No Longer Baggage

So lately I have focused my writing attention on my book primarily. Being a memoir, it has understandably given me an opportunity to look at my past again, from fresh eyes. Putting my life down on paper, sharing with someone, has started a transformation within me that I was not expecting.

When I began the book, I was very apprehensive. I have always been known to divulge anything someone wanted to know, however that information was always in a tailored format. I always made sure to reveal only what I felt that person was capable of understanding. I have taken the advice of a friend, and have tried very hard not to edit myself in my writing. I am putting down events as they happened, not as I wanted to remember them happening. I have found that as the memories are released, in their honesty, they are becoming less and less things I want and need to think about. It seems they have found their way to the same memory bank as the normal childhood events. They don't seem so big and important.

I feel a sudden stillness in my memories. I don't feel the constant swirling of emotion. I no longer feel like a balloon is going to pop if I don't allow someone, anyone, to share them. I spent decades with these experiences kept to myself. Not because I didn't like them, because albeit wrong, I did like many of them, but because I didn't think anyone one else would understand them.

I started this book very fearful of who would read it, what people would think and how small the audience of acceptors would be. But now I want to finish it. I want people to read it. I want the appalled reactions and the reaction of those that can relate. I want to share it all. And even though I know those experiences shaped who I am and my life as I know it, each time I let one out completely, it just becomes part of my past, not part of my baggage.