Posts Tagged ‘memoir’

Today’s Holiday Gift Post

December 24, 2025
Photo by author

Today’s Gift Quote:

Regardless of your belief system, religion, or lack of, as a writer, I have ALWAYS loved the poetic, melodic, soothing strains of these lines from the St.James Bible for the Christmas holiday.

No matter what I believe or will in the future, the sense that there is goodness and goodwill to me from a force bigger than me, always comforts me:

Luke 2:8-14

King James Version

8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

The posts here tell the story of the pain I’ve carried because my life was not whole.

It wasn’t whole because I’ve had so many questions and no answers. All I’ve had was the confusion of a lifetime, because so much of my life was in broken fragments I could not make sense of.

So this blog, which I hope to form into a memoir for publication, is my journey to find answers. It is my way to piece the fragments back together, see the whole picture, and find the understanding that brings healing.

While I write for myself, I am also writing to give to anyone else who wants it, an example of this kind of journey. It is not the only way, but it is my way.

And I write to bear witness to the pain of so many others harmed by abuse of any kind, especially for those who can’t tell their story…or those who didn’t live to tell their story.

Lastly, I offer it all here in the hope that it helps another not to feel alone as they do their own life’s work.

With love

Deb

Today’s Holiday Gift Post

December 23, 2025
Photo by author

Today’s Gift Quote:

“Talk to yourself like someone you love.”

Brene Brown

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

The posts here tell the story of the pain I’ve carried because my life was not whole.

It wasn’t whole because I’ve had so many questions and no answers. All I’ve had was the confusion of a lifetime, because so much of my life was in broken fragments I could not make sense of.

So this blog, which I hope to form into a memoir for publication, is my journey to find answers. It is my way to piece the fragments back together, see the whole picture, and find the understanding that brings healing.

While I write for myself, I am also writing to give to anyone else who wants it, an example of this kind of journey. It is not the only way, but it is my way.

And I write to bear witness to the pain of so many others harmed by abuse of any kind, especially for those who can’t tell their story…or those who didn’t live to tell their story.

Lastly, I offer it all here in the hope that it helps another not to feel alone as they do their own life’s work.

With love

Deb

Today’s Holiday Gift Post

December 19, 2025
Photo by author

Today’s Gift Quote:

“Normal is a setting on the washing machine.” – Unknown

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

The posts here tell the story of the pain I’ve carried because my life was not whole.

It wasn’t whole because I’ve had so many questions and no answers. All I’ve had was the confusion of a lifetime, because so much of my life was in broken fragments I could not make sense of.

So this blog, which I hope to form into a memoir for publication, is my journey to find answers. It is my way to piece the fragments back together, see the whole picture, and find the understanding that brings healing.

While I write for myself, I am also writing to give to anyone else who wants it, an example of this kind of journey. It is not the only way, but it is my way.

And I write to bear witness to the pain of so many others harmed by abuse of any kind, especially for those who can’t tell their story…or those who didn’t live to tell their story.

Lastly, I offer it all here in the hope that it helps another not to feel alone as they do their own life’s work.

With love

Deb

A Moment to Recap This Blog’s Purpose, and My Future Memoir’s Format

October 14, 2025

Before I continue, it is time for a periodic update for the sake of new readers as well as current ones.

I want to take a moment to “recap” why I am writing this blog, and why I would like to publish it in some form as a memoir. I have been writing to discover what I didn’t see before, and to build that “crummy first draft.” Then I will revise, and revise, and revise, because my goal is to find an agent and seek publication. So for right now, I am writing, discovering, and sharing.

So often…every morning when I sit down to write…I feel weary. And I feel the heaviness of the pain from the past. Why, then, someone might wonder, am I doing this…re-living past abuse to put it on paper? And what will it give the reader?

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Why Waste Time Explaining the Hows, Whys, and Tools?

July 29, 2025

Photo by author of her childhood science tools

I’ve spent a bit of time in my posts talking about who I am, why I’m writing, how to do this book, why now, and what kind of tools I need.

Why have I “wasted” so much time on those things?

Maybe this post can answer that question. It will be the first entry in the book and sets the stage for the first chapter — Packing for the Journey, which will include the information I mentioned above.

So here is the prologue to explain that.

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30, June, 2025 – Morning Flashbacks

June 30, 2025

Visiting darkness, and exiting with ritual

The alarm hasn’t yet gone off, but I am awake. I’ve been so since about 5:30, like many mornings. The oblivion of sleep, its escape from reality, at least on the nights I have no nightmares, is over. While my regular blanket keeps me groggy and warm, the weight of the other blanket starts pressing me into the mattress. It is the heavy sensation of feeling scared, hopeless, and like I have done something wrong and will soon be in trouble. I neither want to stay in bed nor get up. I wish I could just sleep in oblivion all day. Getting up means facing another day of writing, struggling to live with the pain it releases, and holding the chaos I feel inside.

