I Need Less Drama Now, or What I Learned in Writing About Remembering

“Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

The uses of sorrow, Mary Oliver

Are memoirs only for people who have done something “big?”

They’ve been in a war zone, won awards, been involved in some scandals, instituted a cause, those kinds of lives. Yet the biggest battle I’ve won is when I got published for the first time. The writing career path I took remained steadily flat; there were no great achievements there, just sheer sighs of relief in finished literature, not necessarily books. And as for a cause, I’ve always dodged community work, and had always preferred the monkish isolation of a poet, though as of date, I have vanity published only one poetry collection.

Older but not truly wiser, the story I lived isn’t coming off as enough material. To put my story in a memoir means I’m leaning toward projection. Memory needs a packaging, after all.

• What three moments in my life felt insignificant at the time, yet they stayed with me? Why?

• What do I consider a “non-achievement” (something I didn’t do or finish)? How did I feel about it then? Now?

• What do I glean from a raw description of a memory? Is the meaning I find inevitable or incidental?

Finally Taking Note of Things I Used to Ignore

My resume hasn’t shifted in a decade. I changed the references, however. Who can recommend me is tricky, because I’ve always operated incognito, that is, at the faculty room while I was a professor of literature, the hybrid classes discouraged any tete-a-tete with colleagues, us delivering the lectures online, like we’re all talking to empty boxes with headphones. So scarcely, among my students, or from the faculty, talked to know another; colleagues are comfortably covered up in the chat boxes, video calls, and private messaging pop-up annotations.

I realize that I desired applause, an actual pat on the back saying I’m good, any encouraging remark from a real peer from the literary arts. These are my long-awaited perks, and now, at retirement, I greatly crave them.

• Who, among the people I know, said something about my work? How did it affect me, if it affected me at all?

• What immediate feedback stopped me from pressing on? Why did it prevent my progress?

• Is there a recognition I coveted but missed, and I stayed quiet, but the frustration lingered?

How My Life Was Always Happening In My Head

From the moment I swung on that swing under our house as a teenager to the time I was winging it the first time I edited another author’s manuscript, there has never been real drama in my moments. The story here is in a stream-of-consciousness flow, nothing tangible, every thought, and overthinking real life happens in a dream, a scripted monologue.

First, in swinging, I sang the song, “…and solitaire’s the only game in town, and every road that takes him takes him down, while life goes all around him everywhere, he’s singing solitaire…”

Why does this memory seem false, and yet it doesn’t leave me up to now with solitude as my default status, the irregular one being in a song that goes, “we are the world, we are the children… we are the ones that make a brighter day so let’s start giving…”

And while editing books, I complained that I desired to write a novel. So I was always on the wings, never really flying. Nonetheless.

• What moment or memory stays with me where I’m alone, isolated, or estranged? How did I keep that time?

• Who are the first real characters from life appearing in my plot when I imagine a scene?

• Who do I talk to when I’m trying to rehearse a fictive angry action or an exhilaration?

Who Are the People in My Neighborhood

Defining a neighbor feels biblical and, therefore, difficult. “Neighbor” is the one I am called to notice, to respond to, to extend something toward, if only courtesy, if not care.

I was never gregarious. I learned early how to move along the edges of community, present, but unavailable. I kept to spaces I could manage, conversations I could end, and exits I could predict.

When a presence lingered too long, when politeness threatened to become familiarity, I withdrew. Not noticeably, perhaps. Just enough to return things to neutral.

What I practiced, over time, was not a rejection but a consistent barring. A closing of something just as it began to open. Discomfort was enough. Nuance was enough. Even the possibility of obligation was enough to turn me away. Approach, hesitation, retreat.

Neutrality was a choice I made often enough. These almost-neighbor encounters, the ones I cut short, the ones I never allowed to deepen, this is where I locate a moment.

• Why have I kept a distance from a person? What did they do, and how did I respond?

• What do I usually avoid saying in a conversation with a new acquaintance? What is my standard greeting?

• What is my one relationship that never deepened? What was the exact moment I pulled back?

To Live By Faith and Not By Sight

Similar to the phrase “in spirit and in truth,” “to live by faith and not by sight” is a difficult segment to carry into memoir. What can by mean here, except a path of living that language alone cannot fully measure?

Memoir depends on what can be recalled, described, and located in time. But faith resists that kind of accounting. How to arrange this into scenes? How can a life lived by faith be documented except through testimonies? Even these are shaped after the fact, gathered, arranged, made to sound coherent.

The problem is not that faith leaves no trace, but that its traces are not always legible in the moment. To live by faith is not to see clearly and then act. It is often to act without clarity, and only later, sometimes much later, to name what sustained me.

Then the pairing “in spirit and in truth” feels difficult to hold in language without reduction. The more I define it, the more it resists. Because the question in memoir is How has it been? What’s the sequence, the evidence, what happened? But to live by faith is to move through what cannot yet be verified. It is to inhabit uncertainty without yet a clear narrative.

This is as close as a memoir can come, not a record of faith itself, but of the conditions around it. The hesitations. The waiting.

• What is that one major decision I made without calculation? How did it play out?

• What is that puzzling moment I understood only much, much later? What did it feel like at the time of the puzzle?

• What are my three major waiting moments?

In memoir, it’s not about making my life larger than it was, but about seeing it clearly, dealing with the small moments of interiority. Even faith cannot be neatly told, only traced through uncertainty and pauses. It is not a search for a grand conclusion of a life well lived or not, but a practice of noticing, to name and to stay with the moment long enough to evolve.