Starting Over Again
The last couple of weeks have seen me enter an entirely new realm, writing-wise. Up to this point, I’ve let 
my mind go off somewhere and play while my fingers wrote whatever happened to flow through them. Now I must learn a little about structure and form in order to re-write my memoir in a fashion which might actually appeal to someone other than myself. Gone will be the preachy chapters. Order will be brought to my rambles. Time will become a factor in what goes where.
Yet the first thing I did was to, in my usual free-flowing fashion, write a brand, spanking new first chapter. It wasn’t quite the same as what I’d written up to this point though, because I’ve now recalibrated my thoughts a bit, and discovered the defining moment I’d been using was the wrong one. The new chapter, a brief 2700 words, is sharper, more focused, and above all, more powerful than much of what I’d written previously. I’m not just saying this from my own perspective either. I shared it with a friend who’d provided me some harsh but necessary criticism of my original first chapter.
As Writers, We Dream of Affecting Our Readers
As I sat across the table watching her read, my heart soared as I watched the range of emotions cross her face. This time, her comments were anything but harsh. Instead, she felt I was now on the right track. When I re-read it myself the next evening (making grammatical corrections as I went), I realized she was right. I also realized why it was so.
When I first started writing Forgotten Victims I wrote from the perspective I had at the time: a broken, solitary, lonely human being who had suffered an unimaginable loss not once, but twice, and was about to be alone for the first time in over 30 years. The second of my two daughters was ready to move out as soon as fiscally possible, and the walls I’d built to contain my pain, shame, guilt and overall unworthiness were closing in faster than I could erect bastions to protect my ever-decreasing area of safety. I poured my fear and pain onto the pages I wrote, then and for several years afterwards.
I Write, Therefore, I Heal
What I’ve come to realize is what I wrote during those years was indeed my healing process. What I need 
to share now needs to come from a different place; from a place where much of the healing has already occurred, and where I can now look back to where I’ve been and appreciate and share the process.
At one point, I stopped writing for over a year because the words I wrote were filled with blame, anger, and a victim mentality. Though I’ve re-written many of those words over and over, I see now they must be cast aside, used only for their part in the process, and written again from scratch, and from my newfound perspective.
I wasn’t ready to do this, or even see it even a month ago. I think my defining moment for recognizing what must be done came when I was in a memoir workshop and asked to determine my defining moment. My mind kept wanting to go back to when my mom took her life, but my heart said “you’re lying to yourself. You’re avoiding the truth which is right in front of you. Why did you start to write? What really pushed you over the edge and forced you to start letting go of the solitary life you’d created?”
Finding My Starting Point, My Inciting Incident
In other words, where did my healing journey truly begin, and why?
We were given a little fill-in-the-blanks exercise: When ________ happens, I do _________in the hopes of achieving ____________.
I started trying to fill in the blanks, but it was a struggle to come up with anything really meaningful. Then the presenter, Judy Reeves shared hers and suddenly my mind took off. I let go of the structure of her exercise, and the real inciting incident came forth in a heated rush and a huge sigh of relief from my heart. When I read it aloud, there were tears in my eyes. But they weren’t tears of sadness as much as of relief. Here is what I wrote (and which ultimately led to the new first chapter):
With my daughters grown and out on their own, I faced the prospect of being completely alone. I found myself forced to face my parents’ suicides 10 and 16 years earlier. The business and busyness of raising my daughters no longer allowed the demons to sleep peacefully.
The Futility of Trying to Escape Our Humanity
On the surface, this may not sound like much to work with, but I knew beneath the surface lay a dark
and twisty landscape I had to traverse before I could reclaim my own humanity. There were behavior patterns not truly my own, but ingrained over generations I had to overcome and eventually discard. Beliefs I’d carried with me throughout my life were doing me more harm than good, but I’d been doing my best to ignore them. Despite my best efforts to deny it, I was, like everyone else, a social creature. I needed human contact on more than just a superficial level, and the harder I tried to run away from that part of myself, the tighter it clung and the louder it screamed in my ears.
