Feb 09 2009
“25 Things about me”
One of my Facebook (& Freecycle) friends tagged me today with “25 Things about me” which spurred me on to write 25 (non-litigious) things about myself. “Where do I start?” I thought. So, being methodical, I went through each of the first 25 years of my life with a highlight or two from each year. The number of things that I had to gloss over: abuses, psychological & physical traumata, more active self-harm, paranoia, emptiness and confusion to name a few. “Where did it all begin?” was the next question - “somewhere between 0 and 7″ was the proto-Jesuit answer. “Who shall I tell?” was a further question; as I have only a score or so of friends on Facebook, the selection of the lucky 25 was going to be difficult. I managed 13, one of whom was me, so I felt that as I had failed in even the simplest of revelatory and self-censored chain letters, the battle to crank out something in the order of 75,000 words plus photographs and illustrative artwork was going to be an uphill battle against my natural lethargy, indolence and shame.
Come to think of it, I have managed some 50-plus psychotherapeutic sessions of 50 minutes each: say 2,500 minutes, rounded down to 2,000 of me talking@ 120 words per minutes is nearly quarter of a million words. All I need to do is to think of my autobiography as a series of private one-to-one sessions rather than addressing the world at large. I wonder if I can remember everything I said …or does that count as cheating?
