t read it otherwise. Do I add a lot of maal-masala? No. Not just because I won’t, but also because I can’t. I’d rather tell you what happened in a fun, interesting way than make up a beautiful fantasy that will take you on a trip and create characters inside your mind. In short, I am a bad storyteller, but a good narrator. Does that make sense?
So, I write about things that happen to me and to my life. Things that are, for the lack of a better word, mundane. Things a historian won’t be interested in. But things that record a particular life during a specific period of time. That said, I do hope that for those who I matter in the future: to be honest, literally one person (you all know her: Kym), this record will be of some utility, if not in living life or in big decisions that she may take later, but in the sense of being able to open it up when she is in the mood to wander about her childhood, and like an adult on a strict diet, treat herself to a piece of gooey, chocolatey, sinful but smallish bite of life as it used to be once.
Of course, since there is no heaven, nor hell, I won’t be there once I am gone. But if there were, I’d be glad to see her read something. And smile.
More: The second part of this post can be read here.
