How Do You Introduce Yourself?

On what it means to be a writer.

New Year, older me. I’m back with more of what hasn’t changed, like the resolve to write more often.

Resurfacing after an inexcusable hiatus, I may as well introduce myself (again).

Hi, I’m Richa. I’m a writer. 

Ideally, you’d have no further questions. But surely you do.

A writer? 

Let’s try something different.

I’m Richa, a person who won’t specify their pronouns, even as I wonder what it means to know that one is a woman.

I’m enslaved to making lists, but I’m the queen of analogies (and impressions).

I despise small talk, but I’m drawn to big words. 

I write narrative nonfiction on psychosocial subjects, sometimes foraying into fiction.

I hate opening my sentences with ‘I’, even when they’re about me.

My ideas visit me during my nightly shower or late evening jaunt at a beloved venue in Delhi.

Lately, but especially since the pandemic, I’ve been reimagining the idea of home. And that’s also what I do for work.

Although fairly elaborate, none of what I stated above suffices as an introduction, because it doesn’t tell you what I do with my time in exchange for money. 

Of course, the question is no longer about what I do for a living. Back when religion and community held our collectivist lot together, work was about paying the bills. 

In the age of the individual, work is about finding meaning and fulfilling a purpose. 

The questions have evolved over the years:

What do you do for a living?

What do you do for work?

What do you do? (What’s your brand? / How do you sell yourself?)

When asked to introduce yourself, you’re being asked about the ‘value’ of the work that you do. 

Being a bank teller is not good enough. Being a salesperson is not good enough. Being a stay-at-home anything is not good enough. Anything mainstream is passé; anything avant-garde calls for an almost apologetic justification. 

Back in the day, I would have been Richa who writes for a living. Today, I’m Richa, a writer. 

In my doing is my being.

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Who Is A Writer?

I started introducing myself as a writer as long ago as 2012, the year I finished graduate school.

Then and now, this is how people react to it:

“A writer! Cool. But, what do you actually do?”

Thanks to these somewhat unchanging, irreverent, panic-inducing reactions, I avoid social gatherings. I seethe with envy every time a person announces that they are any-designation at any big-name-corporation. There’s little desire to probe further, because the answer is so satisfactory.

There are no questions about how they spend their time, or their free time (for which they routinely pay a price, and are therefore ‘compensated’), because the corporation is already exacting those answers from them. 

The problem arises with people of my ilk, who dare to call ourselves ‘independent’. Is anyone accounting for our freedom? It’s not the independence per se that’s the concern–because surely it wouldn’t be if I were an independent real estate agent, for example, whose job is largely self-explanatory. 

But, an independent writer? Who is a writer? 

Much to my dismay, a writer is often confused with the figure of the published author. Friendly reminder: a tycoon who authors a handbook on how-to-build-an-empire is not a writer. They are only the author of that book.

At other times, being a writer is commonly confused with someone who is skilled with the written word, regardless of what they write. In those despairing moments, business emails and literary fiction coalesce into the same thing.

Some people go the extra mile, “Ah, you’re a budding writer!” 

An unwelcome assertion that I am always in the process of becoming a writer, and never quite being one.

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The Fact and Fiction of Writing

Growing up, I was expected to nap every afternoon when I returned home from school, because my days started unbelievably early. I’ve always been a night owl, and formal education never had kids like me in mind. All I wanted when I got home was to play with my friends in the neighbourhood, but I wasn’t allowed to go out until much later in the evening. For my own good, of course.

The words of the well-wisher tightly wound around my limbs, I had little choice but to quietly lay in bed. For years I simply hated having to rest my body when my mind was running amok. I pretended to be asleep to bide my time, and got myself a free pass to listen in on many conversations that unfolded only because I was taken to be asleep.

I pretended for years, feigning untiringly the act of being asleep. I had even learnt to mimic the sound of restful breathing that would assure them that this was no act. Sometimes a joke would be cracked in the room, and my nails would sink into the palms of my hand to stop my cover from being blown.

Then came the day, sometime in high school, when life started to wear me down. I began to feel tired enough to actually fall asleep, to want nothing more than to steep into the state of uninterrupted oblivion.

That’s exactly how I feel about writing today. Let me explain.

It’s true that I have been writing for as long as I can remember, but it was no more than play for me. Then came a time when I had to decide what I wanted to be–I wanted to be myself, but that was not an acceptable answer. I lied when I said I’ll be a writer. But even a clever lie didn’t put an end to their questions about my truth. 

Neither bursts of poetry nor pieces of prose will sell, they said. You ought to be a novelist.

For years I had lied about wanting to be a writer, but it takes a degree of honesty to write fiction.

I would complain, halfheartedly, that I was struggling to write, guiltily hijacking the real troubles of real writers.

Real writers would kindly shower me with suggestions that would help instil discipline, but nothing worked, because all I wanted was to say that I will write, and not to actually write.

After decades of repeating that lie, I now believe it to be true. Now, I want nothing more than to write, to slip into its frenzied state, and to string together sentences with a bizarre dream-like quality that can later be edited into making sense.

From faking afternoon naps, I have grown up to truly wanting to write. Much of that urge and the material comes from the worlds that I was privy to while I pretended to be asleep, opening my eyes just a sliver so that they still looked like they were contentedly closed.

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How Do You Introduce Yourself?

Back in 2012, I assure you that no one knew what it meant to work from home. Or what it meant to work for yourself. All they could hear was that I didn’t work.

In 2020, when the readership was suitably primed, I wrote on the truth about working from home.

Regardless of what the contours of my day looked like back in 2012 when I entered the realm of professional work, or what they look like today in 2023, as I struggle with the idea of home itself (more on this in another essay), this piece is about how we introduce ourselves.

Imagine yourself in just about any social setting, just about anywhere in the world. After the inaugural salutations, we must each answer the quintessential question of identification – what we do – in lieu of the question that we can neither ask nor answer– who we are. 

In the age of automation, amid the rise of the creator economy and the personal brand, what we do for work is hardly restricted to the need to pay the bills. It’s a political choice as loaded as any other. Asking someone what they do for work is the newest (or the oldest!) instance of socio-economic prejudice.

We may think that the gauche question, “So, what do you do?”, is innocuous, but there is little that makes a more heightened display of inequity as does the talk about one’s professional work.

Ask the financially restricted writer who’s struggling to publish their work, ask the socially anxious woman who has recently married someone she hardly knows, ask the person who’s taking a break (one that may not always come to an end) for their health, ask the person caught in the wrong job but must struggle to keep up, ask the person who seeks meaning through their work but fails to find it, ask someone who’s just been shown the door. Ask anyone, really. Anyone who’s somewhat self-aware, of course.

To be continued.