Esse Quam Videri — A Mini Memoir

A short introduction:

This is my first attempt ever at writing about myself. To call it a memoir is a touch grandiose, but ‘Mini Memoir’ sounded sweet, so I kept it. It’s about the past five years of my life, from the start 2020 to the end of 2024. I’ve kept things pinned on academia and my progress as a writer, so there’s a whole heap of other life stuff that just isn’t mentioned here.

Regardless, this was much harder to write that I thought it would be. Ridiculously so. Trying to remember and describe and understand the person you used to be — bearing in mind everything you know and are now — is a weird thing to do. Trust me, have a go. It sucks. But I wanted to try anyway, for personal posterity.

I don’t think this is very good. But it’s been cathartic for me, and I’m trying to get better at sharing. Writing things out makes them more real, somehow, more worthy of attention. And, in the end, it’s just another story.

Fare well, wherever you fare,

— H

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It’s January 2020, and the world has not ended.

As fireworks whistle through the screen, and sleepy glasses are raised from beneath blankets, a beautifully rhythmical year arrives. H is sat in an armchair, knees to her chest, grinning through her tall juice glass. Tomorrow — today, she supposes — she plans to start a scrapbook, to keep memorabilia of this monumental year. Tickets of new shows discovered, receipts of new foods enjoyed, mementoes of events attended and things purchased, acquisitions of a person in the making. She can’t stop saying it: twenty-twenty, twenty-twenty. A year of new things.

Indeed it will be.

She is eighteen, and in her second and final year of Sixth-Form College. She’s studying English Literature, Classical Civilisations, and Philosophy. Because she is an overly sensitive introvert who doesn’t drink or smoke, she failed to make any friends in the first week and thus has since been doomed to solitude. She has spent the past year and a half largely by herself, reading ancient literature and writing passable essays. However, she is not completely alone. The figures of her studies — mostly fictional or otherwise long dead — have taken up residence in her mind. Odysseus, man of many twists and turns, prowls the deck of his ship, restless for a glimpse of home. Victor Frankenstein sits in a darkened corner, muttering genius and folly. Poets and philosophers from every corner of the world hold rapt audiences in their palms with foaming torrents of questions. The constant march of academia forces her to politely ask them to move along, to make room for the next set of writers and thinkers. But one in particular is refusing to leave: Juturna, a minor goddess of fountains and wells, sister of the antagonist in Virgil’s Aeneid. Juturna’s immortality — gifted as compensation for Jupiter’s crimes against her — becomes a curse, when in the final chapter she fails to save her brother from his fate.

In the final days of the winter break, H sits cross-legged on her bed in the tiny room she’s grown up in. There’s still fairy stickers on the dust-pink walls. She should be revising for her rapidly approaching exams, but instead, she finds herself writing a strange poem, inspired by Juturna’s final lament. It’s a list of ingredients for a fantastical potion: stones, feathers, blossoms, venom, fur. An elixir of mortality, a cure from eternal life. She doesn’t know it yet, but those fourteen lines will change everything.

Christmas slowly retreats into its cardboard boxes. H returns to college. Every morning, as she crosses the bridge over the river, she watches the sun rise, painting the sky coral beneath the night’s waning grey. It’s a lonely season of her life. Her secondary school friends are dispersed across London and beyond. She wonders if their dreams are coming true — paediatrician, photographer, musician, lawyer — or if they are like her, barely able to conceive of what might happen after she tumbles out the far end of her schooling.

As she writes a final draft of her EPQ — an extra qualification alongside her second-year studies — she keeps half an eye on the screens in the cafeteria, which display a constant feed of news reports. There’s no audio, and the too-large captions lag half a minute behind. Something about a virus. In retrospect, it’s a healthy dose of foreshadowing. She turns back to her computer: her project is about fictional worlds and how to build them, something she’s been obsessed with ever since she knew how to read. Using her research, she’s constructed a basic world-building template and is demonstrating its use by making her own. For reasons she will forever regret forgetting, she has named it Nerai.

Between deadlines and university applications, she starts to plan a novel set in this world. It’s a compulsion she doubts she will ever be able to shake: constantly telling herself stories to herself about the fantastical. Kings, rangers, rogues, warriors, wizards. She doesn’t think she can survive without a project, something that she can pour herself into, sending herself to distant realms of archaic intrigue. A prince falling in love with the assassin sent to kill him. A band of outlaws and the white-hooded figure that shadows them. A refugee housed by a disgraced lord. Brothers trapped on opposite sides of a magical war.

