In this last prompt in January’s theme of Writing through Shame, we will add some reflection to the scene we wrote last week. As it turns out, telling the world our secrets isn’t the hardest part (sorry). The most difficult part, where we are truly being honest and vulnerable as writers, is when we try to figure out why we did the things we did, even if the answer is ugly. Even if in the end, the answer is “I really don’t know.”
But we must try. Here’s an example of a paragraph from the essay about abortion that I shared last week:
For many years, I tried very hard not to think about all of this, but as I bring it back to the surface of my skin, I remember something else, a thing I didn’t dwell on at the time, but now I see that it connects everything: the other woman had recently lost her mother. When a parent dies, no matter what age you are, there’s that I’m next feeling. When you are young, and maybe even when you are old, that realization brings with it a recklessness, a disregard for the self. For me, that meant searching out a chaos, as if that was the only thing which could fill my chest’s black hole. Of course, it only made matters worse, widened the gap. There was no way to fix the problem—my father was dead, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back.
Someone recently asked me when I knew an essay was finished. I have been asked that before, and I have always joked that I knew it was done when I was adding commas and then deleting them again. While that’s true, it’s purely mechanical.
The truth is that I know an essay is finished when it tells the story