If you are a writer, and one day find yourself in a classroom with other adults, learning a foreign language, you will not be able to help yourself. You will inevitably—joylessly, even—start to narrate the activities happening around you in the voice of David Sedaris. It will sneak up on you, this tendency, until you are fully submerged in it. You may find that your inner voice has changed accents when you weren’t paying attention. You’ll find yourself giving your classmates nicknames, initially temporary to help you identify who’s butchering the new language alongside you, but then later, because you’ve come to like the slightly waspish nicknames you’ve bestowed on them. “Sharp Italian” will remain as is, and so will “Indecipherable American” and “Serious Spaniard”. You will imagine these nicknames when you tell people how your classes are going.
You will work out who will get what question when the class does the exercise in the book, and you will hope that the question you had difficulty with falls to the person you think secretly cocky, and you will hope that they will fail. You will find yourself watching the pencil-sharpening/page-turning habits of your classmates. You will find yourself watching for tics and foibles. You will see which words they mispronounce, which concepts they find difficult to grasp, and you will make mental notes, or maybe even physical ones, in pencil, in the margins of your notebook, or on your phone’s ‘memo’ app. You will begin to form anecdotes about how “this one time, in German class…” and you will mindlessly start constructing 140-character missives to share with strangers on the internet who couldn’t care less. You will write in your diary and your notebook little bits of information, things that you will look back on in a week or two, or three, but find completely, bafflingly unfunny. You will start to the write the essay anyway, hoping to re-find the humour that you were so sure about a month ago. You will draft it, and re-draft it. You will give it time to breathe, and come back to it in a couple of days, and it will still not be as funny as you want it to be. You will consult your notes again, you will think back to class, you will wish you had started writing this sooner. You will end up, ultimately, discarding the essay.
You will realise you have been trying to ape David Sedaris. That is, you have tried to be David Sedaris. But you are not David Sedaris. You will go back to your computer with a lighter heart after you have this realisation. You will turn your laptop on, and you will start to write, and what you come up with may have a touch of Sedaris—and why shouldn’t it? He’s a big part of why you wanted to be an essayist, wasn’t he?—and maybe a little Didion, and a splash of Ephron, plus a tiny dash of Sassy or Jane. But it will also be all you.
You will finally accept that you are not David Sedaris, and that is perfectly okay. You will get stuck in, and hope for the best. You will be fine.
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