Change

by Édouard Louis

I’m twenty-six years and a few months old; most people would say that my life is ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, but for a long time now I’ve been living with the feeling that I’ve lived too much; I imagine that’s why the need to write is so deep, to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it, or maybe, conversely, the past is so anchored in me now that I’m forced to talk about it, at every moment, on every occasion, maybe it has won out, and by believing I’m getting rid of it I’m only bolstering its existence and its ascendancy over my life, maybe I’m trapped—I don’t know.

Such scenes of childhood suffering are among the most banal and predictable that there are, we’ve all seen them a thousand times in books and films, and yet they were among the ones that hurt me the most.

What I didn’t yet know was that the insults and the fear would save me from you, from the village, from replicating your life. I didn’t yet know that humiliation would force me to be free.

had to get away from the past to understand it, and if I wanted to write a chronological autobiography I’d have to start with Amiens and only then tell the story of the village, because I had to get to the lycée to really see my childhood.

I wanted to have her life and participate in this universe I was discovering through her, not because I was more sensitive to art, more intelligent or more destined for that life than anyone else, but because I’d got a glimpse of an existence in which I could have a place.

I’d like to rephrase what I just said: when I met Elena I became attached to a new way of life, to the codes of a new social class, and to everything associated with this class, art, literature, the cinema, because all of that allowed me to take revenge on my childhood, to give me power over you, over my past, over poverty, over the insults, and in imitating this life I was gaining access to a world that had always intimidated you and that you had always implicitly recognized as superior (weren’t you intimidated when you heard the doctor and teacher speaking their refined language?).

(I’m sorry I thought like that but I had no choice, I needed arrogance and violence to rid myself of the past).

I didn’t yet see in this gap between my life and yours a sign of injustice or class violence, but only that I was destined for a greater and more beautiful life.

(I can’t put the images of my years in the village and those nights in the hotel side by side, it’s as if it was impossible for them to belong to the same being, as if the story of my life wasn’t the story of one person through time but a succession of characters who have nothing to do with each other, who don’t even share a name.)

Gilles Deleuze says somewhere that when you meet someone it’s a landscape, and not a person, you fall in love with, a landscape with its own scenery, its own geography, its own features, and every night I discovered one landscape more.

I’d like to tell you how I learned to create the present, to prevent it from disappearing entirely from my life and so as not to suffocate from my obsession with metamorphosis: I walk in the night.

Questioning the violence of the world was not a luxury I could afford, the key thing was to keep going.

read to learn how to remember.

I feel so far removed from writers who describe how they discovered literature through their love of words and fascination with a poetic vision of the world. I’m not like them. I wrote to exist.

I write because I think that sometimes I regret having distanced myself from the past, sometimes I’m not sure that my efforts came to anything. Sometimes I think that the whole struggle was in vain, and that in escaping I fought for a happiness I never obtained.

(It’s the present that I miss.)