Faced with the daunting task of writing a second post, I’ve been going over old stuff and slowly adding it to the blog.
One such piece of writing is an autobiography I wrote at 27, as I was wrapping up my time at NYU. Slightly redacted and even less edited, you can find The Calculated Rhythm of Ease, at this link.
It begins like this: “Recently, waiting for a psychology midterm, I stopped time.” When I wrote it, I thought I was traveling back in time, and felt quite clever for the bits I went sideways—but it took eleven years of hindsight to reveal that I also did some leaping ahead.
It ends like this: “Cautiously, agonizingly, magically, I learn to dream.” I remember exactly how agonizing it was to dream the paragraph that comes right before that, the one that predicted—give or take a child, a mother, a sofa and some gluten—the life I am now busy materializing.
My first autobiography, written when I was 14, began like this: “It was only by April 16, 1980, that the red faced creature had first seen the light of day.”
It continued as a retelling of my short life in the third person—a creature out of space, and place. I was living in England with my mother, just weeks before her first diagnosis. My teacher, Mr. Lawrence, was equal measures concerned and moved, not knowing what to do first: consult the social worker, or write me a merit. I think in the end he did both.
As I read through my old stuff, I was taken aback by how, despite a paternally-inherited penchant for laundering my thoughts in murky waters, the leitmotifs still shine through bright and clear.
It turns out that I’ve been running a colorful spiral around myself, wrestling, essentially, with the same questions for years. What does it mean when your daily experience is of profound disorientation, while from above your life clearly charts a straight (if zigzag) line home?
So, I suppose it should come as no surprise—except, apparently, to me—that in this blog, too, I am out of time, in all of the worlds.
And by simple mathematical induction, at 38, this blog is my living, breathing, third autobiography—only this time, my assignment to myself.
All of the Worlds 