Why write memoir now?

How a shit ton of therapy and a startling mental health diagnosis culled the ground for writing now (some of the time)

Have you ever opened a birthday gift and felt a slight gut punch?

Six or seven years ago, a good friend sent me a copy of The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr. The very idea of reflecting on my life and writing about it left me with a lump in my throat.

When I called to thank my friend, she said, "Well, you mentioned you were ready to start writing about your life, and this lady has great reviews."

Did I really say that?

It sounded like she was referring to someone else, but I feigned excitement—Wow, this is such an incredible gift! Can't wait to dive in!—even though I wanted to toss it right in the rubbish bin.

Because that's what writing memoir is: it's absolute rubbish.

And no book was going to drag the truth out of me without a lot of coaxing and both regular and alcohol-induced dissociation.

Ms. Karr's book sat on the shelf for a few years before I picked it up and read it like a hot potato bouncing in my hands—close enough to read, but not so close that I went up in flames.

I read through the first 15 pages and scanned the rest of the chapters to write down some writing prompts that had some promise.

In that short while, Ms. Karr made a convincing case for not writing memoir, and I took her seriously.

She basically said that if writing memoir makes your life come crashing down, it's not worth it.

So I ignored this book for the rest of the days, pretty much.

Maybe the job of a writer is to confuse herself before making sense of something for everyone

Somewhere around 2016 I got the sense that I was maybe just a little bit chicken shit about writing.

I vacillated so, so much.

I had rapid, ascending moments of inspiration and then they would poof into thin air—sometimes even mid-sentence. It was as if even holding certain ideas in my mind was too dangerous.

The thing is, my experience with professional writing and editing and those of my personal writing couldn't be more opposite. By this point in my career, I'd been an editor on some pretty cool books and important projects, including a piece of software for a client whose name can't be mentioned because yatta yatta NDA blah blah. I also had ghost-written for experts, interviewed CEOs and edited the work of folks that pharmaceutical regulatory bodies actually listen to. There was nothing I couldn't learn, master and make better with my editor's pen.

Over time, though, I began to feel dizzy from the finite nature of being a copyeditor. I felt as thought I was only ever walking around the edges of a writer's motivation and the depths that they're able to reach. My work felt as though it started and stopped with sentence structure. I could challenge the premise of a piece or an unsubstantiated source, but I wasn't reaching any writer in what I would consider a meaningful way.

Instinctively, I knew what this meant. It was time to sit down and be a student again.

For all my trying and forcing and admonishments from NaNoWriMo bullies, I couldn't pull much of anything out. I had a website—with all the right SEO and marketing smarts I’d learned from my time as an online content manager. And even here I started and stopped all sorts of things that danced around memoir: Writing prompts! Reading your writing out loud! Running an online sensory shop! Subconsciously I was saying:

I'll do anything as long as you don't make me write about my goddamn life.

The only thing that eventually calmed this agitation was surrendering to the nothingness I felt around being a writer.

I felt nothing, as evidenced by all the busyness I tried to cram into spaces where I secretly longed to write. (I mean, for a little more than a year I ran an online sensory store! I built an ecommerce website, designed marketing and business plans, bought and managed inventory. I’m proud to say I broke even on investments and sales in the end. I know I learned a lot—and at the exact same time I have to laugh just a little. That’s some genuine writing avoidance.)

OK, I won't pretend to write, I said.

I decided I wouldn't spin up new courses or blogs for my website (or ecommerce stores??). Because I knew that at the core of my avoidance was some level of dishonesty. And I don’t like liars. And I’m not a liar. So I decided to let everything go—like a newly freed bird—and see what, if anything about my writing, returned.

A mental health diagnosis really shook things up

In 2019, I experienced two second-trimester miscarriages I don't care to do the math on. I said goodbye to my second daughter on Christmas Eve and instinctively knew from my work with intuitive eating and embodiment that I needed therapy. Like, the real stuff. Not the kind that you go to for a few weeks.

I met Maggie and began weekly therapy sessions in January 2020, and we still meet weekly today. A psychotherapist, Maggie specializes in a type of trauma therapeutic modality called Somatic Experiencing. I sometimes describe it as "in the same family as EMDR, but much gentler."

She also has additional training in dissociative disorders, which I thought was curious at the time we started working together, but didn't think too much about. I knew just a little bit about dissociation—as far as my family had joked about my father dissociating and "talking to the voices in his head." Haha! Dad doesn't engage with reality. So hilarious!

