I guess since I heard Sheila Heti ask, How Should a Person Be? in 2012, the question has been on my mind. I read it when I was depressed and living through a Canadian winter a long way from home. I was 20. The book changed the nature of my self-awareness. The ache inside myself was no longer an immovable weight but was something to be interrogated. How did I want to be? How did I want to function in the world? What did I need to do? I’ve looked at my time since then as a project of efficiency. My personhood is a set of tools that I can manipulate to almost infinite effects but at some level, my set of tools is my set of tools. There is a limit. So how do I use these tools most effectively? In what configuration do I get the most fulfillment from work, in what configuration do I produce the most meaningful writing, in what configuration do I treat my friends and family best, in what configuration am I the most worthy lover or partner? Even in considering myself as a human, there is something mechanical about the questions I ask of myself. 

I sent a piece of writing to a friend recently for her opinion. She returned it and one of the first notes she had written in the margins was, ‘you could afford to use contractions’. I looked back through and realised I rarely contract in my writing, it is always ‘have not’, ‘there is’. I believe myself to be inarticulate verbally. Many writers feel this way. We write because we’re bad at talking. My writing tends to be slow. I sound out my ideas like a child might, pausing, repeating, returning, drawing out syllables. I need slowness in order to think something through to completion. I need time. I am bad at communicating in real life. I get flustered. I lose my place. I lose confidence in my own words and perspective. I worry I am boring people. I like to write because I know that my audience will feel no shame in leaving me, closing, and folding my words away when they want to. It feels equal. I write it in private, they read it in private, we’re not beholden to each other, really.