I am delighted, thrilled, yet terrified to announce that I have started writing my autobiography book.
I didn’t want to write at all. I thought that to look deeply into myself like that would be absolutely terrible, and I felt my life maybe uneventful, but my close and beloved ones asked to do it. So I said I will write about childhood and teenage years, but I went on after that – childhood and teenagerhood wasn’t quite long enough, so there was nothing for it but to go on. I found it extremely difficult, much more difficult than writing academically. I have been through exciting and daunting situations, like moving between countries cultures, beliefs and the accompanying inevitable internal change.
The passing of years brings a static quality to ones memories, even though they are living things in a living past. They can be looked at objectively as one looks at a picture. Even one’s past selves can be looked at in this way, so different are the past selves to the self-one now is.
I acknowledge that in all of us some of the basic temperament, formed by inheritance and upbringing and early experience, cannot always be changed, however desperately we may long to change it. But what is built upon the unchanging foundation by our own seeking and struggling, by what happens to us and by the profound influence exerted over us by the people we meet and live with, creates an ever-growing and changing personality. One looks back at almost a stranger: “Knowing myself yet, being some-one other.