About 18 months into working with Maggie, we had been working on some of my trauma-related, dissociative tendencies and healing a lot of things from two sudden miscarriages and all the bodily coping mechanisms those experiences bring.

Then one summer night, things changed.

After a semi-heated argument with my husband, I heard a voice in my mind urging me to crawl through a guest room window and run up the mountain our house is built on.

I ran to my husband, crying, confused and stopped him just as he was climbing into the car. I asked him not to leave to drive off some steam. Another voice was suggesting I might hurt myself, and I told him as much.

When I walked into our bathroom upstairs and looked at myself, I felt like I was in a hall of mirrors. My eyes spun in circles. I didn't know where I was. Who is that in the mirror? Is that me?

At this point, I don't remember how I did this, but I sent Maggie an email and described everything that was happening. We spoke first thing the next morning.

And that's when she introduced me to a new term called "depersonalization." It's one of a handful of coping mechanisms that kick into gear when a person's nervous system perceives that something is too dangerous to survive. Depersonalization is when you can't recognize yourself or your surroundings—it feels like an out of body experience. It's one of five specific criteria required for a formal diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder.

So, I'm crazy.

And she said, Hardly.

She explained that the mind is always watching for what creates a threat to safety. And it can get really creative when a child experiences ongoing environments that are emotionally, mentally or physically unsafe.

If a child expresses a preference for a drink at dinner and is met with loud yelling and emotional bullying, the child's personality can eventually, over time, fragment and erase anything related to speaking up for themself. It’s not that the “bad” behavior is now cured and turned into a better, more pleasing behavior—it just disappears. If this goes on for years, the mind will go to extraordinary lengths to survive. It will shut down, it will hide whatever behavior was "unsafe" and the child will essentially walk around with waking memories and instincts hidden in their psyche.

Your brain was protecting you so you could survive, she said.

As we spoke, she explained that based on the last year+ of working together, our therapeutic model was going to shift.

Essentially with this "depersonalization" episode, I had ticked the last box for DID, as the other four criteria I'd been consistently exhibiting for a long while.

What does all this have to do with writing memoir?

As someone with DID, I'm more or less at the mercy of trapped doors in my mind. And I want you to know that upfront as a paid subscriber. If the trapped doors close, I don't always have a way to coax them open. When this happens, I'm usually able to share what's happening, and I lean into writing poetry a lot.

These doors open and slam shut at will a lot (amnesia is a common challenge with DID and something I plan on exploring over time). Walking into new territory (like a paid Substack) has to be done as gently as possible. I understand now that I talk to myself about myself as an established coping mechanism. All the voices are me, they're just hanging out in different parts of my brain because that's what's kept us safe so far.

For the sake of my Substack, I want to share that shifting between parts of myself—let's say between my editor side and my writer side—can become quite distressing. Because instead of dancing together and taking turns and drawing seamlessly from memories and knowledge, my writer side lives in a locked room, tucked safe away. And my editor side is in a separate room. The two haven't interacted with peaceful coexistence until just the last couple of weeks when I first sketched an outline for a series on mending*, which I'll be sharing with both my free and paid subscribers:

This mending series is serving as a guiding light/launching point for the structure of my memoir:

Volume 1: Repairing relationship with God

Volume 2: Repairing relationship with Self/Body

Volume 3: Repairing relationship with Identity

What's most important to me on the paid subscriber side of Substack is to acknowledge that a big part of my memoir will be sharing all the ways I showed signs of DID for my whole life. (If you scroll back up to the beginning of this piece, my response to my friend's memoir book shows a common DID experience. "Did I really say that?")

I also want to shine a different kind of light on how and when dissociation is reinforced in religious groups. (I'm convinced that, in addition to all squelching of self-expression at home, the teachings of our church rewarded all women, not just young girls like me, for dissociating from their basest instincts.)

And finally, I am pretty inspired to share specific examples of how my experience of DID has much gentler sides than a lot of what you might find online or TikTok. I have a growing list of how I experience DID, resources that help explain me when my words fail me and I'm learning how to weave all of these together.

Thanks for reading, for being here and for giving me a place where the trapped doors of my mind aren't a deal breaker.

Editor’s Note: Last night I planned on publishing this piece after I’d worked on a client’s manuscript for a while. When I tried to shift to this personal writing, my mind went foggy and I could barely string sentences together. I cried a little bit on the couch, grabbed some Twizzlers and watched Below Deck. I went to bed not knowing if I’d be able to write or not today. Sometimes these “fogs” set in for days, weeks or months. Or just for 24 hours. All that said, I’m glad to be able to share this with you today.