I’ve never been good at writing about myself. I could easily write a five-page paper analyzing nothing but the technical aspects of a piece of art, but as soon as I have to write something about myself my mind draws a blank. Words change from something being used to describe something external from myself and therefore having no relation to me besides the fact that I chose these words out of preference for them instead of other words of similar meaning but maybe not a similar feeling for me, to something that is necessarily part of me when I use them to describe myself, showing my very essence, and capturing how I see myself at the moment forever, a memory that can no longer shift with my ever shifting “self”, a cage of sorts for any certain memories to be trapped in. I feel as if I am both exposing my very being for scrutiny by others, and caging myself to these words which I use to describe myself. Words themselves have such transient meanings, beyond dictionary definitions, different people have different associations with different words, which will color their understanding of what someone else is saying a different shade perhaps than what the speaker or author is meaning. I just can’t trust in words power to ever completely convey exactly what I mean, or to understand other people perfectly, which is a shame, but there’s nothing to be done about it so it necessarily has to be accepted. However, words not having a 100% set meaning, does help me feel less caged in using them to talk about myself, I’m thankful for this imperfection of theirs. It leaves me to later interpret these words in ways in which better suit my view at whatever moment I come back to them. This personal interpretation that is so essential to words I feel is important to the “Death of the Author”. In that since our subjective views on words give us different meanings from them, it makes sense that what the author means doesn’t necessarily matter as much as what we get out of the words, what we pull from them and put together.