March 14, 2006

• I’ll try to explain.

  There’s this comment:

  So many of us are reviewing our life. I wondered if
  you would share with me what you get out of reviewing yours. I guess I
  am looking for answers why I am reviewing mine. Judi

  Posted 3/13/2006 at 10:51 PM by jassmine

  Judi hasn’t been reading me very long, and hasn’t read all the memoirs,
  so to satisfy her curiosity and bring some other new readers up to
  speed, I will recap why I started this memoir process.  Then I’ll
  delve into my unconscious mind (what better time for it than this
  incredible Full Moon with Mercury retrograde?) and examine what I might
  be getting out of it.

  I have always been telling stories.  Storytelling is a family
  tradition with the Douglasses.  I have retold stories that were
  passed down to me from my great grandfather Cyrus Dow Douglass, who
  lost a leg in the Civil War and had some interesting times sailing to
  old California before that.  I seem to lack the sort of
  imagination that it takes to be a good fiction writer, so I tend to
  stick to stories I’ve heard or read and the things I remember from my
  own experiences.

  By the time I was thirty, I’d had an interesting enough life to give me
  a pretty good supply of stories.  The first time I seriously
  considered writing my memoirs was around that time.  I was working
  in an office with half a dozen other women.  I’d told a few of my
  stories during our lunchtime gab fests, and someone said, “You ought to
  write a book.”

  At the time, I’d been keeping notes for a few years on a flying saucer
  serial killer thriller I wanted to write.  I thought I’d finish
  that book and then maybe do an autobiography.  I still haven’t
  finished that novel.  It is character-driven, and those characters
  keep multiplying and doing things I find hard to explain, and I have
  always had so many other ways to spend my time….

  Then Angie,
  the daughter I gave up for adoption when I was eighteen, found
  me.  She asked me one day if I had loved her father.  She
  sorta wanted to know if she’d resulted from a one-night stand. 
  Angie’s father had been the love of my life.  The story of our
  meeting was a long story, and a good one.  I wrote down some of it
  for her.

  Later on, that old lady in my dream who urged me to keep a journal, and Sarah,
  who was already blogging on Xanga, brought me here.  This was to
  have been my healing journal, to help me sort out and transcend my food
  addictions.  I worked on that for a while as I was also working my
  way into the Xanga social scene.  One day, the little backbiting
  head games some Xangans were playing, and the various sets of unwritten
  rules that seemed so self-evident to some people and absolutely absurd
  to others, reminded me of the rules and games in prison.

  I wrote Rules of the Game,
  and the response to it motivated me to back up and tell the story of
  how I’d gotten into prison.  I already had part of the beginning
  of that story on disk because I’d done it for Angie. 
  Some of my readers were plainly blown away by my story.  I had
  discovered my own deep enjoyment at blowing people’s minds while I was
  riding with Hells Angels, and I knew that the biker part of my story
  would blow a lot of minds, so I went on here and told it.  By the
  time I’d gotten through that, I’d formed the intention of writing my
  full memoirs and trying to get them published.

  So, that’s why I’m doing this, but what you really asked was what I’m
  getting out of it.  First, I’ll tell you what I’m not getting out
  of this.  It is not a journey of self-discovery.  I did that
  thirty-some years ago during and following the months that I
  participated in the Reality Attack Therapy group run by a bunch of
  abstaining junkies.

  That wasn’t a twelve-step group, but I had already
  found the 12 steps and worked them solo in prison.  For me, those
  steps have always worked better when not distorted by the dogmas and
  bullshit that have grown up around them in AA and NA.  The tenth
  step: “…continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong
  promptly admitted it,” melded with what I learned in group about
  self-honesty and self-esteem, and became the guiding principle in all
  aspects of my life.  I am much more likely to find a valuable
  personal insight through simple social interactions or solitary
  reflection on present realities, than when I’m telling stories from my
  past.

  Hang on, I’m getting to what you wanted to know.  What I get out
  of writing my memoirs has an upside and a downside.  Often, there
  are months of frustration between segments as I try to recall the
  chronology of a group of memories or some detail that seems especially
  pertinent to the story but elusive to recall.  There is the
  nagging knowledge that I’m including too much irrelevant detail and
  that I am practically incapable of sifting out what is relevant. 
  I just can’t judge that, so I write down everything I remember. 
  There is the task looming ahead, when I’ve gotten it written up to the
  present, of editing it for submission to a publisher.  Sometimes I
  console myself with the thought that Doug or Greyfox can do that chore
  after I’m dead, and then I feel guilty for burdening them with it.

  That’s the downside.  On the upside, there is satisfaction in the
  continuation of a project, working toward finishing something once it’s
  started.  There is also the pleasant prospect of some actual
  income from it if it is published.

  [EDIT:  I forgot!  The
  mental exercise, I am told, is good for my brain.  Remembering is
  supposed to be good for the memory.  Thinking, working puzzles and
  playing word games, are all supposed to help delay the onset of senile
  dementia.  Does the fact that I forgot that mean that it's not
  working?]

  But I get an even greater
  reward when someone leaves me a comment and says that the story of my
  life has given her insight into some troubling issue in her life. 
  I have little to give in this life besides my story, so I take pleasure
  in giving that.  The greatest reward of all for me, from the
  writing of my memoirs, is when by my frank and blatant example I
  motivate one of my readers to drop her own masks and shields to tell
  her own story openly and shamelessly.

  “One of the
  most calming and powerful actions you can do to
  intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on
  deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws
  sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires … causes proper
  matters to catch fire.  To display the lantern of soul in shadowy
  times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both —
  are
  acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch
  light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you
  would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you
  can do.”
  from Letter to a Young Activist
  in Troubled Times
  —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD—

  

  ---

  Jeff King could win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race before this day is finished.
  I intend to come back later with a race update.

  • 2:31 pm
  • 7 Comments