Truth & Consequences

I shared the post about what to do with my 40-plus years of journals on Facebook yesterday, and a childhood friend commented that he was afraid of how he may come off in the words of my 12-13-14-year-old self. His words were kind of jokey – and not as specific as the ones I just used. But you get it, right?

Anne Lamott said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.“

Yup.

But I want to crack open this idea bit more. Because while I believe I have every right to render my personal experience in all its agony and glory to myself privately, it’s nobody’s business but my own. It’s unpublished for a reason. If I burn it all, that will be why.

I wish I could go through life without needing to document every emotional hang nail and loose the wild banshee of rage over real or perceived injustices on the page, but I can’t. Without the aid of a pen, I don’t know how well I could have adapted to – never mind survived – the dysfunctional systems I found myself in.

Not blaming. Just saying.

However, when I feel moved by the creative spirit to take some raw material from my life and put it out there in the world, I owe it to myself to filter it through rigorously honest self-reflection.

I learned this the hardest of possible ways.

See, when you’ve been writing since you were 11 years old and this new thing called blogging comes along 25 years later, you’re ready. You know exactly how to do that thing.

My blog was called “Bad Mother Chronicles” and I posted about everything in my life as a mother of three young kids. It grew very popular. Alltop syndicated it. I was interviewed five times by the BBC’s “World Have Your Say.”

So I wrote another blog called “Love On The Run” during my divorce from my kids’ father. Same “breathtaking honesty” (one of my most treasured compliments), but the truth had consequences this time. I got actual hate mail that included the suggestion that my kids would be better off without me.

I went scuttling back into the pages of my private journals and stayed there for over a decade.

(Sort of. It wasn’t God’s plan for me to not be a writer in the world, so I had the miraculous good fortune to work a series of jobs at newspapers that included writing narrative columns. But as for “baring my unedited soul” for all to see, that was good and over.)

It’s taken 12 years, but I understand now what happened with the blogging, particularly Love On The Run. I did not lay upon my personal experience any self-reflection at all. Not like I should have. Not like I do now.

At the time it was deliberate. I had gone looking for divorce narratives that expressed the experience as it happened and not as a retrospective memoir. I didn’t find any, so I wrote my own, figuring others might benefit from my experience. That’s the old blogger spirit!

But I can see how it probably came off as a shameful, attention-seeking, heedless-of-the-hurt-it-caused, self-promotional tell-all.

Oh man, do I get this. Lately, I get sucked into certain family influencer Tic Toc reels. There’s one with a dark-haired newborn and a caption that reads, “When your whole family is blonde,” and the parents looking askant.

Really? How’s that baby going to feel when she sees that someday?

I wish I could tell this new generation of “everyday reality” content producers that it turns out there are some life experiences that merit every ounce of contemplation we can bring to them before we render them for consideration by anyone else, especially when those experiences include others, and most particularly when they involve our children.

Self-reflection is a form of revision. It asks questions, considers alternatives, balances accounts, seeks the source, goes a step (or fifty) further, gives shape and form, and makes choices – what to leave in and what to leave out.

Working at newspapers taught me this, too. A reporter owes her subject an accurate rendering. It’s the highest ethic. And it takes time, thought, and work.

Discernment is essential to good reporting. You gotta trust your hunches. But you have to check them, too. A story that sounds good to your ear may not be the one that’s closest to true. So you listen longer, swap your eyes for another’s. And beware those stories that “just seem to write themselves.”

Like my journals.

There are plenty of folks – most of whom I dearly love – in those thousands of pages who I don’t treat warmly all the time. I don’t have to when I’m writing for myself.

But when I am writing from my life with the intention it will be read? Most of all, I want to be fair. No one is all good or all bad, even me (despite what my 17-year-old self believed).

I don’t know if words really live forever on the internet, or who would ever bother to collect (or recall) them all.

But I do know that words can linger far too long in the heart. And so they must be wise ones, and whenever possible kind ones, and most of all worth the consequences of the truth they claim. A spell once cast cannot be un-cast, after all.

I was never a “gotcha” journalist, but I am relentlessly (perhaps annoyingly) curious. I want to understand … why you are the way you are, why what happened happened the way it did, why it happened at all, HOW it happened, why I am the way I am, and what might become of you, of me, of any of us.

I’m just trying to make sense of the world the only way I know how.

Should my childhood friend be worried?

I guess he’d better behave from now on.

(I found some amazing Anne Lamott quotes here. Not the one I used, but all the rest of the best.)