Why I have to write my story:

because even if it comes out all wrong, that's better than being inside, hidden, and all wrong

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

On the way home from visiting a dear friend, yesterday, I listened to an old podcast, Big Magic with the author, Elizabeth Gilbert. In this podcast, with episodes she created after the publication of her book, Big Magic, she encourages people to create, to produce art, without allowing fear to paralyze them.

I need to hear these words. And listen to them, again and again.

Because fear has stopped me from writing. The oppressive voice of the perfectionist, the imposter syndrome, the crippling anxiety that I can’t do it—as in write my memoir. I can’t tell the story well enough. It won’t be good enough, and I’m not good enough at writing.

This perhaps may seem funny because, after all, I pound out these newsletter posts pretty regularly and without much effort and thought into them. I am blessed to read and write very quickly.

It’s a mental hurdle, undoubtedly. But when it comes to putting the stories all together in my memoir, I’ve faced a mental hurdle, imposed upon my own self.

But I have to do this. Why? Because since I haven’t, as I don’t, it still continues to haunts me.

As Elizabeth Gilbert pointed out the other day, these stories need to come out. And because I truly do feel ‘haunted’ when I’m not writing, I know that this is something I have to do.

I have to do it for me, to journey through my story, as I reflect back on it and therapeutically address what happened to me, to name it, and because this is how I process.

I also have to do it because stories are what saved me. They were my tools, my ticket through, my survival, when I didn’t think that I would make it through the tragedies of my family’s story. Stories of grief and loss powered me through—validation and verification that other people had made it through the worst experiences of their lives, of the unimaginable.

I have also endured my unimaginable.

I also have to write my story because I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t. As I wrote about previously, my mother gave such wonderful advice, but was unable to follow it for herself.

I need to grow beyond that.

As a Writing professor for nearly two decades, and someone who holds a doctorate in Rhetoric and Writing, I know how to teach writing. I know how to do it. I know that it is messy and requires a lot of time to get to that final finished, polished piece:

First you’ve got to get the shit down before you can then polish it into the gold. I tell my students these important lessons, of how to cultivate good practices in writing and improve upon their own composing skills, all the time.

I need to do it now. To heed my own advice.

Because, as was discussed on the podcast the other day:

These stories need to come out. They are begging for attention. They have to be told. They will not rest until you do that, until you tell them.

No truer words have ever been spoken, and ones that so well describe my experience— and what I have known for the past two years—ever since I started writing this newsletter, about exactly two years ago. Probably even before then, when I realized that there were no other stories (that I could find) with an individual with more than one suicide in the nuclear unit.

I knew then that I had to tell my stories.

As I told my friend the other day, and I frequently tell my students—

Everyone has a story worth telling.

We need all sorts of different stories in the world, of humanity, of how to do this life and carry on through unimaginable losses.

But we especially need survivor stories. We need people who stand on the other side of a living hell, and are yelling back to those in the thick of it—

You’ll get through this. You can make it. Keep going. Don’t give up. It won’t always hurt this much; it won’t always be this bad.

I ponder this as I think about a classmate from my high school alma mater who just passed, after a battle with mental illness, leaving behind three younger children.

And, I think about if I would still be here without my lifelines, without my mother. I am so thankful for the words of my dearest mama when she had to reassure me—you won’t always feel this way, when I was hanging on by a thread, severely chemically ‘off’. Some neuro-transmitter not working well or not enough of this hormone or that one, or perhaps too much of this one of that one.

Stories from survivors can truly become the difference in life and death. And as suicides (active and passive), self-neglect, and deaths from active addiction continue to rise dramatically, we need other people to extend their stories, their experiences, extend the grace to another, in admitting our vulnerabilities, our hurt and grief, pain and shame, but to hold them up as examples of how—

They made it through this, or that.

Because it then translates into—

So, then, perhaps, so can I.