A little while ago, I was speaking to my mother in a foggy, dim hour. We spoke late into the night, which is unavoidable due to the time difference between Michigan and Kuwait. She gave me her usual feedback about my columns, filled with complaints, praise and ideas — all of which I love to hear; it’s always nice to hear back on writings of personal importance. My previous column, Vitam Post Mortem, deals with remembrance and legacies within families, where I draw on personal memory of my grandfather. My mother, in a slightly inquisitive, innocent tone, asked why I suddenly thought about my grandfather, given his death year ago. I was somewhat puzzled — I think about him often, and I thought my dear mother, who knows me better than almost anyone, knew this.
I tend to think about my past experiences quite a bit, as is evident by my many, many articles of the sort. I think about sitting in a handmade cloth swing during my Indian summers — twisting, turning and laughing. I think about the last time I ever hugged my grandmother before her passing. I remember the countless times my baby brother rested his little head on my tired shoulder. The first time a girl told me she liked me. How I felt the first time I wrote a poem. The first time a teacher said she liked my story. The first time I saw my father cry. Notable islands in an ocean of snug mundanity, each significant for one reason or another.
It’s a little easy for me to think my mother knows me best, given our close tie. However, my mother wasn’t privy to most of those seemingly mundane thoughts and feelings. Of course she wasn’t. They never left my tongue. All she knows is what I do and say and the manner in which I do and say things. That’s what I am to most people: action and words. That’s how they remember and think of me, including personal skews of any degree. What’s intriguing here is how my speech and acts vary based on audience and environment. Different people emerge in front of mothers or strangers or editors or lovers.
This is something I have become all the more aware of since writing my column for the Daily. At times, I like to write in a very cold, clean manner, with minimal fat and wishy-washiness. More often, I drift and wander, talking about moments as if they were hearty dreams of endless avenues and speculation. Sometimes scientific and argumentative, sometimes poetic and explorative. While I always try to write as honestly as I can, sometimes I can’t help but feel I’m portraying myself incongruently. Perhaps this is an effect of this intentional honesty. I write myself as who I am, and that often shifts in varying, uneasy degrees. Every day born anew; who knows who I am after I step into my nighttime suicide-box. Yet, I am always aware of this personal notion: Who do I portray? Who am I today?
Following this stream of personal portrayal a little further, we quickly, and rather naturally face up with this thought: How are we interpreted? Being able to write this column is quite an enriching experience. I am allowed to write with a flair and truth not readily exercised in the open. Given this, how must my friends think of me now? My editors? My mother? And what of my readers? Those who only know me by name and column content, what must they think of me? Am I the columnist who can’t seem to make up his mind? The columnist who talks about his mother too much? The one who doesn’t write politics and can’t seem to get over himself? Perhaps one of the above, most likely some interesting union. It is quite the thought: Everyone in your life, regardless of scale of interaction, knows and experiences different aspects of your actions and your words, making their own judgments and theories. A thousand little yous in a thousand little minds, struggling to live and thrive and make good. None have the most complete view of me, to be sure. They don’t have my mind, my feelings, for my eyes are mine alone. All bits and pieces of an ever-evolving whole.
There is some use in seeing how other people see you; perspective is almost always of appreciable valuable. However, it does no good to solely focus on these foreign perceptions. Living for someone else’s mind comes at the weighty cost of your own. Still, it’s intriguing to ponder over.
As far as I can see, the best I can do is to write genuinely, in whatever manner I wish, while striving for a better understanding of what is and once was. Personally, I choose to not deal too much with others’ perceptions of me; there lies treachery and looming tragedy in living for another. They might not host the kindest or the most accurate notions of myself, but at the very least, a tiny bit of myself lives on in another. I believe that somewhere deep down, we all share this wistful hope — a longing that a day will finally arrive when we can stand tall and become something greater than the sum of our parts. Until then, I suppose we’ll just have to work for it.
Bharat Nair can be reached at bnair@umich.edu.