h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I find it difficult to speak about myself. Not as you might understand to reflect on personal matters but to communicate information regarding my feelings. I am an intensely private individual as is everyone in my family. It is even hard to decide what I should say.

This is a philosophical problem: Can we ever be sure about who we truly are? But even this question leaves me feeling uncomfortable for reasons I have yet to ascertain. I am aware that I am failing I my task of writing an autobiography but this will be the fifth of a number of attempts at what is for me, a difficult matter.

Identity is, amongst other things, a social matter. One knows oneself in relation to others. A private individual thus has fewer opportunities to see his or her own reflection in the reactions of others. How then to know oneself? How to know that one’s inner thoughts represent anything other than exactly that? Can others perceive my innermost thoughts? The questions are relevant. These questions I will grapple with in order to write an autobiography.

Words fracture reality. Silence is laden with meaning. I am a good listener but offer few opinions. My skills are technical rather than political. I imagine a future as a solitary worker rather than as a leader of men. I prefer working quietly by myself to group work. It suddenly occurs to me that I have strung together a few sentences about myself and do not know whether to be astonished or whether I feel my privacy has been violated. I am uncertain once again while realizing I have begun on the task of writing an autobiography.

Others might be able to read me like a book but I cannot be text and reader at the same time. Torture. I smile, knowing I feel a little looser, but unsure where this is heading. Now again I am serious and unsure why moods change so rapidly.

Is anyone aware of this going on in my head?

The irony is that I can find myself too intrusive and we must leave the matter there.

Wow, that was deep. It's okay to be private, though. I'm a sort of private person myself.

I'm just mad!

I like to talk to people, but I don't exactly tell them my life story

Language is a problem. Although we have a very rich lanuage. Language can be a barrier. It is very hard to explain one's inner most feelings to others. Knowledge of one's own self is very hard as life is an ever ending journey.

I hope I making sense.

kat

You should send that in to the reader's digest.

I wrote that about myself when I was in year 11 at secondary. It was an autobiography as coursework. I still wonder why it only got a C though.

A teacher with a grudge?

I know it would probably be ed but it has to be said, the english teacher was a weird old dirty faced who couldn't organise a p up in a brewery.

she was ok actually!

Yeah, sure.

SOunds a bit some some of the teachers I've had

*carries on sarcastically*

Don't you just love em!

Our head teacher has an aura like Darth Vader. The moment he enters a room, a deathly silence falls, broken only by sobbing, the Litany against Fear and the imperial march.

I want to be like that!

You just need practise, the first thing you'll need to learn is the patronising stare, I've used it so many times its unbelievable.

And the ability to look down on people who are in fact taller, and the ability to draw all happy emotions from a classroom.

and the killer, the blank expression.

No, the killer is the voice that'd freeze the balls of a brass monkey.

One can tell you haven't been given the blank look.

Yeah, I get it every day. Usually when I ask a question.

and it makes you feel bad?