I wrote the first draft because I was asked to. There was a box, and inside the box were instructions, and inside the instructions was a sentence that said: Please provide a brief autobiography. At the time, I did not quite understand what “brief” meant in this context, so I ignored it.
The first draft was ninety-seven pages long.
It began with my earliest memory, which may or may not have been real, involving a red plastic cup and the uncertainty that it belonged to me. It included the smell of my grandmother’s living room, the way my father cleared his throat before saying things that he did not want to say, and a detailed description of the afternoon I cried in a grocery store because I could not remember the word for “spoon”. It contained years that contradicted each other. People appeared before they were introduced. Some chapters were written entirely in the present tense because I remembered them
better that way.
I wrote about things I did not understand, because I had not understood them yet at the time. I wrote about being unkind without meaning to be, and kind for all the wrong reasons. I included long digressions about books that mattered to me briefly and then not at all. I wrote sentences that trailed off, and I asked questions that I never answered.
When I finished, I felt something like relief, followed almost immediately by sheer embarrassment. It was too much. It was indulgent. It was inaccurate in places, I was sure. So I decided to rewrite it entirely.
The second draft was sixty pages. I removed repetitions. I combined similar memories. I corrected the timelines. I cut the parts where I contradicted myself, or at least made the contradictions less obvious. I replaced I don’t know with perhaps. I replaced I felt everything at once with I felt conflicted. It read more smoothly, and it made more sense.
Yet still, it was excessive. I imagined someone reading it and growing tired. I imagined their eyes skimming. I simply could not bear the image, so I rewrote it again.
By the third draft, patterns had emerged. Events were no longer standalone; they led somewhere. Mistakes became lessons. Choices became “formative”. I noticed that I was starting to sound like someone who understood what they were doing all along. This was not true, but it was persuasive. The draft was forty pages. I was pleased with it.
The fourth draft was twenty pages. At this point, I began to remove descriptions that displayed emotions unless they directly contributed to “development”. I removed people who had not changed me. I summarised entire years into single paragraphs. The writing became efficient, and I left no room for uncertainty. I began to like this version best.
The fifth draft was ten pages. It read like a simple case study. I used words such as trajectory and outcome. I stopped mentioning how things felt and instead focused on what they resulted in. I was careful not to include anything that could be misinterpreted. It was objective. It was respectable.
Still, I felt that there were redundancies.
The final draft was one page long.
It stated where I was born, what I studied, what I had done, and what I was currently doing. It mentioned my life long interests in a single sentence. It implied continuity, purpose, and coherence. There were no metaphors, not even a single pause. It could not be argued with.
I read it through several times. It was flawless.
I noticed, distantly, that nothing in it surprised me. There was no discomfort in reading it, no flicker of recognition nor resistance. It did not hesitate or stutter. It did not contain the red plastic cup, or the grocery store, or the books that once mattered. It did not contain my grandmother’s hallway, or my father’s silence, or the many years that blurred together without any meaning.
It did not contain me, as I remembered myself.
Instead, it contained a person who had always made sense.
I told myself that this was accuracy. Facts replaced feelings. Structure replaced memory. I had removed everything that could possibly be questioned. The life described on the page was undeniable.
I wondered, briefly, where the earlier versions have gone. Surely they were saved somewhere, that I knew. Labeled carefully and untouched. But I did not open them.
The final draft stared at me from my computer screen, complete and ready. It asked nothing of the reader. It revealed nothing that could not be repeated.
I submitted the final draft because it was what was asked for.
Before closing the document, I scrolled to the top and read the title one last time.
A Very Accurate Auto-Biography.
It was true.
