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What Writing My Memoir Has Taught Me
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There are parts of my life I looked at — but only on the surface. I had two reasons for that. One, why look? And two, who would I tell — and who would even want to hear how deep it goes? So I just dragged it behind me. All of it. Everywhere I went, every year, I dragged it.
Then I sat down to write a memoir. And everything I’d been dragging came forward.
Whether I was ready or not.
Memory is honest in its own way.
I remember what happened. I can tell you the sequence, the feeling, the weight of a room. What I can’t always give you is the exact words. What someone said. The precise line.
At first that bothered me. I wanted to be accurate. I kept pushing for the exact quote, the specific sentence. Sometimes I got it. A lot of times I didn’t.
What I learned is that memory has its own kind of honesty. The facts are there. The shape of a thing is there. The words sometimes aren’t, and when they aren’t, I don’t fill them in. I’d rather lose the scene than fake it.
I’ve lost scenes because of that.
Whole moments I know happened. I know the basic shape of them. But I couldn’t put enough flesh on them to make them real on the page, so I let them go.
That’s painful. There’s a specific kind of grief in knowing something occurred and not being able to hold it long enough to write it.
I keep going anyway.
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The revelations are real.
I didn’t expect the memoir to teach me anything about myself I didn’t already know. I was wrong about that.
There was a moment — someone pointed out a pattern in how I treated a person I cared about. The pattern mirrored exactly how I was mentally abused growing up. I didn’t see it while I was living it. I didn’t see it for years after.
Reading it on the page made my mouth drop.
It hasn’t fixed anything. But it’s made clear why I’ve been the way I’ve been. That clarity — I didn’t have it before. The memoir gave it to me.
I’m writing it for myself and the story.
Not for anyone else. Not to explain myself. Not to settle scores. The memoir exists because the story is real and it needs to be told honestly, and I’m the only one who can tell it.
If it helps someone along the way, good. But that’s not why I’m doing it.
I’m doing it because it’s mine.
And I’ll say this — writing a memoir has been the most unintentional therapy I never asked for. I didn’t sit down looking for breakthroughs. I sat down to tell the truth. The eye-opening parts just came with it.
If you’ve ever thought about writing yours, I highly recommend it.
— Neon