Read At Your Own Risk

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I call this the Raw JAW because I need to continue to practice putting my words out into the world without fear. If censoring oneself is a superpower, I don’t know if I have it, but I would consider trying out for that reality show. But who would watch it? We often want what’s unfiltered.

That was my intention when I started blogging again, to practice writing with less censors. But there are many reasons why I find myself not doing that.

When I write or speak, I was taught to do it as if I’m writing for an audience of one. I’m sure this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but I took it to heart. The problem with that is I always have a person in mind. Usually, it is my critics, people who read me to pick apart and analyze my inner world. That’s part of it.

The other part is that I had a precarious season on social media several years back. I believed in letting it all hang out online as a way to push past my fear of criticism. Sometimes I threw in wine with my attempts at uninhibited writing. The problem was that drinking made me angsty, and sometimes I picked fights and shoved myself into other people’s business. I lost readers back then. They decided to look away from the train wreck. Now I don’t want to offend those who were able to stick around or chose to return. Many of my friends are true blues, faithful for years despite my shenanigans. They read, and I still write for them. But it’s holding me back.

A third reason I struggle to be “raw” is that I’m not sure I know myself well enough to lay the words down on a train track of certainty. I believed for decades that my inner world was suspect, and I needed to manage all my desires, motives, excitement, and fear. Emotions and thoughts needed to be denied or manipulated. As a result, sometimes, I still don’t know what I feel or believe, much less how to articulate it.

I once completed a Facebook meme about hopes and dreams for the future. One of the things I wrote was, as someone married 20 years, “a passionate love affair.”

Well, that didn’t get past some of my readers at all, and I got confronted about it.

But what was behind my comment? What if I wrote about that?

When my marriage was 20 years old, I was sad. I felt grief that the days of romance that left me unable to concentrate on anything else were behind me. My dreams of sleep were full of stories of being desired. I’ve said it before, but there’s a reason we like stories with the sexual tension of, “Will they or won’t they?”

“Why can’t you have that in your marriage, Jenny? You want a relationship with sexual tension? Don’t talk about that. That’s behind closed doors stuff!”

Well, yes. But isn’t that why we read memoir, to peek behind closed doors into a world we either want to understand better or to tap into the universal themes of our human journeys?

Many of these feelings came up for me when my children were coming of age. My daughter’s first boyfriend was the inciting incident for me to pick up the phone and call a therapist again. And I want to justify my FB meme with, “Well, I didn’t say it had to be with someone besides my husband!” After all, can a marriage change over time and be reinvented? I think it can! Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about books like “Kosher Adultery” and “The Ethical Slut.” Let’s talk about how, when the church introduced the vow, “‘Till death do us part,” people died much earlier in life! Let’s talk about how women losing their youth is painful and real. Now those are exciting things to write and read.

A good memoirist has to be able to explore themes such as these in a personal way. They have to go out ahead of the crowd, tell their story, and stand despite inevitable criticism. The memoirist is the one that says, “Life is not simple or black and white. I want to see my life in color, and maybe your life can be in color, too.” I believe these are the kinds of things I must write.

My girlfriend told me a few days ago, “It’s like I hear your voice when I read, and then it starts to slip away. I think, ‘There it is, there it is!’ and then it’s gone.” I hear her, and she’s right. I know it, too.

I cannot write and try to sidestep what I mentioned above. Not only do I hold a laundry list of what I still don’t talk about out loud, I don’t always know what I think and feel about those things. Maybe what’s more accurate is that I know what I believe about those things, but they are so radically different from the culture I left. To write them down anyway means facing the judgment that ruled my experience there.

But if I am ever going to get serious about writing the story I need to tell, I will have to face that judgment. I need to write more than a blog, Facebook statuses, or in my journal, but instead like a sculptor, painter, or woodworker. I know the story I need to tell. But can I find words to lead us through the depths and heights? I don’t know yet.

What I do know, however, is that this is where I need to practice. I write everyday words and worlds I do not publish. But I need a place where I push myself a little bit even though I know you will read. I need to stand on the edges and then go even farther.

So I leave you with a caveat. Read at your own risk. If you read for voyeurism looking for chinks in my armor so you can say, “Aha! I knew it!” or “How could she?” or ”That’s what she gets for leaving the church!” I need to stop writing to you. I’m going to try, anyway.

I'm curious. Do you read memoirs? What's a favorite?