Time Remembered
Two old letters, my stash of memorabilia, and the search for the inner voice of truth.
I kidnap the memories of my life and hold them hostage. A documentarian by nature, I keep letters, journals, emails, pictures, and real-world ephemera like yearbooks, posters, or concert booklets far beyond any pragmatic sort of usefulness. When I moved from Arizona to Virginia just over two years ago, 39 of the 86 boxes I had shipped to my new home contained letters, journals, parts of my portfolio, childhood mementos, and other tokens of my half-century of living.
I’ve been thinking of that habit this week in light of a lovely writing workshop I recently attended featuring authors Albert Flynn DeSilver and Cheryl Strayed. The title of the workshop was “Writer as Fearless Citizen,” but the fear they spoke of was related less to our current polarized political landscape and more to the fear that lives in us when we sit down to write about the truth of our lives. Cheryl’s focus on digging down to find what she called “Your Inner Voice Of Truth” reminded me of two letters I wrote long ago and had the unexpected opportunity to review years later.
Both letters were handwritten, artifacts of the Late Analog Era. Both were to people with whom I’d had romantic relationships - one of them written years after a passionate but conflictual six-month relationship had petered out and the other penned just six weeks into what turned out to be a decades-long partnership. One of them I never sent to the intended recipient. One of them was returned to me in a less-than-friendly email, with digitized photos of the letter - written on two sides of a single blank sheet of white paper - attached as proof of … well, attached.
Both letters disrupted my internal narrative of these relationships, mainly by conveying to ME more about who I was when I wrote them. What I learned from them was the lengths to which I would go to seek approval that I should have been giving myself. See me as an intelligent, successful, meaningful adult, I seemed to say, without actually saying those exact words. Give me the appreciation I can’t seem to give myself.
Journals and letters (and their present-day digital equivalents, emails and texts/messages) provide us with a look at our past from the inside. We don’t have to guess how we felt about a particular time period; these materials reveal our previous truth. For me, it’s always educational. I rarely remember the amount of courage, pluck, determination, or aspiration my archives contain. Conversely, I am also reminded - sometimes painfully - how little I trusted myself or my ideas, and how often I’ve acted from fear and not authenticity.
In the workshop, Cheryl Strayed discussed “four wells of story” for those who wish to write from personal experience:
Wounds
Journeys
Epic Transitions
Obsessions or Curiosities
In each case, mining your archives - which can include any bit of written or physical memorabilia that anchors a memory - can help you fact-check your writing. It can be a critical part of your research when writing a full-length memoir; it can also inform the making of a project that re-imagines or reinterprets the past. My friend Rachel Hile, who has taught English literature as a university professor, worked as a medical writer, and freelanced as a copyeditor during her productive career, had this to say about how she used her diaries in her writing in a 2009 interview on my Write Livelihood blog:
“I have found my diaries most helpful when I am writing about an idea, not an experience, and a memory or personal anecdote seems like it will be effective in illustrating that idea. Then I go back to read what I wrote at the time in order to strengthen my memory and create a more vivid impression.”
How to mine your personal archives, even if you don’t think you have any
So... what if you want to write about personal experiences, yet you haven’t been the sort of person who intentionally documents your life? Simple: start now. Here are a couple of easy tips to get you started.
Start keeping a diary or journal. Whether you are in the throes of a crisis, or just living through the shitshow that is 2020, start leaving a record of your days. If regular journaling seems too intimidating, select a pre-formatted method such as Bullet Journaling, and you’ll at least have a trail to start following later about your goals, ideas, and passions (not to mention your schedule - which can also contain revealing details).
Read old emails. Search by keywords to dig out messages that relate to a specific topic. Search by sender to find email correspondence between you and a significant person. If you have held onto (or transferred emails from) your earliest email account, you may have years of material to review.
While you’re at it, make sure you read your “Sent” file. Some of our deepest, most heartfelt emailed thoughts can remain unanswered, sent seemingly into the void, or result in a call or meeting instead of a reply.
Look at your old yearbooks. This is typically not something you created, at least not by yourself, but can provide keys to your mood, what you were doing, and how you connected (or didn’t) with your peers.
Were you photographed in 15 club photos and as president of your senior class? Are you only seen in the gigantic group class photo or as a tiny face in your school’s 200-person marching band picture? Were you captured as a blur in an action shot for sports or in the winter musical? Any of those scenarios can tell you something about your school experience. Also, if you had people sign your yearbook, what did they say? How close were you then? Do you speak to them now? (If you don’t have physical copies of your own yearbooks, check eBay for hard copies or Classmates.com for digitized versions.)
Our personal archives are a glimpse into how we used to move through the world. If you’re going to write about your past, arm it with the richness only accuracy can provide.
What have you learned from a letter, journal, or email from your past? Reply to this newsletter to let me know.
That’s it for this issue. Until next time, wishing you long days and pleasant nights.