I get up anyway, because by now, in my 7th decade, I know that this is part of my life, my existence, at least for the time being. Even as I felt great last night, felt ready to take on the world, yet again, this morning, the black cloud was there to greet me when my eyes opened and consciousness returned. But life has taught me that, like the weather, everything eventually changes. You just have to wait long enough. So for now, I just focus on my “routine.”

The routine. It is something I had to create after I retired from teaching at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. When I was working, I didn’t have time to feel all of this. I had to get up, get moving, battle traffic, and then revel in the last job of my life — which was my total joy.

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Is It Easy to Write a Memoir About Abuse?

February 10, 2025

Cathartic maybe. Healing, insightful, yes. But easy? Never – And sometimes it takes you down unexpected roads…

Author's photo of her mom at age 17 - smiling happy young her whole life ahead of her, optimistic
Author photo of her mother – 1948
Author photo of her mother – circa 2017

It has been a difficult time. I have been writing …well, I WAS writing the next pieces about my childhood, working to move the book forward. But I got sidetracked by Mom.

The festering splinter

I had done a side piece about Mom..her death, her life…her, as part of the prologue. A matching bookend to the prologue entry about my father’s death. Yet every time I tried to edit it I ended up rewriting it instead. First from one angle, then another, struggling to capture that “something” inside me that needed to speak. That “something” that was driving me to write about her, and it was unrelenting. While I felt like I got closer to “it” with each round of writing, still, I was missing the essence.

Whatever it was I was trying to excavate, it was buried deep in my soul. The effort felt like when you have to plunge into your flesh with a needle to remove a deeply embedded festering splinter only to have it keep slipping out of your grasp and sink deeper. I felt like I was failing because that “Mom piece” was taking too long, and I needed to get back on track and return to that piece from my childhood. I was determined to stick to the outline.

This continued until late yesterday afternoon when, in a flash of insight…then despair, I realized I WASN’T off-track at all…and that there was actually something much bigger emerging in all of this. In fact, I suddenly understood that the “Mom” piece wasn’t the “sidetrack” but THE track. I kept getting pulled back to her…her death…her life because there were so many questions that needed answers. Questions like why did it matter so much to me that we took care of her to the end…why was I so proud of how she navigated her death process? Why did I care so much after she had abandoned me for a lifetime?

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Author Note to the Reader for This Memoir

December 26, 2024

Trigger alert:

This blog shares excerpts of my draft memoir — working title: “I Thrive.” While not graphic, it will discuss aspects of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse I endured and my journey back to healing…and thriving. These entries start in June, 2025 and continue into the present. Prior entries cover other topics

Photo by author, circa 1959-1960

To be the illustration

Memoir expert and author Marion Roach Smith described the genre of memoir this way:

“Memoir is not about you. It’s about something and you are its illustration.”

Another author, Trish Lockard, added that this genre is not just a recounting of things that happened to you because, after all — “Stuff happens to everybody.” Instead, memoir captures one’s reflections about an event when enough time has passed for a change, a transformation, to take place. Those insights gained over time through effort are the gift to the reader—the takeaway.

To only write a list of everything done to you in life without the reflections is like dumping a pile of ingredients on the counter and calling it a cake. It is only a cake when that pile of ingredients has gone through the crucible of a hot oven and been transformed into the real takeaway — dessert. Only then does it have “purpose and meaning.”

I loved how one author, whose name I cannot find, summed it up:

“Don’t just confess. Digest.”

Digestion is change and makes something useful…nutritious. It gives back. And digestion is the unfinished business of my life.

After seven decades of silence, it is time for me to look back, digest the raw material of my life, and obtain the nutrition— the insights that give it meaning. It is not: “Look at what was done to me” so much as the answers to the questions: “Because of what was done, what am I doing with it? What does it mean?” So, my life will be the illustration of that “something” that might have meaning and nutrition for all.

28 years of abuse…and building a “beautiful mosaic”

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MY Rules for Writing My Memoir – Part II

December 13, 2024
White handwritten message on black background, like chalk on a blackboard. Message states these things are MY rules for writing this memoir - part II
Photo by author

As promised, here is the second half of my rules for this memoir. These will be right at the front of the book so the reader is also clear about what I have in mind.

Caveats, cautions, and purpose

Before departing on this journey, here are 7 key points:

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MY Rules for Writing My Memoir – Part I

December 12, 2024
White handwritten message on black background; looks like chalk on a blackboard. Message says that these items are MY rules for writing my memoir - Part I
Photo by author

A moment before continuing the story, to state the “rules of the road” for this book

Before continuing with posts about my life, I want to share what I think is a vital part of any memoir – stating the rules, goals, and cautions for the book. So this is the first of a 2-part set of posts that will form the introduction to my memoir. That introduction will give all readers clear information about the how and why of my approach.

The “hows and whys” of my writing

Since there are so many good books on how to write a memoir, mine does not and will not be a textbook on all the nuances, methods, and rules.

But the following things jumped out at me as I studied all the different books on the subject. So I wrote myself some clear guidelines:

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