There is something it would be rather ridiculous to deny.

If someone read something I had written and told me it stayed with them, a small part of me would think:

Fuck, I wrote that.

And I would enjoy it.

I do not know whether that makes me a narcissist. Probably a little. I suspect I am in good company.

We have turned narcissism into a kind of moral defect, as though taking pleasure when someone values something we made automatically makes what we do less genuine.

Yet we spend a good part of our lives giving while hoping, somehow, to receive.

We love and want to be loved. We speak and want to be heard. We do something well and, yes, we like it when somebody notices.

Why should writing be different?

Writing and publishing are not the same thing

I could write and leave everything in a folder on my computer. To some extent, it would still work.

Writing is helping me recover pieces of my life that I had filed away. Experiences I had not truly forgotten, but which were no longer immediately accessible.

I need something to open the drawer. A photograph. A conversation. A friend saying, Do you remember when…? A street, a song, a name.

Sometimes very little is enough for what seemed to have disappeared to start moving again.

And when it returns, I am not interested only in reconstructing what happened. I want to understand what I think about it now.

The person who lived that experience and the person telling it now are the same person. But not exactly the same man.

Today I may have words I did not have then. I may recognise something I simply was not able to understand at the time.

I do not resent what I failed to understand. I simply did not yet have the tools to understand it.

When the memory belongs to childhood, sometimes there is even a certain tenderness.

But then I press “publish”

And that changes something.

If writing were only a private exercise, I would not need to put these words in front of somebody else.

Publishing means admitting that I want something back.

I do not necessarily need somebody to tell me, Andrea, you are an extraordinary writer. It would be nice, of course. We are not here to pretend to be saints.

But another sentence would give me far more satisfaction:

What you wrote made me see something in my own life that I had never looked at that way before.

Then I would know it had worked.

Something started with me and arrived somewhere else.

Not so much being recognised. Knowing I reached someone.

So what is the pseudonym for?

Perhaps precisely to separate those two things.

Andrea Morel is the name I chose to write under.

One day I may decide to say who is behind it. Perhaps when I have run out of subjects and need one final plot twist.

That would be quite funny.

For now, I care more about the stories circulating than my identity circulating.

We can want recognition without wanting exposure. We can put something deeply personal on the table and still decide that part of us remains ours.

The fear of running out

There is something that worries me more than how many people will read.

What if one day I have nothing left to tell?

I have had a full, intense life. Yet many experiences have ended up under the carpet of memory.

Not erased. Filed away.

To recover them, I have to look. Photographs, friends, conversations and places can bring them back to the surface. And often, when one comes out, another follows.

Perhaps stories are not a pile that gets smaller every time I tell one.

Writing is teaching me where to look for them.

So perhaps the greater fear is not running out of subjects at all. It is losing, one day, the desire to look.

Because through that search I am not merely making stories. I am recovering parts of myself.

Memory keeps the facts as best it can. Time changes the person looking at them. Perhaps writing happens exactly in between.

Give and take

In the end, I keep coming back to this.

Do we give in order to receive?

Sometimes, perhaps. But I do not think that makes what we give less real.

Loving someone while wanting to be loved does not make the love false. Telling something while wanting to be heard does not make the story false.

And writing in the hope that somebody on the other side will be touched by those words does not turn writing into an exercise in vanity.

Perhaps the problem begins only when what comes back matters more than what we gave.

For now, at least, I want to keep looking. Lifting a few carpets. Opening a few drawers. Finding out what I remember and, above all, what what I remember means to me now.

Then putting it here.

If somebody finds something of themselves in it, I will have got what I was looking for.

And yes.

Fuck, I wrote that.

And I think I have finally decided that is perfectly all right.