Monday, July 15, 2024
I had lunch with a bunch of writer friends on Friday. I hadn’t met them all year since I had been hermit-ting so much, though through our WhatsApp chat I had stayed in touch with their happenings. A new writer person had joined the group and two of my older friends were telling him that I teach karate. They made me sound impressive and when I played it down, they called me humble. I had this strange sensation that I was listening to them talk about somebody that was not me.
Later I told one of them, when she asked about my karate writing, that I still couldn’t call it a karate memoir. It is memory only, I told her, and I don’t quite identity with the person I am writing about. I honestly think that if I wrote the stories as if they happened to a character called Radhika I might write them better. At some point she said, imposter syndrome, and I agreed.
But today I realized it is not just imposter syndrome, it is more. Being a karate teacher, a Sensei, truly is something I don’t identity with. It is something I do, rather than something I am. But many others see it as something I am. I guess until I understand this split, though split doesn’t quite describe it, I might not be able to write a memoir on it. But the conversation with my friends helped me move slightly further along in trying to figure out this blocked writing.
All year I have wanted to feel settled (into my new home), flowing (in creativity), and focused (in whatever I do). Instead, I have felt unable to settle, blocked, and constantly distracted. And all this had made me feel frustrated beyond what I can express in words. But if I try to describe it, it feels like a several people, or hands possibly attached to people, inside my head, pulling and pushing, and pulling apart something in totally different directions. It feels like madness boxed up that will burst out of my skull and splatter my grey matter all over the walls.
I don’t know why I struggle instead of just following what is and avoid this immense psyche-ache.
But going back to the issue of the split in what one does and what one is. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but it makes sense to me. I could do things that I don’t feel I am, but others may feel that this is exactly who I am. It’s entirely possible. I think people who do things, that others around feel they are, and which they too identify with, are possibly happier people than misplaced idiots like me.
But it is an interesting story to uncover, to see how I got to this spot in my life. Some people end up doing what they don't feel they are for money which they need to earn to support a family, or even a career they might have begun in when they were in their twenties but stuck to even after they saw it wasn't quite them. I don't quite know the forces that kept me in this thing i do. But, this fits in with what I had discovered in the memoir course — that I would never have been teaching karate in my own dojo if I had remained in Bombay. This Sensei identity has got everything to do with this move to Singapore. I have parked the investigation of this puzzle in a garage in my mind while I work on something else, or work on nothing else right now, as the other thing I want to work on is also merely in a state of brew.
I spent several years writing a novel with the theme of psychotherapeutic abuse. I had begun writing it as a memoir in 2013 but it felt too complicated to write the memoir and think of all the people whose privacy I would violate while writing. So, I fictionalized it and I loved doing that since fiction is what I am most comfortable with. But as the memoir course progressed, I began turning in more writing from the memoir of therapeutic abuse and these writings were the most alive, they were where my energy was.
It is what I should be writing as it is likely that it is what is blocking the flow.
On the weekend another writer friend sent me the name of a book to read, Writing Hard Stories. A book about how to write about difficult material. In this book the writer interviews several memoirists who have written about ‘hard’ life stuff. One of the authors said she did the same thing I did — for ten years she wrote novels about incest and didn’t write about the sexual abuse by her father. She knew these novels would never be published and yet she wrote them. She said perhaps it helped her get familiar with things, but the memoir took it deeper.
Some part of me knows that possibly this is the route I too need to take.
I am waiting until I return from my Naha and Kyoto trip next week to dive into that work. One of my friends, at the Friday lunch, reminded me to take notes on my karate trip. I know that story too needs writing. Another friend could see the connection between these two big stories or threads of my life, and I see some of that too.
That’s it for this week. It felt like these ‘discoveries’ were big and also, I wondered why I had not realized them sooner.
I will be busy in Naha next week and chilling in Kyoto the following and blogs may or may not be written.
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