The Fight, Flight, or Freeze Conundrum of Writing a Memoir
Chipping away at my psyche
My brain grasps for comfort morning cloud wisps, fractured like ice cracked, but not broken on a winter pond.
The feel of my dog’s soft fur warm skin, rising and falling breath
I search for my ACE score 4 maybe? What’s the word for relational trauma?
Watching the neighbor woman cry and plead to use your toilet because her husband raped her again? the same woman’s 12-year-old son, dead, by gun, case unsolved, but it happened at his home.
A dad murdered his daughter, killed himself. Something about an answering machine confession lurks in the dark cobwebbed corners of my mind.
And, then the Hamburgler. Why? Did she and I eat at McDonald’s once?
Rest In Peace, Jason. Rest In Peace, Carrie.
She was about 12, too, but the year was different.
There’s more, but that’s for the book, the memoir — my memoir.
This memoir stuff is kind of like entering trauma, purposely. It feels scary, weird, necessary.
So, for the millionth time, I return to the manuscript, buoyed by my editor, hopeful, raw, rough, my brain grasps for comfort and begins to trust it’s similar to strong ice — writing will create cracks and slivers portals into the depths, and still, I’ll remain whole.
I am safe. Safe enough.
I’m reading Felicia C. Sullivan’s memoir, The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here, and it’s gutting me. How do I finish my own memoir? She remembers the cocaine, the needles, the train wreck mother —her trauma-filled childhood — vividly.
In the prologue, we’re introduced to Rosina, the writer’s mom:
“These are the things I know about my mother: she was a junkie, a liar, a thief, a woman who made the very best golden-fried chicken cutlets, who tried to protect me from the world and all the people in it, a mother who didn’t know how to be a mother. And she is also the woman who broke my heart. The last time we spoke I remember telling her, You make it impossible for me to love you. I thought that loving my mother was killing me, but I know now I was killing me.”
She picks at scabs like it’s nothing new.
I work through layers of fat. I tried to put off the pain when I was a kid. Instead, I lived a constant panic attack.
I look privileged as fuck. I wonder if I’m in the way of more important voices. Yet writing keeps me alive, so I keep writing.
Dramatic? Yes. True? I think so, though once I doubted it.
Yes, I’m a white woman living in the United States, married to a man. We have a son and a daughter, two kids. We live in a home in a neighborhood. We have two cars and the standard American financial debt and credit offers out the wazoo.
Time to double back.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” the seasoned writers gently remind us.
Time to find a crack in the time portal and travel into cracking ripples of childhood melting. A rearview look into my past. The stuff I don’t want to write about:
- The shame of being ashamed of having a disabled father
- The shame of having an unconventional and mentally ill mother
- The fear when mom was so depressed she couldn’t even answer me and I had to decide what next
- The ER visit for first-period hemorrhaging
- The childhood friend who suffered incest and begged me not to tell — and, I didn’t — and another frightening secret ate into my cellular self — at twelve years old. 12 seems to be an important number
- Moving to California around age 12 after threatening my mom with a kitchen knife. Yes, I did that
- Running back to my mom in Oklahoma when fear permeated my body in California, too
Going back is picking at scabs. It’s messy and I feel the lump in my throat as my fingers stall on the keyboard. The lump sticks and even though it’s my fingers that make the words appear on the laptop screen, it’s my brain, too, and she’s checked out. Maybe it’s not safe. Don’t do it. Not yet. The lump sticks. I get up and pace.
My editors said, “Delve deeper.”
I thought I had.
But, that lump is back. Writer’s congestion.
I didn’t realize the depths to which hurts can plummet and reside, harboring in bones and cells, informing fight, flight, or freeze. Fear transformed to rage to love to what?
Disclosing my dad is an energy healer, an RCT practitioner, my step-mom does psychic channeling, my mom meditates and receives deep philosophical downloads. When do you weave that into conversation? Do you state it in your memoir?
Sussing these things out is part of writing my memoir. I think there’s something worth reading there.
But?
Honestly, I’m not sure.
If we’re being truthful, I’m scared. I go back to playing Candy Crush. Easy dopamine hits for a tired brain. Anxiety, ADD, procrastination? OCD, GAD, Clinical depression? Chronic pain? Myositis? 43?
Why do I feel exhausted? Afraid to succeed or fail? Afraid to complete my first book and shop it to agents?
Afraid and determined.
My intuition is strong. My gut instinct hasn’t failed me. I’m called by something outside of myself — the universe? — Write. Write your story. My intuition is strong. My gut instinct hasn’t failed me. I write when I can or when I must and don’t when I can’t.
Birthing a memoir isn’t easy.
I can’t write the “real” version of my life. No one can. Memory is fallible and how many times will my memories be “wrong”? Does it even matter?
My survival instinct might be stronger than I give myself credit for.
I’ll write the fragments on the page and hope my family is strong enough to survive any weather it creates. Writing a memoir is almost like invoking a tsunami. And, who wants to do that?
Do you know what I’ve noticed about women and memoirs?
Most women writing them have dead parents or their parents are dead to them. Not here. Not so. My mom, dad, and stepmom, Lil — we’ve come to accept, forgive, love, but there’s still the past lurking in the eaves, under the creaky floorboards.
As I write about trauma — the tension between mothers and daughters. Mother-rage, I realize my daughter will have stories about me. Stories like this. This I know.
It hurts already and we aren’t even far into our story.
We arrive perfect and leave broken.
Broken and beautiful if we’re lucky.
Broken and beautiful is the human story.
You might also like my memoir list 📝, or these personal essays:✨ How to Captivate Your Audience When You Write a Personal Essay
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