What did I get?
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”—Maya Angelou
I do not characterize my emotional state before writing my memoir as “agony.” And the writing of my story did not provide immediate catharsis. I was often asked, during that process and afterwards, if writing my story of raising and losing my daughter was healing. Actually, I wasn’t asked; I was frequently told, “That must be healing.”
Was it, though? Healing? I asked myself over and over if I was experiencing some sort of healing. I was not—not during the nine months I drafted the book, anyway. It was a HARD project. I was emotionally challenged, spending hours a day sitting in the past, reliving hard times. That experience wasn’t agony either, but it was closer to it than not telling my story had been.
I do get what Maya Angelou meant. For me, choosing what to tell (and what to leave out), what words to use to convey my experience of those three decades of raising Colleen and mourning her, and what tone to use in my writing (with my “dreams” chapters differing from the rest of my story, in this regard)…all of that shaped a writing experience for me that has ultimately (since publication) moved me forward in my bereavement.
It's hard to say where I would be without having done that work. I would, for sure, not be writing this blog. What else did I get? My story was one that I was both itching to tell and one that I felt, after starting, I wasn’t certain I could tell. I wrote the prologue and first chapter and then set those aside for six months, not at all sure I would ever return to the project.
Why did I return to that writing? Why did I persevere? I had not yet read Angelou’s wisdom about writing memoir. I had experienced a taste of success in writing those first two bits. And, I had a story that I thought could be a moving one. A story that I could tell from my heart. A story that others would relate to—because of the themes in it, not because of the specifics of my experience and theirs. In other words, I had the makings of a good memoir, inside of me.
I love learning to do something new. This was my first experience in writing creative non-fiction, other than a few stories I had written about my childhood in the weeks before writing my prologue for These Dreams. So, after those six months off, I picked that project up again, and I did not put it down for seven months. Then it was done. Then it needed revision and editing and a publisher. It all came together, from writing that prologue to seeing my book in my local bookstore, in just two and a half years. And then, I started to feel that something had shifted in my experience of living without my daughter in this world. It was then that I understood what Angelo wrote and what others expected. Yes, telling a hard story can help to make peace with it.
Prompt: What story do you have to tell, in writing or otherwise?