As I looked at these developments, my teenage brain arrived at a conclusion that everything intellectual was useless crap and that one had to have money and material possessions to avoid feeling completely worthless.
So I worked and made money. It wasn’t easy for a female full-time university student in the mid-nineties to make enough money through intellectual pursuits (that’s the only thing I was good at, no matter what I believed) to feed herself and a dead-beat husband. I worked as a translator and gave language classes. There were no weekends or holidays for me. It was all work, work work.
And I did make good money. When my peers visited my huge apartment and saw my lifestyle, they sighed, “Oh, you are so fortunate! You have everything one can only hope to have by the age of forty, and you are just nineteen.”
I didn’t feel very fortunate, though. I wrote a lot even then. I had a diary where I recorded my feelings about my life that I didn’t share with anybody else. The image that was central to those diaries was that of emptiness. I felt that there was this gaping hole inside of me that no number of material goods I kept accumulating could ever fill.
“What’s wrong with me?” I wrote at the age of 20. (My diary was in English.) “Why do I feel so miserable when I have everything? I must be sick or very perverted.”
And then, one day, something happened that let me realize what had been missing from my life.
(To be continued. . .)
Clarissa's Blog 
The last sentence is a great cliffhanger. Seriously, if Sarah Palin wrote an autobiography, why can’t you with your interesting life? I don’t think now, but f.e. 20 years later with more life experience (*). It would be very interesting both for people like me and American public in general since, I guess, they love reading about immigrant perspectives and you have an easy to read writing style, which is fit for mass consumption (doesn’t have to be a bad thing! It doesn’t say anything about the value of ideas expressed!).
(*) Think one of the reasons people have children is to gain it. Because even if one has a great job and partner, many crave new experiences, which children provide. My mother had a good job, yet was bored in a sense before having me.
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Thank you for the compliments! I surely don’t have a life that’s nearly as interesting as Palin’s, though. 🙂 Not that I’d really want to.
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It could be half memoir and half your uncensored thoughts about world politics, feminism, etc.
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The cliffhanger is killing me 🙂
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I said it before Clarissa: please write a Bildungsroman! Even if you say you are not good at writing fiction I dare to disagree with you.
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If Clarissa thinks she is not good at writing fiction, she should write a non-fiction Bildungsroman! 🙂
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That would be an autobiography. 🙂 (Which I keep spelling as “autibiography.” Maybe that will be a new genre.) I’m glad people are interested! I thought these autobiographic posts always bored everybody but I wrote them for cathartic reasons.
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Actually, “autiebiography” is already a genre: autobiographical writing by autistic people.
(I agree that this series of posts is very interesting, and that you would write a very engaging autobiography.)
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Thank you, Lindsay!
I had no idea this genre existed. Interesting.
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