Amongst those early attempts at storytelling, hidden within tedious prose and wooden dialogue, she finds a boy. Black curly hair, deep green eyes. A youthful, freckled face. He’s been sneaking his way into her stories for some time now, wearing different costumes, different names. He’s never a protagonist, never anyone of consequence. But he is always there, humming to himself in the darkest tavern corner, thumbing through a library’s archives, hunched by the fireside, hood covering the faint flicker of a glow in his eyes. She doesn’t fail to notice him, folding himself into the pages of her notebooks, appearing on her documents, slipping through the keys. One day, she promises herself, she will meet him, tell his tale. But only when she has the time to learn his story, do it justice. Only when she can sit him down, and ask him questions. Only when she’s good enough.

For this new story, though, H begins to plot a quest in which someone might seek the elixir from her poem. A 3000-word plan is feverishly scrawled down late one night before it’s quickly set aside. After all, it’s not as if she’ll have any time in the foreseeable future.

March 2020 arrives.

With a slice of her brother’s birthday cake on her lap, H sits with her family as they watch the world shut down, live on TV. Her A-Level exams are cancelled. Without much warning, there is nothing but six empty months between her and university, during which time the world may or may not decide to crumble to pieces. May you live in interesting times was always a curse, after all. And so, beneath the muffled carnage, she starts to write.

An adopted cartographer, a winged paladin, a mischievous wind spirit. A mighty fine adventuring party. They wend their way through the continent of Nerai as it is built around them, trekking through the rolling wilderness, crossing paths with oracles, soldiers, queens, ghosts. It’s not a masterpiece, by any means. The pacing is wrong, the exposition is heavy, and the characters are culturally interesting but interpersonally flat. But it’s a novel. A book. She names it Project Juturna, after its muse. Those long months of fear and caution melt away, and she is left with 50,000 words of her very own.

She gets generous results for the exams she didn’t take. She says all the right things on her applications. Then, all at once, it’s September, and she’s stood in a room in a featureless hallway with half her belongings, waving farewell to her parents from the fourth floor, and tasked to figure out what life is really like.

Fresher’s Week is a poorly designed website. She meets new people in her halls, and they laugh through the lockdowns. It’s a long hall of sixty of them, divided by fire doors and stairwells. A single case of symptoms imprisons them all for a week. Not that they’re missing out on much: aside from a single seminar a week, everything is online. Their food is delivered on a trolley through the lift like they’re inmates in a high-security prison. They gather in the courtyard in their allotted time slot and pretend they haven’t been darting between their rooms all day. It’s a heady cocktail of chaos and joy and poorly suppressed panic that things will never be the same.

Aside from her unexpectedly thriving social life, she chose her degree well: English and Creative Writing. Joint Honours, and an honour indeed it is. Half of her studies are fairly standard: the history of the novel, critical foundations, days spent skimming the British literary canon. It’s dull and dry and eye-wateringly prejudiced in directions she hadn’t thought possible, but at least her relatives can stop asking her why she hasn’t read the classics. However, it’s the other half that excites her. Writing classes, writing prompts, writing workshops, writing about writers, writing about writing, writing, writing. There’s a healthy dose of fear at the beginning, posting her work on the online portal for scrutiny. It’s demanding and it’s awkward, but it’s enough.

And then, just before Christmas, the plague returns, and it all falls apart.

H goes home. She completes the second term from there, tied to her laptop, the lectures stuttering as the family devices fight for connection. In the spring, her family moves home for the first time since she was three months old. On a mattress on the floor of her new bedroom, surrounded by space she’s never had and now doesn’t know what to do with, H wonders if this was all a big mistake. But she passes her classes. She chooses new furniture and builds a bed, a desk, a chair, a bookcase. She finds strangers to live with next year when the first friends fall through. The summer lags by, and in the blink of an eye her first year is over, and her second year looms.

H turns 20. On the first night in her first rented house, the electrics trip, and the three of them crouch around the fuse box in the dark beneath the stairs until the house flickers back to life. There’s no internet for the first week, so they spend their evenings playing card games and making origami and arguing about whose workload is the worst. It’s an omen for the rest of her year: meeting strange challenges and fumbling her way through.

