The Nancy Who Drew

How does writing a memoir solve a mystery? Well, if you think about it, how could it not? Even if you didn’t necessarily call it a mystery, you had questions, right? Why did I do this or that? Why did this other person do this or that? Why, exactly, was I cut up over such and such?

It is to be hoped that we continually ask ourselves questions throughout our lives in order to know who we are. Journaling of course is excellent at detailing thoughts and feelings, events and happenings, but I think it is even better if we actually turn the pages back from time to time and see what we have written, analyze it. Without analysis, it’s just an itinerary, a travelogue. I came, I saw, I wrote about it.

Some of us have more questions than others. Some of us have more need to ask why. More need to figure things out, find resolution. Perhaps because our lives have been traumatic or upsetting. Those drawn to writing in the first place are those with a story to tell. An event or a series of events that happened to them or to someone they know, which is fascinating or troubling or simply interesting.

What I Did

I took my early life and made it into a narrative. A story. There had been some painful events to live through, and therefore painful to recall. Yet as I worked through each draft, the person I was in my early life became less and less me and more of a character in the story. The more I became a character, the more I became an observer. I think this quality, this becoming an observer in one’s own life, is probably the most important gift we can give ourselves on the path to becoming conscious of ourselves as a soul living in a body.

Why would a Soul, part of the Divine, want to experience pain unless it was to know itself better? Know more thoroughly all the aspects of life? Especially when those aspects of life lead it back to a deeper soul consciousness. I think in order to come to any kind of resolution about the events in our lives, on some level we have to be alright with what happened. We need to have achieved an understanding, and certainly a forgiveness, in order to keep the glass as clear and unclouded as possible, looking at our previous selves with the detachment of an observer.

When I first began telling my story, I had no idea what the outcome would be. What sort of deductions I would make, what conclusions I would come to. And that was okay, because all I needed to do in the beginning was get the facts out. Write down what happened. This wasn’t enough of course, but it took many years even to do that. Meanwhile, the wheels were turning. Another set of wheels turned as well, asking the question I had asked all those years ago. The question of why?

That I found an answer was partly because I was looking, and partly because I was ready to hear it, and partly because there was something I could do with it now. The answer came because I could make something of it now. I could use it, and use it for good, and communicate it to others with this new skill of writing that I was developing.

Answers are always there, hovering in corners, behind doorways, hidden in drawers we haven’t fully examined yet. Just as the saying goes, When the student is ready, the teacher appears, so it must be that when the seeker is ready, the answer appears. The answer is also a teacher.

A memoir by itself cannot solve anything. A memoir will usually turn out to be whatever the intention of the author wanted it to be. I didn’t describe my intention as the desire for illumination. But when I began attending writing workshops and memoir classes, I did think of blueprints. As an artist doing architectural renderings I was familiar with blueprints. What, I wondered in mid-life, was the blueprint of my soul?

So, I retraced my steps. And I found a reason why things might have had to happen the way that they did. A reason why my soul might have chosen those particular experiences. I found the click where all the pieces suddenly made sense. I had to go into the shadows and the dark places, and shine a soul light. And that was when I was able to make something beautiful out of those steps. Once I realized where all those steps led to, there was nothing not beautiful about them.

When I was in high school studying to be an actress, my father told me to “take my work seriously, not myself.” And a few years before that, when I was in junior high, he encouraged me to raise my hand in class and not worry whether or not I had the right answer. “Don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself,” he said.

These were great words of advice. I ended up making a fool of myself on a regular basis, and while I often did take myself far too seriously, I always took my work much more seriously. But that was only after I found a connection to my soul. It was only then that I could see there was a difference between my personality life and my soul life, or soul consciousness, or higher self.

Now, my higher self, my soul consciousness, do you think it cared a fig about my silliness and making a fool of myself? It didn’t even agree with me that I’d made a lot of mistakes, a lot of ‘errors.’ From the perspective of soul, I was having ‘learning experiences.’ Things I thought I’d done wrong, my soul disagreed. My soul doesn’t know from right or wrong, up or down. It only knows love and acceptance. When I visualized all those Xs, those Xs for Wrong and Unacceptable, my soul said wait a sec, aren’t those lines just crossings? Like the way you used to cross the Atlantic Ocean all the time? Back and forth, back and forth. Crossings. Nothing wrong in that!

People have called me brave because I risked being laughed at when I wasn’t trying to be funny. Yet it took its toll, and hence my father’s words to me, because I was a desperate approval seeker. Or at least my personality was. My physical self.

The key, of course, is to come as you are, be who you are with love in your heart, and allow others to be who they are, without needing them to be any different.

Ultimately, it’s not about me, it’s about you, whatever it is you make of my work. This was true when I was a performer and a director said to me, “I don’t want to see you cry; I want you to make the audience cry.” As an actor, I was a vessel for the playwright’s words. His or her representative. As a painter, I was a vessel for the art spirit moving through me. And now, as a writer of memoir, I’m an interpreter. What’s done is done. It’s over and done with. All that’s left is my perception. The memories, and the perspective at which I chose to observe them. Which is to say, I made it all come right in the end.

That bears repeating. I made it all come right, in the end. But that was because I went left and right. Into the shadows and darkness, and out the other side. Seeing both sides, the light and the dark, and knowing they are one.

Just as the X is really a Plus sign too, just a little askew. I straightened up the X, and made it into a +