Why I Do Not Write About Myself

Somebody once told me to write about myself, and even though how seemingly commonplace that piece of advice was, it took me by surprise, mainly because writing about me, putting myself in the spotlight of my own poetry, had never really crossed my mind. I always thought one can never be the muse of his own art, but can wait instead, for someone else to come by and make a meaning of them that’s worth the ink or the paint. My poetry caged my emotions like circus lions, put up on show but never realized to their full power, my poetry was always for others to relate to, for others to gasp and awe at how beautifully I could speak THEIR mind (if I could, at all). It was only recently that I realized that in my mission to prove my poetry cathartic to others, I forgot about what they meant to me; on the same note, here’s a confession- I lie in my poetry a lot. Alcohol, for instance. Despite all that I write in the lines of ‘The liquor burns my throat like fireworks, lips lackluster from the liquor lullaby, waiting for the day when love won’t taste
like the last sip of whiskey  and the flood of fire in my veins,’, the blatant truth is that, I HATE alcohol. Despite how I JUST romanticised the throat-burning, at the risk of sounding prudish or kiddish, lemme just say I never found any solace in liquor whatsoever. Maybe the acute bitterness is just an ‘acquired’ taste, and well… I haven’t acquired it yet. I do like the feeling of being drunk though, and how it shuts down the overtly efficient lying mechanism in the back of my head, lets my thoughts flow in an uncensored strain instead, lets me be the most undistilled and raw form of myself; however this whole romanticisation of something I do not like is solely because of what I said at first; the need to make sense to others before I can make sense to myself. I fail to segregate the two lists- of things which I love and the things which I ‘should love’, the things which make me ME and the things which make me the ‘chill girl-next-door’ (because evidently ‘me’ and ‘the chill girl-next-door’ aren’t exactly synonymous), I want to be the cool girl in the ripped jeans with a Heineken in hand going on and on about how excited she is about the Civil War movie, when in reality I am just the ordinary skirt-girl who’d choose a plate of tandoori chicken over booze any day and would probably rant about how much she loves Andrew Garfield in The Social Network, uh, not in Spiderman. I am the girl who isn’t exactly a fan of the fancy/poetic 3a.ms. because honestly I can barely stay awake that late; I am the girl who prefers a sunny day over the rain, because the bright sunshine makes me feel new, while the rain just catches me unawares without an umbrella and leaves me in mud-stains and usually with a bad cold.
The art of being oneself nowadays comes with the very art of taking a risk. When I say ‘leave it ya, you’ll not understand me’, as an excuse to why I do not write about myself, it’s not because I’m some abstract incomprehensible piece of art, but because writing about myself would mean taking a risk  I’m not ready to take. It would mean undressing myself of socially-acceptable facades, it would mean opening my fallacies to unsolicited scrutiny, and segregating the things I love from the footnotes as to why I shouldn’t like them because aren’t really ‘cool’, it would mean baring the stamps of my ex-lovers on my skin only to be greeted with either sympathy or salted wounds; when I say you won’t understand me, it is not about you but about me. And maybe I will write about myself one day, when the very fallacies and stamps and scars become my muse and something worthy of ink; a piece of art, a piece of me which people can gasp and gaze at, and say, ‘it’s beautiful.’