A fun little piece of Gen Z slang that’s making the rounds these days is the term “yap”. And me? I am a yapper extraordinaire. I reside in the Yappalachian mountains, I am a citizen of the country of Yappghanistan. I would not know how to shut the fuck up if my life depended on it. When I have something to say, I will talk the ear off anyone who will listen, and then write 5,000 blogs about it. Because the words will find their way out whether I want them to or not. The only way to free myself is to word vomit all over the page until I have nothing left to say.

This problem only gets worse when I’ve had caffeine, and unluckily for you, dear reader, it’s iced latte season. The more I talk, write, listen to the same songs on repeat, etc, the more epiphanies I have, and I am piecing together a puzzle that I still don’t quite understand.

The crux of it is the interweaving of fiction and reality. If you’re like “wow, Eliza, you sound like such a wanker right now”, just know that I once started a blog with the line “I don’t spend much time thinking about Italian Neorealism, but—”. I used to be so much worse, I promise you. It is a blessing to us all that I am no longer a Film student, because there is something about that academic discipline that causes wankiness levels to skyrocket.

My best friend and I used to have a running joke that we were characters in a sitcom. Every time something utterly ridiculous happened, it was just part of the plot. There were times I felt I was living in a telenovela or a coming-of-age novel or a romantic comedy, but the thread that tied it all together was that I have spent my life using fiction as a frame of reference to make sense of reality. I learnt how to be a person by reading novels, and it really shows. I read back through old diaries and I’m just like…this is literally a YA novel. But it’s not just me, there were people in my life back then who seemed like they’d been possessed by the spirit of Edward Cullen. The thesis statement of both this blog and my life is “yeah, I know I’m insufferable. But I could be so much worse!”

I’ve often said that I view my pre-pandemic life as fictional now. I look back and see myself and the people around me as characters. The story is frustrating as all hell. It’s like a TV show that got postponed indefinitely in 2020 and never had a satisfying ending. Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on that era, (see my posts On Regret and What Haunts Me About Glasgow? for details), and feeling the full intensity of who I was and what I lost for the first time in years. I’ve got a bad case of yappendicitis right now, and I’ve been trying to restrain myself from writing a third blog in the space of two weeks, because I know it’s self-indulgent wankery and probably much less interesting to people who don’t live inside my head. So I posted on my writing Instagram account for the first time in months instead, and as I was writing the overly long caption, it hit me why I’m suddenly feeling everything so intensely and immediately after all those years: I’ve remembered it was real.

When I position my post-pandemic life as distinctly separate from the life I had pre-2020, the two are not related. One did not cause the other, they existed in separate universes and I did not live through the pain of those what ifs. But lately I considered how my life would have gone if the pandemic never happened, the opportunities I could have had, the people who might still be in my life if I’d had a little longer to rectify my wrongdoings. I read my old diaries and laughed and cringed and almost cried, and I felt it all viscerally. For the first time in years. I read my own words and it stopped being fiction to me. Seeing the Before Times as fictional protected me from the pain of losing the life I had built. But it cost me so much healing in the meantime.

I don’t know how to break out of the numbness and neutrality that have dominated my life in the After. I suspect the answer does involve feeling everything to the nth degree and writing about it until there are no words left in me. Because that is how I have always processed my feelings – at least, it was how I processed them in the before times.

I am so lucky to be possessed by the goddess Yapphrodite, because if I hadn’t marched through life with a trail of words spilling out behind me, I wouldn’t know what was real. I can’t imagine what it’s like to not keep a diary, to only have the fickle friend of memory as your accomplice when reflecting on the past. Memory polishes the sharp edges, turns us all into unwitting caricatures of ourselves. It’s selfish to wonder how people remember me in the aftermath. I suspect most people are infinitely better at forgetting than I am. Memory is the curse of the writer, but it’s also the blood that runs through our veins and becomes the ink in our pens. Nostalgia is a bitch, but it’s my bitch and I love it dearly.

I once wrote that I feel most like myself when I write about my pain (I told you I was a massive wanker), but there is a grain of truth to it (more than a grain, a whole field of wheat. Theresa May is running through it as we speak). Pain is truth, it is visceral and all-consuming. Pain is real to us, even if other people deny the cause. I can write about my joy and my hopes and dreams and the eternal question marks that hang above my head, but when I write about my pain, I feel a profound connection to whatever greater power exists. I find words where before there was silence. Often when I write a blog, both my parents will message me and tell me it made them sad. I’m not trying to make people sad; I’m trying to give my own sadness meaning. I am lucky to have this outlet for my feelings. I am lucky to be able to put them into words.

The more I reflect on the past, the more I question how much of it was real. The core memories that define me have been altered by the passage of time. Was I defined by what really happened, or by my hazy memories of it? How will I ever know? If our bodies keep the score of every feeling we have ever felt, what about the ones we feel in retrospect? The line between reality and my own fictions is blurry at best. The more I interrogate my memories, the more distant they seem. And paradoxically, the more I infuse my fictional writing with real feelings, the easier it is for me to process the life I lived before.

When it comes down to it, my life philosophy is this: everything is nuanced, two things can be true at once. Reality is subjective, and there remain universal truths. I can’t tell you what’s real, but I can tell you how I felt about it.