Sonya"emie"Singh

Who is

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What is an auto-biography

if not the book one writes

after they die?

How does one possibly began to distil themselves into a 250 word text box on a digital webpage? I try to imagine that I am, in fact, not writing about myself, but that I have already lived a great life. I have made my bed, wrapped up the last cardboard box of framed memories, and left. I imagine that an auto-biography is simply a remembering of oneself, of all the fossilized and forgotten things that I would be survived by.

Sonya "emie" Singh enjoys being where things are not; filling time with thoughts, space with questions, and quiet voices with words. She relishes in the kind of aimlessness characteristic of a murmuration of birds, keeping lonesome company with curiosity. Emie is an old soul, in the sense that she sheds past versions of herself often, simultaneously resurrecting intact and anew like a perennial after a long winter. What more can one say about a living thing other than that they are trying to make living worth surviving?

I am a writer...

...not because I have earned a following great enough to deserve that title, but because I write when I need to keep myself at a distance from myself. I’m a writer when I cannot be a dancer. My naturalistic lexicon embraces the perennial experience of mental illness. Honest and pathologically descriptive, I write to destigmatize, reflect, and challenge.

I am a dancer...

when I feel proud. I am a dancer when my body is something I can trust, feel safe in, and give autonomy to. When I cannot be a dancer, I settle with being a photographer, a designer.

I am an artist...

when I feel non-absolute. I design and photograph when I feel the need to leave myself behind and be survived by whatever creative product I have brought into fruition. When I am a ghost in the machine, a shell of a person, that is when I feel most like an artist; a starving, tortured one at that.

I am a teacher...

...despite all this. I am somehow a more compassionate, empathetic, understanding human on days that are hardest on the heart. Callouses are hardwork's rewards, and hard experiences make us soft spoken. It is always my goal to create a reciprocal environment where my students learn, grow, share, and laugh, and so do I.

Photo by Drew Berry