a most personal of personal essays
After five years and two weeks, I posted the last (non-epilogue) chapter of etc. etc. (and life goes on). It's taken over twice as long to finish compared to my other novels, partly due to poor timing with life events, but with the direction I ultimately went with in the story, it became much more difficult and personal than anything I've had to write before, especially this chapter I just posted.
I wrote about what I'm afraid of.
I think of Clemence as someone I could have been, in another timeline, in another situation. She is not me, but she has my fears and anger and the kind of thoughts I keep to myself. She became the way I expressed that side of myself which I no longer show outwardly, but as much as I've written about myself via story and metaphor, I never explicitly wrote about me until last year, when a long-time friend who never talked about himself much—before he started writing journal emails—confessed in one of those emails to feeling misunderstood and dismissed in ways I recognized.
This is a portion of what I wrote to him:
I think highly of myself—or, in less forgiving terms, I'm arrogant and prideful. I used to I think no one understood me, or at least certain parts of me, when people understood me more than I gave credit for and I understood others less than I believed. Part of me enjoys not being understood, that masks that flaw as strength and translates that inscrutability into uniqueness. Pride in pride.
I'm afraid of any change that might compromise who I am, even growth. Afraid I won't know where to draw the line, that I might not stop at "becoming a better person," and fall into "becoming what people want me to be." My flaws color me good and bad. Selfish! But confident. Aloof! But pragmatic. Insensitive! But honest. They're part of who I am, leading to the question I like to raise, "What if 'who you are' is an asshat?"
I was much worse before, if you remember that far back, before I thought before I spoke and learned to put being considerate above being right. I'd realize that I was never in any risk of compromising my sense of self. It was just... thinking of others. Listening. Learning cues. Remembering that not everyone is me and how I live is does not necessarily make more sense. Basic decency, in other words. It doesn't come naturally to me, as it doesn't for you. We lack context—that foundation of emotion—which lets us spring back up easily, but the trade-off is it's harder to empathize with people different from ourselves. I'm blunt, I don't really have personal boundaries, and I expected others to be the same, just like you described yourself. I thought too many people were oversensitive, silly, stupid. I still do, but I double-check how much of it is me scorning anything that got in the way of my being correct or finding out some truth.
I've gotten a lot of these thoughts out in writing. Characters who carry my feelings, my beliefs, my mistakes. I write them and I learn. I tell my heroine: you are not so special that you are impossible. Impossible about what? Anything. Impossible to understand, impossible to love, impossible at changing. I tell her so she can remind me not to take pride in my imagined uniqueness.
I have changed. I've learned that I get what I give. That being condescending might make me right, it might even be who I am, but it doesn't strengthen any relationships. It doesn't matter what my intent is; if I come off as rude, however accidentally, I'm still rude. That even if I personally wouldn't think it's rude, I'm still rude. That's the compromise: sometimes respecting other people's reactions as valid and above my own. The answer isn't to ask why they're bothered, but to respect their feelings and move on; otherwise, my actions say that I care more about knowing than about the person. I know behind the bluntness and pushing and pushing and pushing—getting the last word—it is too easy to feel like being right validates my behavior.
I've been saving this to post with the end of etc.; I've spoken so much about the story and seen so many people respond with how they’ve never related so much to a character that I want to be honest with how much of myself is in Clemence. As much as I'd love to have her witty comebacks and brilliant ability to slip in and out of any situation, that is not the part of her that is most like me. It is all of her worst, most terrified moments, when she thinks she's the only one like herself in the world.
