The End
It’s my birthday! I woke up earlier than usual this morning from a dream. That dream included a figure from my past, and my early morning mind went down a rabbit hole of thoughts including this one:
I’m not going to finish my memoir, because I don’t want to.
When I started Who You Gonna Believe a few years ago, I did a little research on memoir writing. One thing that came up frequently was authors saying how emotionally raw writing their stories left them.
Pfft! “This isn’t that hard,” I said to myself, digging in for another chapter.
Reader, in hindsight writing that shit was brutal. I’d dive into a story, trying to think about a scene and how to write it only to discover a year or two later that I was ruminating on terrible things not in the chapter. Things I didn’t include in the manuscript, but things that were essential to remember if I wanted to convey anything meaningful.
Then I’d have to think about the terrible things in the context of how to anonymize the written details. Then I’d have to read what I wrote for editing.
However well I thought I’d done, it was not a labor of love.
But I felt obligated to keep going for reasons, and I genuinely thought one day I’d write “The End” and walk away mostly unscathed.
In doing meditation and introspection regarding my anxiety, though, I recognized two things: 1.) writing a memoir requires living in the past, at least sometimes, and 2.) healing trauma requires being present.
Others might be good at moving back and forth between moments in time, but I am not. And so as a birthday gift to myself, I’m just walking away from this thing. Not a quitter, but—as always—a fighter.