Her commute is a cold and dark one, weaving through garages and side streets before she slips through the great gates of the campus. Finally, she can explore the grounds, and navigate the new relationships she finds there. Seminar buddies, society snobs, sweary lecturers, fellow writers just as hungry as she is. All in all, second-year studies are simple enough: Renaissance literature, a Shakespeare intensive, Gaskell, Eliot, Dickens. Her essays scrape by, but her creative writing is thriving.

Filled with rather unfounded confidence, she returns to the characters of Nerai and begins to share them with her classmates. But it begins to feel as if her teachers are allergic to it, brushing it aside as childish and escapist and therefore unimportant. But they are not the only ones to blame — for a while at the beginning, H herself avoided it out of shame, wondering if it was all just something she needed to outgrow. Everyone else’s writing is gritty and political, saturated with death and disease and the monotony of modern life. Her professors and peers will pour out ceaseless praise for tortured protagonists captured in brutalist detail, but will sigh defeatedly at something slightly more fictional than usual.

Eventually — thankfully — she resolves to take the leap, and tries and garner some semblance of courage on the way. And yes, to begin with, the workshops are painfully quiet. But something strikes her fairly quickly when faced with the embarrassed silence of students unwilling to engage with her work. To be looked down upon, you must be below. But escapism is necessary and glorious, especially in times like these: it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

She reads the feedback on her pieces feverishly. The numbers on her marked assignments slowly tick upwards: 62, 65, 72, 68, 75. Her poetry — often mythical and strange as she explores new styles — is praised for its sharp, fresh imagination. When she submits a short story about a fisherman who finds a rusted idol of a long-forgotten god, her professor tells her it is good enough to publish. It’s the final spark of confidence she needs. For her final fiction submission of the year, she re-writes the first chapter of her lockdown novel and braces herself. But aside from the odd remarks of a lecturer who evidently doesn’t care for her genre of choice, it does well. Very well. A glimpse of hope, then.

A third and final year dawns. It’s the most overwhelmingly brilliant year of her life. A new house, new housemates. A new commute. She meets more people, reads more philosophy, specialises in Children’s Literature. She plays Dungeons & Dragons with groups of strangers. She writes essays about Socrates and metaphors and orphans and Beowulf and maps and philology and history and memory. She learns how to format screenplays, and writes one that gains her the highest mark she will ever achieve: an 82. H finds her people, S and I and C, folks who embrace the wonderful and the weird, the sweeping soundtracks of worlds beyond their own. She meets with them every week in a room they shouldn’t be in, and they pore over each others’ work, leaning between laptops, panning for gold.

Amongst the flurry of it all is the opportunity she’s been waiting for: a year-long project, ten thousand words. An idea has been brewing in the back of her mind, plucked from a single off-handed line from her final piece the previous year. A travelling songstress, a lyre of bone, a wide-eyed apprentice, and a song of a great city’s downfall. Perhaps it’s how she imagines herself: a lonely wanderer in unfamiliar lands, ceaselessly sharing the kinds of tales that others have forgotten.

H begins to write. Two narratives — one of the storyteller, the other of the story she tells — lace together, finding echoes in each other. A perfect twist nestles between them. She’s never written anything like this: a story with a grand secret, a great reveal. It makes her heart soar in a way she can’t explain. She drafts and redrafts, and crafts her paragraphs as carefully and beautifully as she can. It’s stunning to watch her practice change before her eyes: she used to think of titles first, before plot or character or in fact anything of substance. Now she can’t name the thing to save her life. Project Opal is typed into the Save As screen, and she almost forgets to change it at the end. It’s the best thing she’s ever written, and she cries when it’s done.

And then, to neatly bookend her academic career, another disaster: strike action. She sits an exam she knows will not be marked, hands in essays she is certain will not be looked at. Her dissertation, her final piece, the single story she’s been striving to tell for the past year, will never be read.

Results day comes and goes. The online results portal, the loading bar aching with the weight of thousands of desperate eyes, reveals that she has passed. Nothing more. Her final grades are blank. Her classification is empty. Perhaps it was all a waste.

A week later, a flurry of texts through the phone from her course-mate, C. She checks the page again, three years of anxiety flooding her bloodstream. And suddenly, there it is. First Class Honours. Three years in exchange for three words.

