When I think about the persistence of this thing called memoir, I understand what it means to write because not writing has become impossible. It even means this blog gets short shrift while I mold and shape and come to grips with what I want to say and not to say. It's the"nots"that are assailing me right now. Say them? Don't say them? Do they matter? Not matter? Those things I forgot to mention, did I really forget, or are they relegated to that deep labyrinth of darkness where they are held eternally? does it matter? Should I care? This kind of angst, while irritating, will resolve itself eventually, and in the end the memoir will tell me what it needs, and what it needs to discard. I did not come to this understanding with ease. It was a slow dawning, pierced with resistance. But realizing that the thing is writing itself, that my purpose is only to shape it, I surrender to it even in the times I attempt to take back control. What I have come to understand is that part of me sees the need to let out these truths to others, not as a revealing of myself, like a purging, but to announce in a meaningful way that throughout this writing it can be seen that we are all knitting the same garment, it's colors, size and appearance all shades of the same experience we call life. How we wear the thing we make is perhaps the real tale.
As I read the essays by others in the now many classes I take at Writing It Real.com, I see how valuable are the outpourings of writers doing their knitting of a similar garment of many colors, and how they wear their lives for themselves and for others, as we unravel the tangles And knots as we reweave the sorry places, as we discover our true colors, our broken strands, our place on the path of the journey.
As an exercise, memoir is worth the doing, if that is all memoirists did. But the greater, and better goal is to bravely reveal what can perhaps heal others just by the telling. Today I am happy in my work. About time!
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