Three months later, I had an epiphany. Alice was right. I was, in fact, embarrassed to write in the first person. Somehow, the conventional form of the confessional only added more pressure, stoking hyper-awareness that I was declaring to my old teacher and the whole world that I had a story worth telling. (Did I? I hardly knew.) Besides, my ego concerns were loud. If I were really honest about my feelings, I’d upset people, namely those with whom I share genetic material. I needed a psychological trick, a cushion to protect me from my fears about writing what I wanted to write. In the end, I chose the second person, because it seemed easier for me to say that “you” made a series of bad, possibly life-threatening decisions, or that “you” suffer from neuroses, or that “you,” perhaps, could have been kinder to yourself. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

This Happened to Me: Musings on Perspective and the Memoir-worthy Bar