Graduation Day 2023 is more catharsis than celebration. Their laughter is tight with relief, grinning madly at cameras as they wish each other good luck and declare good riddance to the rest. H almost passes out for stress as she queues with her fellow graduates, but when her name is announced she remembers to don her cap and shake the Dean’s hand and murmur a quick thank-you and keep her head raised as she walks down the steps. And, just like that, it’s all over.

It’s a perfect, lazy summer. She takes a trip abroad with her family — a fortnight of rural poolside tranquillity. Finally released from the shackles of required reading lists, she devours the books she’s been gathering during her studies. Her record still stands: three books in two days. She starts drawing again, writes indulgent poetry, makes things for the sheer joy of it.

Then, in the back seat of the car at the Calais terminal, the public internet finally flickers through. Half blinded by the setting sun, H blinks at her laptop, trapped between her stomach and her knees, legs hitched up against the back of the driver’s seat. An email arrives. There’s feedback on her final piece, it says. Project Opal. A moderator, from another university, has pulled through. And there, beneath her submission, sit two paragraphs of the most sincere, kind, heartfelt praise she could have ever dreamed of. The question is finally answered, the quest resolved: was it worth it? Indeed it was. Every single second.

Then the real world comes knocking. H flounders for a few months, hanging on email threads and rambling her way through job interviews. A constant state of dread worms its way through her veins, every fear she’d ever had about adulthood finally manifesting. But she starts taking small steps to build the cornerstones of a normal life. Between sending inquiries and scrolling through job sites and staring numbly at application forms, she reaches out to old friends, rekindles camaraderie in the solitude of young adulthood. Inspired by the talented T, she starts a blog, just for herself and a few trusted pairs of eyes. After months of inactivity, it feels good to flex her critical muscles, to keep the scholarly scraps of her mind alive and kicking. She still can’t quite let go of academia, it seems.

She finds her first job at a local primary school, beginning in November. It’s not her dream, but it’s a start. In her final days of freedom, before her waking hours are once again commanded by the fetters of education, she finds a face she’d almost forgotten about, buried in her summer sketches. A freckled boy, with dark curls and a strange smile. His hair has grown long and unkempt, his emerald eyes crackling with anticipation. Her old promise is palpable in his hands.

And so, in those final days, H plans Project Pine.

It’s both incredibly easy and devilishly difficult. Hundreds of fragments of ideas have been building up around him for the past six years, and sorting the wheat from the chaff is more time-consuming than she’d hoped. But soon, with the care she had always hoped she could provide, a vague semblance of a story emerges. Six parts, each led by a different narrator, each knowing him by a different name. If even the minimum projected word count is reached, it’ll be 100,000 words long. It’s overwhelmingly enormous. Her own words come back to bite: only when she’s good enough.

November blows in, in all its frigid glory. She survives the first day of her job. The first week, the first month, the first half-term. It’s demanding in directions she hadn’t anticipated: suddenly, the numbers stamped on her essays and translations and poems and scripts are worthless. What matters is her work ethic, her tone of voice, her problem-solving. It matters if she can keep an eye on thirty pairs of hands at once. It matters how she holds herself, how she speaks to colleagues, and how well she can communicate an idea to a group of nine-year-olds. It’s utterly exhausting, but she learns more about herself in those six weeks than she has done for a long time.

But there’s no room for anything else. H tries to put her hand to Project Pine, but the stakes are too high. It has to be perfect. She’s struggled to write anything of substance since graduation, and for a while, she wonders if it was just a fluke, a one-hit wonder.

Festive chaos reigns in the final week of term. H leaves for the winter break with an armload of handwritten Christmas cards and collapses on the sofa face-first. She has two weeks to recover, to smile at her family members and tell them it’s all going great, thanks, before she faces an agonisingly long full term in the new year. That first night, wide awake in shell-shocked fatigue, she wonders if she’ll ever have the energy to write a single word again. She’s being melodramatic, of course, but the thought sticks. Something has to give. She can’t rely on the whims of teenage inspiration anymore. No looming weekly deadlines are there to crack the whip, to keep her fingers scuttling across the keys. There are no numbers or grades or online viewership to reward her for her efforts. If she wants to write, she has to make herself write. If she wants any of it to matter, she has to make it matter. On her own terms, in her own time.