A funny thing about trying to ignore your own nature is it becomes the elephant in the room who’s moving around, smashing furniture, bumping into walls, and generally making the room unlivable. Eventually, if you don’t open the door and walk out yourself, that elephant will simply smash the walls down, leaving you standing out in the open, completely exposed. The only viable solution is to accept the lessons the elephant is there to teach you so it can move on to more comfortable and fitting surroundings.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
It may take me a while to figure out I need to change my environment but once I do, I’m likely to effect those changes swiftly, efficiently, and often mercilessly. Baring my soul, even if only on pages no one else might ever see (and we all know how that turned out if you read any of the chapters I posted on my website) was equivalent to ripping off decades-old bandages which had adhered themselves to my skin with the sticking force of super glue. A lot of skin came with it. Even if most of it was dead and crusty, the pain was no less intense.
There is a lot to be said for just ripping the bandages off, though. Sudden, intense pain eventually passes, and anything which comes after is easier to manage. In the years since my initial baptism by fire, there have been painful moments, and scary ones too. But none as bad as taking the first step, leaving home for a few days all by myself, and writing out the pain, sorrow, and loneliness I’d tried to deny existed.
I learned I was addicted to my own misery, and of course, the only way to deal with an addiction is to first admit it’s there. The second is to admit you need help. That one took me many years to reach, but in the meantime, I used the therapist who had always been there for me whenever I needed her: my writing.
Where the Re-Writing Goes From Here
Getting back to the point I raised when I started this post, the writing I did over the last 9 years was the actual healing journey. The writing I’ll do now as I re-write and re-configure what came of the process is to look back at that journey and all I learned while going through it. My manuscript, at this point, is merely a large collection of notes chronicling the process. As an editor, my job is to put those notes in a more cohesive order. As a writer, my job is to take the re-ordered notes and make the story interesting and, even more than interesting, relate-able to a larger audience than I’d originally envisioned. (OK, so my original audience was me, but it later expanded to people who’d lost a loved one to suicide).
In the last couple of weeks I’ve learned some things which have not only changed my outlook, but broadened my perspective on how the story needs to be told. Among them:
- Everyone has suffered some kind of loss
- Anyone who is a parent of grown children has struggled with letting go
Understanding just these two points makes me see the story I’m telling in an entirely new light which of course means I will be telling it differently than I initially wrote it. And that’s a very good thing!
I couldn’t end this post without expressing my deepest gratitude to a few people:
To Heather Hewes who pushed, prodded, kicked, and nagged me into starting to not only write my memoir, but to start my blog which, to my amazement, has done me as much good or more in expanding my world beyond the hermit hole I used to hide in all the time.
To Lorna Bank who isn’t afraid to tell me like it is, but encourages me because she knows, even when I don’t, that I can do better.
To Candy Illing who never lets me forget that an audacious 10-year-old stood up in Mr. Levy’s 4th-grade class and declared “This book is stupid. I’m going to be a writer when I grow up!”
To Judy Reeves who gave me a gentle but honest critique of Chapter 1, then showed me, in her workshops, how I really needed to tell an important story which could touch a lot of hearts, and which I’m duty-bound to tell as best I can.
To the entire staff at the Southern California Writers’ Conference who made me feel welcome and included just because I was there and was, in my own fumbling way, trying to be a writer when I grew up.
Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Without any one of you, I might still be groping around in the dark, tripping over that damn elephant!
Sheri Conaway is a writer, blogger, Virtual Assistant and advocate for cats. Sheri believes in the Laws 
of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. She is available for article writing and ghost writing to help your website and the business it supports grow and thrive. Her specialties are finding and expressing your authentic self. If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author.
Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming release of “Forgotten Victims: Healing and Forgiving After Suicide”.
