A Writing Journey of My Memoir Part 1: Where It All Began

We write to taste life twice. In the moment and in retrospection. –Anaïs Nin.

November marks the one-year anniversary of my first participation in a worldwide writing challenge in which the purpose was to commit myself to establishing a habit of writing every day. To do that, I needed a platform that would hold me accountable for this commitment; to show up at my desk and just write no matter how stupid and hopeless it would feel *and believe me, there were a lot of those days that all I felt was hopeless and stupid.

For some strange, cosmic power — I’d stumbled upon NanoWrimo. For those of you who don’t know what it is, the idea is simple, it’s an online challenge to burn through the 50,000-word first draft of a novel in 30 days beginning on November 1 (that’s technically a daily 1,677 words a day for 30 days). I thought this brilliant idea was the only way to whip myself to finally do it no matter what the outcome would be — writing badly and stupidly is better than not writing at all!

If you have been, or still are, attempting to write a book of any kind before you can sort of imagine what a daunting and lonely task it is to turn up at your desk every day, alone of course, and try squeezing the thoughts out into sophisticated words that are worth reading. And this is hard enough even after you already have a faint clue of what you’re going to write, let alone still juggling between plots and other thousand glorious ideas of what you want to write. In my case, I tried to pursue writing a novel with many plot ideas that seemed to be all great that I couldn’t decide which one to go for, and in the end, no great story was ever good enough to be told.

At the back of my mind somewhere buried the idea that it should be easy to write a story that has me as a protagonist. The plot is simply the life I have passionately lived, the characters are the people I already know and love (and perhaps, hate). The theme and motifs are there, the beginning and rising action I am already familiar with, and I in a way, can dictate how the ending will unfold.

Writing a memoir is different from an autobiography in the way that the memoir is limited in scope, I could just pick any particular period of time and turn it into a story. On the other hand, the autobiography will include the details of my entire life up to the present — but both need to be told in the 1stperson POV, and that was my only problem.

How true and how much should I (and am I able to) disclose my personal memories and emotions to it, and how much you will be able to let the world see who you truly are through your story and the voice you use to tell it? The experience is vulnerable almost like imagining yourself walking down the street naked. So I thought if I could tell the story in the 3rd person POV, breaking all the literature rules, it meant I could still hide behind this ‘she’ and ‘her’ at least to get the first draft out and I will later edit it.

After living an interesting 42 years of life, I knew it was the right time and I was in the right place (physically, psychologically, and spiritually — you need all of the 3 to put up with the havoc of emotions that would later rise as you go through your past) ready to face it. Some memories are so painful and still bring you to tears that even thinking would already bring excruciating pain, but writing about it is worse for those images would be a re-run on an 8K UHD screen.

But knew I needed this as part of the hard work of the Individuation process that I am, and have been committing to since I left the external world and turned inwardly to travel to the unknown world within myself in order to reach the integration of our whole psyche according to Jung.

I will share with you the documentation of my journey, the process from scratch ideas of what pointed me this way, and how I learned to listen to the calling to arrive at the threshold of this unknown adventure and pull through the 30 days of agony that later on proved to be so rewarding.

See you in the next post — be happy!