Writing about myself in third person allowed me to take a third-personal view of myself; a view which eliminated the possibility of choice. One could not change the past, I thought, reassuringly. It made sense to view one’s past in third person, because one’s past was already over. But then another thought occurred to me, as if from somewhere outside of myself: one could change the past. The past is constantly changing, I considered, and this change is entirely dependent on what happens in the future. The beginning of a story could mean something entirely different by the end. Life, as well as fiction, was made up of small, concrete decisions; lived forward, understood backward; and third person was ultimately a denial of two primary facts of life — responsibility and choice. Also love, I considered abstractedly. A third-person person cannot love, because he cannot choose. Only in the first person, where every choice is simultaneously irrevocable and changeable, can a person love.
Jordan Castro