How I choose to remember my past
As I delve into memoir writing, I discover that accessing memories can be both draining and invigorating.
When I was ten years old, my mom told me, “You need to get a training bra.” I knew my body was changing but was terrified of growing up. Adults were always upset, fretting over something, and completely drained. I didn’t want to be one of them - yet.
At the time, my mind was a vast expanse, a wilderness upon which I could place any thought or idea or image and create something out of it. I spent my time after school holed up in my bedroom, doing one of three things: sketching with colored pencils, writing in my diary, or reading the latest from The Babysitters Club.
Being alone felt safer than venturing into an uncertain world, or among people who were bigger than I was and louder, too. My room was my sanctuary, a respite from the chaos outside of it, outside of me. Because my inner world, though rich and vibrant, always brewed a tempest of emotions. I was intense, emotionally charged, and considered “too sensitive.”
For some reason, I believed that, if I held onto my childhood long enough, I might also be able to avoid making my own decisions about, well, everything. Freedom, to me, entailed finding myself lost in a world that I conjured, or that someone else had invented for me, in the realm of reading and writing. Imagination meant everything. I did not want to lose that.
Imagination equaled my innocence. It was the essence of my childhood.
Once I reluctantly (and shamefully, I might add) accompanied my mom to purchase the dreaded training bra, I knew I could no longer hide in my body. It was becoming womanly, which meant I was growing up. And that meant I would have to shed my dreams of becoming a published novelist and select a career more sustainable.
“Artists don’t make any money,” my parents warned me then. “You know the old saying about the starving artist, don’t you?” Well, no, I didn’t at the time. But they told me, and my imagination pieced together pictures of vagrants and oddballs strolling the streets of New York City, unhoused and hungry. No, I decided. I would not end up like that.
I settled upon school counseling, because it was financially stable and merged a paycheck with my gift at counseling those who were wounded. No managed care to deal with. No bureaucracy of starting my own company. I lost my dream of becoming a full-time author when I entered adulthood, as I feared I would.
Or rather, I tucked it safely in the dark corners of my heart, where it remained dormant for decades.
I never stopped writing. From the moment I first took pen to paper, I always kept a diary or a journal. On the pages, I free associated anything that came to mind, the type of verbal ventilation you don’t want to share (or overshare) in public. But the kind that is cathartic and often leaves you with a hidden gem of insight.
A couple of months ago, I read a powerful quote from Henri Nouwen that read, “Your future depends on how you decide to remember your past.” This became the mantra to which I clung, because I thought my True Self had disappeared, disintegrated into a woman I no longer recognized.
I owe this setback to the villain of Postpartum Depression, which snatched me from recognizing what it meant to be fully human and fully embracing my life. Everything was hijacked: my body, my brain (mostly my thoughts), my emotions. Every aspect of my past that included pain or loneliness resurfaced.
It was how I chose to remember my past: haunting, stifling, suffocating.
And I saw, in the moment I read the Nouwen quote, that this was exactly how I was living: a stifling and suffocating life. I had convinced myself that the arduous task of writing, rewriting, editing, and revising this book - The Book of My Heart - was impossible, a fruitless and worn out child’s dream.
Then, my therapist told me, “I don’t want you to become desensitized to your story.” She knows many stories of my childhood, most of the worst, in fact. And I fleetingly considered her comment before I chose to respond. “You mean, if I become desensitized to it, it will become a sanitized version of the truth, of what really happened.”
“Exactly,” she agreed.
Exactly.
So here I am, choosing to remember my past in full disclosure to you, my reader. I want you to know that I need you on this journey, because it is so terribly lonely to do all of this - to excavate your hardest memories and put the reality of it all into an indelible imprint of words. Because that’s what books are, really. Once the stories are published, they cannot be undone.
I am taking care to remember the wisdom from a book whose title I can’t now recall, in which the author stated that the best writing happens when we have a little distance from our stories, yet are close enough to remember what really happened.
I think I am finally at that point.
I have written the first two chapters of my (first) memoir. It is a story of redemption, I am told. And I am asking for your input. As I write these chapters, I will share about 10% of what I have crudely crafted so far. (I guess it’s called a teaser.)
What I need is for my work to be shared and supported. I took the plunge to end all of my freelancing, so that I could devote my full attention to this book. As I do with all things I attempt, I want it to be a work of excellence. I want it to be a gift to you, to the world.
If you share my Substack with your friends, with anyone you can think who might find resonance or intrigue with my journey, with other artists or creative people, that will expand my network and community. It will strengthen my ability for outreach and connection.
I leave you with a short video I created that summarizes the insights I shared with you today.
Thank you for being here and sharing this space with me.