Soul Mosaic

I just wanted to take a moment, before continuing the story, to share the Introduction for the book, something to set the stage for how my own unique, “ancient-history” story can still be a universal way to view a life and search for answers…

Introduction

Sketch and photo by author

So, as will become obvious in this book, I am a “split-personality” writer — always torn between my science brain and my “dreamer-artistic” side. I am also an aging Baby Boomer, with my childhood being circa the 1950s-1970s — ancient history to most people now.

The world I grew up in — a small New England immigrant factory town that was heavily ethnic and Catholic— is long gone. The stories I tell out of that culture will be very foreign to anyone reading this book now in the 21st century. As I was told by an editor one time, if I write a novel now and set it in the years of my childhood, it’s considered “historical” fiction. So in that sense, my personal origin story in this memoir is partly “historical” memoir.

But it is also universal, because all of our origin stories are “historical” and unique. The reason to share them is that those stories are the clues to who we were…and became…and why. Those cultures and details are what we are made of and what we had to work with.

So many people have asked me, “Why did you stay so long being abused in that house?” “How did you get out?” “How could that have happened?” — and other similar questions.

For that matter, I have asked myself those same questions…and other, more self-hating ones.

The easy answer is to just say…”It’s complicated.”

But that gives nothing to the reader, and it leaves me with only questions and no answers.

So the real work is to do a “post-mortem,” an autopsy, and dissect my past to see what made me who I was, how I got out of that house, and how I am healing. It’s like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci spending hours dissecting cadavers so they could know the human body and give their art depth and realism. The gift of their sculptures and the intense emotional connection people feel for those works is only possible because of how deeply those artists went after the “truth” in their subjects. And it is that full truth that comes through in their work and inspires others.

While my story is unique to me, the process of taking apart the past to find answers is universal. The longing to find truth in the rubble of a life is universal. And the gleaning of insights, and the wisdom earned by telling one’s story is also universal.

So maybe the journey into my past will be quaint or unique, but it represents all the dissected body parts of my life, and the truth that those parts can tell me. And I think that can be possible for anyone.

For me, I am getting older, wearier, and I am so tired of having not only lived through the things I did, but also, of having to carry them silently within, all my life. I can no longer carry it alone…and I don’t think anyone should have to. It’s time to tell the story, and I don’t think it is wrong to tell a story just because there are ugly parts.

Even as I share the hard places, the book is about so much more. It is the story of reclaiming a life and thriving, of the search for wisdom, growth, meaning, freedom, and most of all, healing.

I welcome you to join me on this journey.

This entry was posted on August 26, 2025 at 9:00 am and is filed under Memoir - sexual abuse trauma recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.