Well this is brilliant. I've had exactly the same experience, above all with my memoir, which I wrote in a way to expore whether I had a nefarious inner identity. Of course, people had already proclaimed I had a negative outer one, because of my historical origins. But I needed to find if my inner one -- my actual self-- was at all negative. What I did find was nothing pretty much, because people hadn't given me the leg-room to act; they were too much on my case about the negative external identity.
The strangest by-product of my writing, though, was that I got to know all about people in ways I couldn't even have imagined. People expressed absolutely astonishing levels of insecurity toward me, always in the form of a projection. I couldn't have been all of those negative things as they were all rather specific and in some cases represented the precise opposite character structure to the kind of person I am -- I AM very, very emotionally dry, which is why I took to writing -- to try to get more emotional flow happening: But by golly, people projected their emotional wetness onto me, and what I saw reflected back was not me at all (which is what I had been hoping), but a reflection of the contemporary Western personality in its different manifestations. And when I reflected deeply about what people had said, I did conclude that those people had revealed to me what was deeply personal about themselves.
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