ASS+U+ME=ASSUME : A reflection on memoir and honesty.

I’d say that my first experience with memoir was my freshman year of high school, when I was required to read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Maybe it was my first memorable experience reading or analyzing memoir, but in terms of writing memoir or creative nonfiction, that has been consistent through my life for as long as I can remember. During adolescence I had journals and diaries like the majority of other girls my age, but rather than routinely writing in the little lined books that I was given just for that purpose, I was more prone to scribbling about myself on blank pages of the sketchbooks that accumulated over the years. In my younger years it was often about my future; how good I’d look once I became the sixth Spice Girl or at very least the point when I’d get real boobs and sex appeal and stop wearing severely round-framed glasses that my parents picked out for me. In high school it changed to my present:



I never considered myself a completely happy or totally fulfilled person [who is during high school? The kids who go to church, never question authority, never experiment, and live the life their parents prescribed to them from birth? Puh-lease], but I never felt the need to reach out to a therapist or outside source. What I consider one of my greatest weaknesses is an inability to articulate myself well through speaking, so I relied on myself to write out my thoughts and look over them later. Hours, days, weeks, later, and analyze the complexities of emotion and experience that way. I loved the disorganization that came with not having them written in one convenient place to flip through and see a day by day portrait of what a particular year or month was like. To this day I’m still finding snapshots of ugly, angst-ridden, fourteen year old Explicit Kisses in notebooks and sketchbooks around my room, but also on napkins, post-it notes, newspaper margins, greasy fast food bags, and backs of algebra assignments. To me, this functions in a more interesting way than a mere memory; it’s what specific thoughts I had at a particular moment when I had a pen in my hand [I never write in pencil, I’d rather have scribbles and cross-outs all over a page than the ability for words to be erased forever. Not to mention the texture of writing in pencil really irritates me]. The collection of these little scraps of my life is like an intricate puzzle…maybe one that only I’m interested in. Even if that’s the case, I really don’t mind. I want to figure myself out, or at least get as close as possible.

I know that I’m not much of a risk taker, but I consider writing about oneself to be one of the biggest risks a person can take. Once something is written down it can be quoted or reprinted and analyzed by those who may not have a clue as to the context or true meaning of the words you chose. Such was the case when my mom found [and of course subsequently, read] the only real consistent journal I’ve ever kept. I ended up in her therapist’s office trying to explain myself and convince them that I was no “worse” or even different than any normal seventeen year old that I knew, I just had the metaphorical balls to write it all down. Admittedly, the fact that it was online and completely public didn’t help my case—obviously I was diagnosed as severely depressed and reaching out for some kind help, as my expressed teenage angst was never taken along with the fact that I was a straight-A student with numerous friends and involvement and enthusiasm in my extracurricular activities. The things I chose to write about in said blog were relatively mild anyway; maybe they had alluded to experimentation with petty things like cigarettes and alcohol, but there was clearly no explicit account of the time that my friends and I purposely started a fire in the band shell near my house [not in an arson kind of way…I can explain, I promise! See? It’s all about context…]. Nonetheless, it was both interesting and incredibly jarring to find out firsthand what kind of impact writing can have. Something that seemed so routine but purposeful to me became controversial. Something that I considered nothing more than stream of consciousness about my thoughts all of a sudden mattered because it was written down. I had and still have no regrets about my decision to express and archive honesty, despite the constant stream of criticism from those who believe that the experiences, mistakes, and “rebellion” of adolescence and young adulthood should be censored, repressed, ignored, forgotten, obliterated, invisible, hidden inside one’s mind or in a little locked book beneath a mattress. My only regret is that there are people in existence who refuse to believe that there is a deeper meaning beyond the words that “amateurs” choose to write, and that these people, so adamant in their interpretations and assumptions, become even more closed-minded than they accuse me of being on a daily basis. I regret that locks on little pink diaries are the norm, because of individuals who make and impose their own conclusions, judgments, and diagnoses on girls who are merely evolving out of their cycles of sugar-coated American childhood.

Eventually reaching college and finding out that there was an entire genre based off of this kind of writing was groundbreaking for me as a writer, although it made me realize that everything I had previously disguised as fiction was not. I am much more interested in truth when I can express it without fear of persecution, when I know that it will be judged and critiqued objectively rather than overshadowed with a cloud of blunt emotion. Since I can’t speak it, I need to write it, whether it’s just to me or to the entire world.