[Thoughts] #2: Autobiographies

In the 2000s, the fashion was on the blog. Everybody had a blog. And among those thousands of blogs, I came across the one of a girl who never put a picture of herself. She wanted to confide in this personal space, without judgment, without being recognized.His blog was a kind of session at the shrink’s, open to all. An honest, unfiltered analysis of his life, his frustrations linked to the precariousness of his work but also his lack of confidence and his recent love relationship.I don’t know why I liked his blog so much. Maybe to make sure that even a person that I considered my ideal at that time (she made it clear that she was very tall, beautiful, intelligent and fluent in English) was also entitled to moments of weakness. The madness of blogging has ended. This person no longer posts and for many years I searched for a blog of this quality, in vain.Until I came across autobiographies.I haven’t read a lot of them. But the ones I did read had the merit of being quite honest. And written by the author herself. I saw in these people my faults and my qualities. And observing them from a distance made me realize how others might have perceived me, and how irritating and touching this or that behavior on my part could be.I started with an autobiography by Françoise Hardy. And then that of Justine Lévy.These two beautiful and talented women, to whom life has refused nothing, are nevertheless very unhappy. Reading their autobiography, one has only one desire, that is to open one’s window and jump from the 8th floor. And yet they still cling to life, finding from time to time a few seconds of happiness here and there.I want so much to shake them, to slap them and say: but look at all you have, all you’ve done, look at you!If the reading was annoying, I figured that if I was writing my autobiography too, it would probably be just as depressing, and someone else would want to shake me up and slap me around too.As a result of these readings, I was able to rise above my emotions, as an objective reader would have in relation to her book.I made a list of what was going on in my life, and what was wrong. The list of what was right went far beyond what was wrong. And for any item that was wrong, I always found a solution, sometimes quite radical (cut contact with xyz). And when I compared the state of distress I was in, faced with this little list, I smiled and said to myself “all this for that”.