Don't Look Back in Anger

When I started this blog, my objective was to tell my stories. I'm of the firm belief that everyone has a story to tell and this was a way to tell mine while keeping my writing up during my career hiatus. Styles of blogs have come and gone and I often wonder if I need a niche to attract an audience. But what I really want is to simply keep telling my story in the best way possible.

In doing so, however, I've noticed that memories are fuzzy. Guesses happen to fill in gaps. Caricatures of people in your past who are no longer in your present happen. Take my ex-in laws for example. They were a significant part of a certain portion of my life. I remember my ex-FIL as just the best man among men. He was kind and patient and gentle and funny and just wonderful and taken from this earth way too soon. I remember his good influence on my ex, but I also remember how his passing is tied to the beginning of the end of my marriage. True? I certainly think so, but allow that it could all be timing mixing things up. My ex-MIL was, well...stereotypes were made for a reason, no? She, out of the two of them, has become the caricature in my mind. Screechy and not nice and difficult to deal with. I would love to know what is memory being distorted by time and where reality really lies.

How do you stop this from happening? How do you tell your life stories and be true to them without the fluff to make them funnier or the drama to make them more sad? How do you keep the supporting players real and true to what they are while still protecting details that aren't for public consumption? I'm not sure anyone really can, actually. I think it's human nature to soften the edges of memories and make them better or worse depending. I think it's natural to see things through individual filters and things that happen will look differently to those who lived it. Even while relying on journals and notes made while in that time period, you are still seeing just one side of the story and a personal slant on things.

So while my goal is the same, I'm looking at it differently. I want to tell my stories, to write, to interact. But I know now that some details of my divorce will never be written, at least by me, and that will make that story incomplete and details that are shared may be fuzzy and disjointed as a result. Some aspects of prior relationships will not get discussed due to the nature of the incidents or relationships or where I am in my life with all of it. And while I'll do my best to recall how people truly were, I know some will be second stringed to caricatures of how I remember them and not how they would remember themselves, if they were the one telling the story.

Life has so many aspects to it. Peoples' stories have so many nuances to them that it's impossible to give a fully accurate accounting of every minute that story was star. I remember a vivid conversation with Isaac during the first few months of marriage that resulted in a lack of spaghetti for dinner for many years. I now know that he remembers that conversation in a completely different way. We're both right. And that's what makes these stories personal, unique, fuzzy, true, distorted, illogical and messy. That's why I love true to life stories so much. They are all the same, they are all different.

Music for cold remembery days:

(joss stone, tell me what we're gonna do now)