Και η βρόχα έπεφτε, right through…

(Fragments of an academic exercise… “An autobiography”)

"I have given up the idea of writing a “good” autobiography a long time now.
I think the story about me trying to write autobiographies is more interesting, and this is what I will attempt to narrate to you.
I started writing diaries when I was about 8 years old. I don’t know why, probably I saw it on a kid’s show or something.
Then, my writing was limited to events that happened in school, what we ate for lunch, my favorite toy, such things… and I would always start writing with the phrase “dear diary” (I was actually writing this phrase in English, that why I suspect there was some kind of influence there!)
However, as I was growing up my diaries started having a purpose; the more I grew up, the more demanding and even stressful the purpose.
You see, at some point I realized the function autobiographies have in society, and this is when I became more aware of what I was putting down on paper.

A small note here… maybe diaries do not classify as autobiographies, I don’t know, but for me it was a linear thing, something that I could put together when I’m a grandma and make sense of my life and my times. Maybe it could become a book, something like Anais Nin’s diaries (which I never read).
Anais Nin though seemed to care less about sharing intimate parts of her life. Me, on the other hand, I was very worried of what would happen if somebody read my diaries- especially when I was still living with my parents and my little sister was sneaking in my room looking for anything to use against me (she found a pack of cigarettes once and showed it to my parents…big drama!)

Another time, I forgot my diary on the ferry and forever lost it. The thought that somebody found it and read it made me feel embarrassed for a long time, even though I will never know who that was and she/he had no idea who I was.
Other crazy thoughts worried me, like what would happen if I suddenly died young and my parents would read the diaries… very embarrassing, even though dead people are not supposed to care about such stuff!
Thus, self-censorship was my solution for a long time; everything I was writing was parent-friendly, or as close to it as possible!

Then, when I was 18 and moved to ….(country)… to study, I had my own place and felt more independent, less obligated to write parent-friendly stuff. I put all my past diaries in a suitcase and locked it with a lock; I gave this suitcase to my ex-boyfriend who has his own house back in ….(place)…- and they are still there (the plan is to take the suitcase back when I move back and have my own place with a big storage room).

My diaries then became more sophisticated; apparently influenced by the academia, where I had to write sophisticated papers, well structured, argumentative and all that. My life recorded in the diaries started to look like that as well.
Since I lived abroad for 10 years, my Greek language skills got worse too (I did so many unacceptable spelling mistakes) but I never attempted to write in English since it is still impossible for me to express properly in that language (even though now I realize this is not always the case...I am experiencing language-bastardization)!

Since I was 18 and a growing academic, recording my thoughts and political/philosophical theories in my diaries became a major goal. I was less concerned by simply describing events, now I liked to over-analyze them! Then, I really struggled to liberate myself from the idea that somebody would read my diaries because it would prevent me from writing things that were important to me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable for other people to know.
I started pressuring myself to write these things because I believed that if one day I want to go back to my diaries to make sense of myself, I will be losing a large part… I had to be honest! The truth is my memory is so bad, that I really depend on my diaries to remember past events and thoughts.

For a while then, I became very overwhelmed by analyzing me, who I am, why I am the way I am, why I am so stupid some times, why I am so great some others. It was a time that I became very judgmental on me. I was completely crashing my own self-esteem! I used a lot of self-sarcasm so that I could be judgmental and funny at the same time to make it easier on me. That really helped actually, it made me happier and able to escape my misery often! Sarcasm, self-sarcasm and irony became my major defense and strategy, and way of living since then (I love it!)

However, as the number of my diaries increased and my style of writing was continuously changing according to where I was and how I was, I realized my major purpose in writing these diaries might not be served. I would never get to know me if I keep changing my writing so radically from time to time!
And the funny thing is, I recently realized that the reasons of these changes have little to do with me and my psycho-synthesis (I hope this word exists in English) but more on what I wanted to achieve each time when I started writing a new diary.
I try to direct my self more through my writing rather than the other way around.