A test, then. A challenge. Something manageable, malleable. She pencils in some maybes — a first draft of Pine, some blog posts, a short story or two — but in the end she keeps the resolution simple. To write every single day, for an entire year. A leap year, no less. She would love to have the courage to devote every single word to the novel, but she knows herself too well. Her imagination is still slippery and fickle — with the internet in her pocket, new hyper-fixations are a few taps away, and she’ll be frantically devising new projects before the challenge can even begin. In fact, that’s exactly what happens, a week or so later. It’s nothing more than a tableau: a winged warrior trekking through the rain, the warm haze of a town on the horizon. But she pursues the thought anyway and arrives at an outline of a short story.

Already, she’s getting distracted. She takes a breath. Keep the premise vague, but the goalposts firm. Write, every day. No exceptions. Whether she is gripped by the muse and the paragraphs flow with ease and grace, or if all she can muster is a single, scrappy sentence. A Year of Words. Nothing more, nothing less. Just words. Lots of them, hopefully. Of questionable quality, most likely. But words all the same.

She starts Project Rook on New Year’s Day, 2024. Upon later reflection, it’s an accidentally perfect plan. Not only does a fresh story give her challenge an incredibly strong start — over 10,000 words in the first month — but it acts as a practice piece. The doubts that have always gnawed at her brain are faced head-on, and by early February she has a first draft. Then, during the spring half-term, after some final panicked planning, Project Pine finally begins.

She works on Pine for four months straight. A routine falls into place: wake up, walk to work, survive the day, catch the bus home, unwind with a game or two, then eat, write, and sleep. Nerai begins to unfold, finally able to flourish within the story it was built for. In the beginning, progress is tough but steady. Part I stretches from mid-February until the end of March. It’s far from what she wants it to be, but reading back her own wonky prose is far more valuable than wasting time perfecting sentences she’ll ultimately rewrite. April and May produce Part II — a much smoother journey, with characters she’s known for years running amok in a setting she knows like the back of her hand. But by mid-June, as the summer creeps in, her momentum has started to flag. Ultimately Part III, the most emotionally complex and thematically challenging act, proves to be too much. She labours fruitlessly for the first half of June, before deciding to switch her focus. She writes for the blog, composes some in-universe poetry, and slowly chisels out the finer details of the world in preparation for later sections. Then — because she’d almost forgotten about it — she returns to Rook, and the spark of that success fuels a second draft through July. By the middle of August, sat in a wicker garden chair in the south of France, Rook is feeling solid, and after a week of furious editing, she has a completed short story.

Allowing herself some grace for the beginning of September — a new classroom, a new teacher, thirty new lives to familiarise herself with — she eventually decides to bite the bullet and return to Part III. After two months and half a dozen restarts, all against the backdrop of a fairly harrowing first half-term, she has a finished attempt. She sets her hand to the next part for a single day before being sidetracked by a shiny new idea. Project Fringe — an anthology of scenes comprising a modern love story — carries her through November. It’s a well-needed refresher, a new arsenal of aesthetics to play with.

In December, she finishes a five-part anthology for Fringe, and finally finds the strength to get a foothold back in Pine. By the time she hits the phantasmal week between Christmas and New Year’s, she’s written over one hundred thousand words, and the year draws to a close.

New Year’s Eve. In 2024, she writes a total of 112,017 words. She keeps staring at the number, feeling its weight in her brain. As a gift to herself, a grand reward, she gets a copy of Project Opal printed in paperback, and when it arrives she holds it to her chest like a child. It’s only sixty pages long, skinny and small on her shelf, but there’s a spine and page numbers and a cover with her name on it, and it’s all she’s ever wanted.

Esse Quam Videri. To be, rather than to seem. It was her university’s motto, which she didn’t really pay heed to until she’d left. She’s wanted to be a writer her whole life, but it never was a dream. It was never a grand, unreachable career, filled with fame and fortune. It’s a skill, a habit, a daily practice she just had to sit down and start. And now, at twenty-three years old, as she rings in the new year on the sofa once more, she’s never felt more ready to be. Maybe she’ll try a scrapbook this year. After all, she had planned to try and take a break from writing in 2025, to let the ferocity of a year-long streak mellow out into something more realistic. Secretly, she doubts she’ll be able to stop. She doesn’t remember not having the instinct to record, to keep, to collect and hoard her memories, to document her life. But it’s been quite the journey these past five years, filled with failures and victories and sorrows and detours and joys and thorns, and a handful of good stories to tell.

As H sits in front of her laptop, resting her chin on her knuckles, it occurs to her that maybe she should write it all down.

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