I’m convinced it’s not healthy to be left alone with your mind for too long. A lack of an external life leads to an overly active internal life, which for me is just exhausting. Thoughts and wisps of potential writing are tumbling around my brain, yet everything I’d think to write is either far too personal, too embarrassing, or just off-topic. At the end of the day I can’t stop my thoughts, and I want a drink, and if I decide not to have a drink, then my thoughts don’t stop and continue along the vein of the drink I’m not having. I want to write about depression, or addiction, or anxiety, but that’s overshare, and this isn’t a diary. Plus, it couldn’t be very interesting to read.

I used to write fiction. I wonder if I’ve run out of stories, because I don’t even think of them anymore. I guess I gave up on it because the value judgment system got to me. Every story has been told, so you have to find a really unique way to tell it, but if it’s too unique it winds up seeming undergrad-writing-student-ish. I didn’t have anything significant to add, so I stopped. Even by the time I graduated high school, my writing was taking on a first person, confessional quality that I eventually tried to steer away from in the interest of diversity. But I only wrote about myself in my diary.

Now the only writing I do is about myself, and it just feeds into the whole living too much in my head thing. In the writing world, authorial identity can make all the difference as to whether a book is a bestseller or passed on for publication. I haven’t read a memoir that turned out to be fake, unless you count Go Ask Alice, but I wonder if they could have stood alone as works of fiction. Authorial identity is so important people want to pass off fiction as their own stories. They’re part of the narrative. They live as their own carefully constructed character.

Things are different now than they were five years ago. With the normalization of blogging and social networking sites, we’re selecting details to present our narrative, and in the case of social networking sites that narrative tends to be flattering. Through our photo albums, notes, and wall posts, we can inform all those people from high school, exes, and “friends” that we’re doing fabulously, thank you very much. It’s a new kind of narcissism, and if I were more into blogging it might cause me to explode into myself. In Japan, any detail I happened to mention about my personal life was met with an awe-struck, captive audience. “Your sisters are twins? Really?” “Your boyfriend plays guitar?” “You often make tuna sandwiches for lunch?” If I ever was unsure of what to do for a period of time in my adult conversation class, I knew all I had to do was give some details about my life for my students to be interested and wanting to ask questions. I got used to being interesting, and I know for some foreigners it gets to their heads. I still get some reinforcement here, in that whenever I mention to someone that I’ve spent the last two years living in Japan they’re generally impressed. But I guess I’m thinking about this blog, and how occupying the expat in Japan niche gives you a pool of people who will be interested in your writing. The repatriation niche isn’t so established, and I’m afraid by coming home I’ve lost a potential audience. I know that coming home was the right thing for me, but I wonder about my “authorial identity”. If only I were a little more interesting, this thing could keep going and people would read it. Now it’s just me, me, me, reflection without cross-cultural insight. I wonder about possible ramifications of seeing yourself as a sort of character in a life narrative, and I think the insufferable, tumbling thought cycles might have to do with it.

Speaking of narcissism, here’s a picture of my cat: