May 13, 2007

• Remedy for Hypocrisy

  Today, wandering around the neighborhood, playing with rocks and looking at flowers, I was reflecting on some comments I have left here on Xanga lately.  It struck me that I’ve been hypocritical in advocating journaling, blogging, for expressing and working through difficult issues.  My memoirs have become a “difficult issue” for me because I’m stuck, and I’m stuck because of the nature of this one particular part of the story.  If I’m going to walk my talk I have to get on with telling the story.

  The next entry or the one after it is going to be protected.  I keep saying that, have been saying it through many months and three or four public entries, and the story just keeps stretching out and never getting to the juicy part.  The really embarrassing thing about this is that it isn’t the “juiciness” that has me hesitating. 

  I guess most of my longtime readers know that I don’t blush and shy away from stuff most people would consider “private” or even obscene.  I’ve got the youthful portion of my memoir up to just about the time when I shed my virginity.  The common term for that, I know, is to “lose” one’s virginity, as if it were simply mislaid somewhere or forfeited in a wager, but I was wanting to get rid of mine for a while before I arranged it.  That’s not what has had me stuck.

  The truth is even more embarrassing than that.  I have been telling this story over and over in my head, and through repetition I have gotten a new perspective on it.  When I started out, I had a lot of buried anger and resentment, and the way I thought about those events, the way I remembered the story, was colored by my resentment.  I have been able to release that.  It is gone.

  Even without the snide and hateful tone the story had taken on due to those feelings I no longer have, if I tell it from my perspective, as I remember it, somebody wouldn’t like it at all.  For a while, I fearfully considered just leaving out one little detail, but if I leave that one out, it is going to have a domino effect on the rest of my life’s story and I’ll end up leaving out one helluva lot of stuff that was terribly important to me at the time.

  I am pretty sure that if I tell this story the way I remember it, and it gets back to the guy whose “detail” I’m revealing, he will want to kill me.  So what?  He has hated me for over two thirds of my lifetime and his, as it is.

  I keep asking myself if I just want to tell the story this way to be mean to him, and I have satisfied myself that it is not so.  It’s part of the story.  If it was a fictional story, it would be an essential element of the plot.  Funny thing is, even when I was pissed off at the guy, I never brought it up, to him or anybody else, because I knew he’d be sensitive about it.  Now, though, it needs to come out because it’s an element in my story.  A number of the pivotal choices I made were influenced by that one little detail.  It has to stay in the story, even if it shows me up for the sort of woman I was am, and even if it pisses somebody off.

  I spent some time on the memoir links today, entering some episodes that had been left out, and bringing the list up to date.  I may be able to drag my feet another day or so tidying up that narrative summary of the memoir episodes I have written thus far, but now that I have reached this decision I will have to write on through that block very soon, or I won’t be able to live with myself.

  

  • 10:56 pm
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