And since my identity has become completely mixed up after living 4 years in …(country)…, 2 years in …(another country)… traveling a lot in between and facing many diverse situations and people while still being very attached to my …(birth country)… lifestyle and home, recording this life and describing my self in one manner has become impossible. I realized that constantly contradicting my self in my diaries is absolutely normal and expectable. That’s why I often contradict myself in real life as well. That’s very annoying sometimes!

What I concluded after all these years of writing diaries? That it is sometimes very-very misleading to use autobiographies as undeniable recordings of truths about one’s self and about historical events; at least when the people writing these autobiographies are like me! I was mainly writing more in my diaries when I was very happy, very lonely, very miserable or when I had to say something to “the world”. All the in-between psychological situations were kind of dismissed.

I became increasingly aware that my writing was defining me and the way I remember my life rather the other way around.
Before I thought there was a way to be honest and representative of myself in my writings, now I know this is an illusion; at least in my case. I struggled with being honest for a long time, when my self and my life seemed very complex to be described in paper.
I found many different ways to deal with this confusion.

For example, for a while (inspired by the movie “Amelie”) I only described small little details of my life in my diaries, something like this: “I am in my hotel room in Santorini. There is a big dark could out of the window. I drink an orange juice while observing a little bug walking on the white wall. The curtains are blue. Somebody is laughing outside”. In this way, I was able to recall events or moments of my life without being influenced by my style of writing or my thoughts. It would “purely” bring back to my mind situations, without further comments that would lead me to partial psycho-analytical conclusions about myself.

…………………………………(part missing)

Actually, the whole story is a bit more complicated, but that’s why in this autobiography I describe more my diaries rather than real events, or else it would look more like a drama-comedy soap opera, completely influenced by the way I view these past events now in the present where everything is over and I can rationalize my past; even though then I had a completely different idea.

What I do now? Since I realized I really depend on my diaries to remembers things- considering my memory is bad- and since I realized the way I write about me and my life is influenced by many things according to the times in a way that makes it impossible to have a clear idea of what happened or who I am; since I am able to control my memories and myself through my writings; I decided to change my style of writing once again.

For a while I thought to stop writing diaries altogether because I was tainting my memory and my perception of myself with my own prejudice.
Then I remembered the phrase my first love wrote to me on a cafeteria receipt when I was 16 years old, still nice and simple: “Life is not beautiful; we make it”.
Ironically, this guy died in a motorcycle accident when he was 17 and since then I still have this cafeteria-receipt note, always in my wallet as a reminder.

Taking this statement as my starting point, I recently did something very radical: I tore apart some pages of my past diary (the one I have here, because there many more I don’t have access right now), the ones I consider to be unnecessarily hurting me by preserving painful, controversial and not complete truths. I decided to make more happy things for me to remember, more simple, and more pure, like the ones I was writing when I was inspired by Amelie.
In my new diary, there are no complete or structured texts, just random phrases that can recall moments of my life, little sketches or lyrics from songs. The pages I tore apart I used to make collages in my new diary. I tried to make beautiful things out of them to cast their evil away, to make me a happy grandma if I make it that far!

It was frustrating to realize that my diaries will never serve their major goal because my memory was so processed by language. It was simply a representation of texts, photographs and objects when in reality it was much more.
I still wonder which side of my self I was trying to expose to the world all this time and what I wanted to say to me and to the others. Everything seems to be a part of a big CV that wants to be something important when it grows up.
Getting rid of these illusions was very liberating for me- finally! Tearing apart previous parts of my diaries and being seemingly “simplistic” in my new one doesn’t seem “fake” to me. It is not “hiding” trauma or truth because of fear of who I am. Because there is not a single truth or a single me. I am only presenting a new edition of the “true me”, what I had always been doing anyway; recording one side of my story at the time for different purposes. Real life will never be sufficiently described in paper anyway (or even on a blog page)" <--(recent addition...obviously!).

The end!