A Struggle Within

I've never had a lot of family, and my friends have filled those voids for me. Which is good, because it seems like the family members I can manage to coexist with are far away or passed away.

I know I've been quiet on the blog lately, and it is all a struggle within my mind. There are good days and bad days and days when I wish I wasn't me and days that I wouldn't be anyone else for anything.

My home has always been within fiction. The stories I want to share are always bubbling free. The problem is that the story I want to tell these days isn't fiction. That said, I abhor memoirs. And yet as I turn the pieces together, nothing else will fit. Some stories do not translate to fiction. I also refuse to go the route of saying, "Here, read this pile of fifteen stories to understand." And it would take an unknown number of stories, because fiction simply doesn't translate the same way nonfiction does. Coherence of story matters. (At least, to me.)

The other struggle with writing a memoir is that I don't remember everything. I see flashes here and flashes there and only creative nonfiction would fill in the gaps necessary to make it understandable.

Is it worth telling a story that gets more complicated the more you remember? It's bad enough a friend of mine looked at me this week and simply stated, "You're complicated." I'm pretty sure that isn't a compliment, but thanks, dude. Doesn't matter if I try to be an open book, if I try to be someone simple. It doesn't work for me.

Honesty may be the best policy, but less can also be more. Simple questions should have simple answers. I know it always frustrated my father when he would ask me questions that seemed like it would have a yes or no answer, and I'd come back with something like green. All I can say is, it made sense at the time. To me, and me alone.

This month, today, both are significant to me. I struggle with mental illness, and the first signs of it (at least, confirmed from someone outside myself) were about seventeen years ago this month. Diagnosis followed slowly, about seven years ago. It's forever, and yet it's yesterday. I know I've been irrational with a side of paranoia lately, and I'm hoping to move past that for a time. How much is always unclear.

Maybe the memoir idea will fade and I'll be able to concentrate on editing that story I've been meaning to finish.

I saw a quote today by Terri Main. "You are a writer. The 'normal' ship sailed without you long ago."