HELP! SOMEONE FROM 1910 IS IN MY HEAD

Words Emmy Hallahan

@emmyhallahan

Lately, I’ve found myself unable to write at all. Getting through a sentence is a struggle, and getting through a paragraph? Forget it. It’s not going to happen. Perhaps it’s cheating, a little bit, to make my column for this issue about not writing, but I promise it ties back in with the theme.

I was recently working with some archivists, and during my time there, I came across a magazine. A handwritten piece from the November of 1910. Some of it felt structurally familiar, more or less - discussion of events, news, all that you’d expect from such a publication. One of the articles, though, felt like someone had crawled inside my brain and started piloting me Ratatouille (2007) style. For a brief moment, I actually wondered if I had written this - if in some strange state of semi consciousness I’d handwritten and faked an entire magazine from the 1910s. I told you I was delusional.

For some clarity on this matter, I always thought my sense of humour was something very modern. Shaped by growing up online, and being pretty plugged in for my teens, and then the (slightly) less online life that follows, where you roll your eyes at what the kids a decade younger than you are saying on the internet, rinse and repeat ad infinitum etc. etc. And yet, here this person is in 1910 cracking the same sort of jokes I am, using a tone that swings wildly between selfdeprecating and self-affected and making plenty of nods to the nature of the form. I’m perfectly aware that people from the past were all complex individuals with their own fascinating lives and perspectives. That being said, it was still strange to see a version of my own voice reflected back at me through the decades, coming not from the words of some author or figure that may have permeated the public consciousness, but from the mouth of essentially just some guy. Nothing is original, apparently.

In my defence, I have never claimed to be original. I am, as a now defunct Twitter (or … whatever it’s called now?) account put it best, ‘the amalgamation of every single girl I’ve ever thought was cool’. I see strangers in outfits I love, and I write down everything they’re wearing so I can recreate it later. I still wear eyeshadow recommended to me by people I haven’t spoken to in years. I eat cucumber with a stupid amount of pepper and garlic on it because a friend of a friend of a friend told me about it once. I don’t kill bugs if I can help it, because my dad once said ‘if you kill something, a bigger version will come back for you’. I hold my thumbs because I read once somewhere that it brings you luck. Even though I haven’t worked at my old job for a while now, I still refrain from using the word ‘quiet’ at ones I’ve been in since - we all know what happens when you do. Don’t do that, by the way.

I skew far more neurotic than poetic, but sometimes, I do just get gripped with a feeling - a realisation if you will. Someone laughed at this joke. Someone played this game before. All that is new to me, was new to someone before me. I wear a stranger’s face and she smiles back at me in the mirror.

The subject of their article, by the way? The same as this one. The author’s inability to write.