When they find me, when I make it, when I get lucky—they’ll box me in right then and there. So maybe it won’t be so lucky. Maybe I never want to be found. They’ll take me as I am, and then thereafter, I’ll have to work very hard to break out and become anything else. I might even have to work harder than I did to become something in the first place. Because to become something in the first place is just that—become it, and that’s it. But to become something else when you are something already requires an extra step—you must first break free of what you are already, and only then can you start to become something else. At first, I thought only of the social problem: what “they” will call you, what “they” will say you are. But the other, more subtle, and probably more dangerous part is what I call myself and what I say that I am. Because then I will build up an internal identity for myself and start to behave that way, just the same as society would build up an identity for me externally. And I think this matters for my writing. Because I don’t want to be boxed in. I don’t want to write just one way, from just one perspective. I want to write it all. And, of course, I know that I can’t. But I still want to try to get as much of it down as I can. And in order to do that, it seems that I need to stay loose and alone, being nothing more than a vessel through which experiences can pass and in their passing be quickly recorded before they shoot out the other end. I needn’t retain any of their details as parts of my own identity. I need only to study them like a scientist, let my senses record their findings, and then avoid them like snakes in the grass.