Real Life Stories

I love autobiographies and I love hearing peoples' life stories.  I know that some people have no interest in this sort of thing, but for me there's a reason why I find this so interesting.  When I was younger and I moved from Primary School to High School, I knew I was gay, and I also knew that not everyone who found out would react in a positive way, in fact I was convinced at the time that most people if they knew would react badly.  I deliberately sought to distance myself from everyone around me.  I was a loner kid, there were a few people I spoke to who I considered friends but almost all of these boys weren't in my class.  I went to an all male high school, and I felt that if anyone knew that I was gay they would bully me, ostracize me, and that really school wouldn't be a safe place.  The irony here is that I was still bullied just not for being gay, and I was still ostracized, both by others and through my own self imposed isolation, and school was never a safe space for me not until college at least, so whether it was worth it or not seems like a moot point now.

During my high school years I watched other people around me and made observations.  I learned a lot about people by the things they said and did when they thought no-one was listening or that nobody was watching.  I also learned a lot about people through the realisation of the impact their actions had on those around them.  This didn't stop when I left high school.  Although I came out of my shell again in college and became a much more open person throughout college and University, I still watched people intently.  The idea of "people watching" is a concept that some people claim to love but they don't do it in a way that they perceive natural behaviour.  You can't deliberately watch someone and expect them to behave in a way as if they were not being watched.  Observing people in this manner makes most people uncomfortable.  Likewise you can't stalk a person and follow them around and expect to get a sense of who they are.  You have to see them in normal social situations and you need to disinterested.

The easier path however is to find people that want to be watched, or that want to share as much as they can.  I don't mean in an exhibitionist or voyeuristic way, unless you're both into that and it's consensual then have at it, I'm not one to judge.  What I actually mean though is that you will find more people than you would expect who are willing to share everything with the world.  Despite the fact I write this blog and the others detailing my thoughts on many topics and my journey through my health troubles, I share very little about my actual life.  That's a conscious choice, I only share what you can find out on your own if you really wanted to, or what I want you to know.  There is still plenty to consume however, as I've been quite productive in writing posts here.  There are others who write blogs of their own, and there are those who go further and write autobiographies that detail their lives in a much more succinct and structured way.

The reason I love autobiographies more than anything else is because whilst our lives are long and filled with a plenitude of opportunities, we all live our own lives.  We are not as different as we like to think, we all think in a similar way and we all behave in a similar way, my own observations have proven that to be true as far as I can tell, everyone has more or less the same insecurities and they feel self conscious for the same reasons.  What can vary greatly however are our life experiences, this is where the autobiographies come into play.  Right off the bat before you consider writing one, the idea that someone would want to read it is usually spurred on by the fact that you think something happened to you that doesn't happen to many people or that something set your life apart from everyone else.  In other words most people who write an autobiography think their lives are interesting enough in the first place to even consider writing one, and for the most part this is usually true, although not always.

You have only one life to live, and there is a limit to what you can experience for yourself in that life.  If you want to experience much more than this, then your only real option is to live vicariously through another, either through people you know who can tell you what it's like, or through another person documenting their experience.  I hesitate to suggest social media as a tool in this regard as the world they paint a picture of through their social media profiles is often very inaccurate.  As for an autobiography of course there is no guarantee that it will be any better or that it won't be a lie from start to finish, but at least the content is sufficient in length that the person who created it had to at least put thought and effort into producing it.  There will be a narrative or an overarching theme to provide consistency and you'll get to see things as the writer sees them, this can be more illuminating than a social media post as it actually tells you their point of view rather than presenting something to you and expecting you to react to it.  Social media after all is intended to be a place to engage and be social, although even that I think is a misnomer. 

Nevertheless, I love autobiographies because they detail experiences that I will never have, and lives that I will never live, and they give me an insight into how other people think, feel, and react to events in their lives.  The interesting thing about that as I said above is the fact that we're not as different as you would think, and we all approach things in a similar manner, so often you get to see how things would play out, either by reading and thinking "I would have done that too" or "What were you thinking, why would you do that!?" when presented with the scenarios they found themselves in and how they chose to respond.