Why, then, if not to explain?

One of the best memoir titles I’ve ever encountered is Why I’m Like This by Cynthia Kaplan. Admittedly I haven’t read it yet; it’s one title in the steep and teetering pile of them. But the title alone speaks directly to my original (but no longer true) intention for writing my own story about being adopted. I wanted—needed—to explain myself.

The skinsuit

For most of my life I felt just slightly out of step with the world, though I’ve covered it quite skillfully (if I do say so 💅). I felt like an alien that learned to rock a slightly ill-fitting human skinsuit. I managed, but was constantly hobbled by the suspicion that capital-e Everyone could tell something was slightly off.

Then, two years ago, I read the introduction to Anne Heffron’s memoir You Don’t Look Adopted. It begins:

Most of my life I have felt both real and not real. I have felt real in the sense that I have a social security number and an online presence and a pulse, and I have felt not real in the sense that my birth mother wanted nothing to do with me once I arrived. Since an infant is born with a sense of self not separate from the mother, I believe part of my brain took a nosedive in the gap between mothers, and part of my brain decided I must not exist, and in some crazy unexplainable way, nothing changed in that part of my brain, even as an adult. When you are in conflict with yourself it's like you're a car whose gas pedal is also the brake. It's hard to get anywhere.

Nothing I’ve read before or since spoke so deeply to my experience. To me, that paragraph said everything.

But rather than simply let it speak to me, I decided I’d do my own version of this—tell about my own experience of being adopted to explain, well, Why I’m Like This. I could point to my skinsuit, maybe even take it off, hold it up, say, “yes, I am as awkward as that. I am as confusing to myself as I am to you.” I wanted so much for you to understand my inner world so that, perhaps, you could accept how it was manifesting in front of you.

At last, I’d found a way to explain and, with that, I said yes to writing my story.

A false foundation

This revelation did not, as I expected, unleash the floodgates of the creative process. Instead, my memoir and I have spent the ensuing years wandering through the same big, creaky old house, running into each other from time to time, scaring the bejeezus out of one another, shrieking and retreating into separate ends of the building to hide.

I mean, writing a book isn’t easy; this isn’t news. It can, in fact, be the hardest thing in the world. Still, why would anyone bother if there isn’t a tiny bit of joy in the process? I couldn’t find any, and so the mutual lurk between my story and me continued.

I’ve since come to see that a huge part of this stuckness was the very need to explain myself: an approach that assumes that I am bad, I am wrong, and that I am writing to literally beg your pardon. Not that being naked in our awkwardness, shame, and all that other ugly stuff doesn’t make for powerful stories. But my singular purpose in writing it was to justify all that. To apologize for it. That is poor motivation, a mushy foundation, for any work.

Plus, nobody was waiting for an explanation because—say it with me!—nobody is ever paying as much attention to us as we are to ourselves. Contrary to my projection, not a single soul noticed the skinsuit and, even if they did, they sure as shit weren’t staying up nights trying to puzzle it out.

Maybe all the explaining I ever needed begins and ends with Anne’s marvelous quote up there—simply because of how it settled me when I read it. Maybe I don’t have to hunt for my own elaborate justification.

Anyway, I don’t want to anymore.

Then why?

Still, the yearning to write my own story persists, and I’ve been sitting with the “why” of that: if not to explain, then what’s it for?

The answers come pretty quickly: it’s for the deeper understanding of myself backward and forward in time. It’s for signs that might point the way ahead or, better yet, down into the ground in the form of deep acceptance, maybe even serenity. Heck, maybe it’ll even help someone.

Regardless, in writing it I’ll be creating something: the one thing that I’m certain I am here to do. We all are, I think.

Chipping away

For now, I’m writing around the story’s edges. But I am writing. Right now, I am writing. I’m tiptoeing down the halls of the house I share with this story, peeking around corners. The story is doing the same. We make brief eye contact, giggling at each other. There is a little joy. There are glimpses of the “why.”

I think this counts. I mean, it has to, because it’s what’s happening. And it feels a lot better than cowering, paralyzed, in the corner of my life, avoiding my story until I’ve found courage or reason enough to run straight into its arms.

So the working title of the thing appears to have evolved from Why I’m Like This to something like What I’m Writing Instead of my Memoir, or Sidling Up to My Story, or Writing ‘Round the Book.

I’m chipping away, and the story is revealing itself on its own terms.

What about you?

• Is there a story you’ve been poking around the edges of for a while, unable, just now, to meet head on? What exists around its edges that you can speak to, write about?

• Is there a part of your life you feel called to explain or justify? How has that affected your creative process?

Please share your experience in the comments. Your wisdom will help all who read it.

And if you are feeling a little stuck for whatever reason, join a bunch of us who sit quietly and write together every Monday from 9-10am Pacific in the Creative Co-Working Den on Zoom. Email me for the link at joy@beginnerdom.com.