# Autallobiography: Writing Down One's Other Life // 24-9-21

When you write down your biography, you want to tell people how
you lived, more or less.
Of course you may want to beautify things, keep some stuff
secret, or invent a bit more of the awesome achievements you made.
But in any case, you basically want to tell people what you
experienced and to explain yourself through this.

However, there are lots of things you *didn't* do, although you
might have wanted, due to fate, bad (or sometimes good) luck or
the awful neighborhood bully who always stood between you and
your sweetheart. And I think this also had an important effect on
what you lived, became and are now.
Therefore I suggest to also think about what you *could* have
done, wanted to do, or imagined to do if your life turned out
differently: writing your **autallobiography!**
(This is an artificial word made up of the Greek words for self,
other, life and writing. Of course, "other" could also mean "of
another person", but for that kind of story the word "biography"
is commonly used already.)

Obviously, this can be as revealing as writing what you *have*
done or experienced, so be as cautious as for your autobiography
-- but the big advantage is that you can be much more imaginative!
If you like, you can start with your boring, ugly self, and end
up in a secret agent story, science fiction fantasy, celebrity
romance, or serial killer plot with your neighbourhood bully
starring as one of the poor victims while you ride into the
sunset with your sweetheart.

To give you an example: At a tender age, I was rather infatuated
with a certain Sandra from another class (as far as I recall,
there were several Sandrae crossing my paths while I was in
school), and so I wrote probably a dozen of small love notes to
her.
(Had I been using git already then, they would have sported
several branches and tens of commit messages over several days
each -- hey, it was hard work!)

If Sandra had received the most elaborate of these gems, she
might have thought very favourably and fondly of its romantic
author who proved such an awesome mastery of language that even
reading just the "ands" and "ors" of the billet would have
rendered any being capable of a modicum of emotional response a
sobbing heap wrecked by ecstatic feelings.
No doubt about that.

Her response (after some days of recovery) would have been to
send me (via her best friend who was a girl in my class) a little
timid note (emanating a hint of Jasmine or Bergamot) telling me
that my letter sweetly described what she obviously always felt
but could never put into words.
However, it might not have been easy to really get into her life,
because she came from a rather wealthy family, and her parents
might have been quite protective, until I was able to prove I was
a bright and reliable guy worthy of their precious one.
Being around them might have had an influence on my further path
of course, and so instead of heading towards science, I might
have ended up in engineering, as this would have been closer to
what her father was doing and because he would have become rather
fond of me, seeing Sandra and me getting involved in his business
at some point.

Not everything might have been rosy, though, because after some
time, her best friend could have tried to make her own advances
towards me.
However, Sandra and I would certainly have made it clear that we
wouldn't tolerate it, but we would have kept her close and even
managed to make friends with a great guy Sandra might have met in
one of her Spanish lessons, and who turned out to be the perfect
match for her.

Isn't it astonishing what unforeseen wonders life sometimes could
have thrown at you!?
Provided, as in my example, you would have had the guts to pull
it off; but as we all know, Sandra never received any of my
masterpieces.

Anyway, I don't want to keep you occupied longer than necessary
with my unlived life.
By now you should have understood what interesting paths also
*your* life might have taken if only things would have turned out
differently.
Care to tell us?

.:.

This post was born on a Freewrite Alpha in the backyard on a sunny
autumn day, transferred via USB to an old macMini, saved in a git
repo (but *without* touching Github or Gitlab) for synchronization
with BSD systems, reviewed with the help of ed, and published through
another git repo on zaibatsu.circumlunar.space.