Not Doing

Taking time to write a memoir, and what it actually looked like along the way

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

When I decided to take off a chunk of time to write, I’m not entirely sure what I expected it to look or feel like. I think I imagined myself sitting in a quiet, warm cabin somewhere, rain or snow falling outside, pages to write on, maybe a laptop, nothing fancy. I could wake early in the morning and write while my mind was still foggy with sleep, and then when I needed a break I’d dash out for a run (no watch, no phone, no music, just me and the road of course) or putter in the garden on a dry day. Every aspect of those moments would stitch themselves together into a conduit of writing, of all these words tucked up safely inside of me finally finding a place on the page. And I knew there was a chance I’d hit a day when the writing wouldn’t happen, when I’d have to take a break, nap, watch TV, be a lump on the couch. Sure, I expected that.

There would also be days when I’d end up writing about the wrong thing. Like taking the wrong freeway exit and circling through downtown when you meant to get off two exits later and miss all those stop lights. Writing is funny. Sometimes it lets you say the thing you wanted to, other times it has a mind of its own.

What I did not expect was the rhythm of life to keep on chugging around me while I was attempting to lose myself in some zen state of being. I didn’t expect having to check math homework (dear god, fractions?). I didn’t expect that trip to the auto mechanic (again). My life is surrounded and entrenched with people and things and dogs and responsibilities, and somehow I imagined that all of this would fade away and leave me to my own devices to just… write.

Man I was wrong.

Day One

The alarm didn’t seem so important. I helped the kids get ready for school. It’s always a scramble (sometimes actually involving eggs), but their bags got packed and their shoes got tied. My wife and I walked them to school and then enjoyed a neighborhood walk together. She asked once we were home if I wanted to write. I shrugged and said, “I’ve got six weeks. Today is about resting.” We watched some television together, enjoyed an easy lunch, got a few things done around the house. I planted seeds in little trays to warm in a sunny window.

Day Three

I wrote things, but they weren’t the things I expected to come out. They were technical. Nothing poetic, nothing heartfelt. Clunky. Awkward. It was easier to organize the garage and clean up some messes that had been bothering me. I loaded up the firewood stack in the rec room beside the wood stove and started a fire, and I felt guilty twenty minutes later when I was still captivated by the flames licking the dry fibers of cedar.

Day Four

Writing is stupid. I’m over it.

Day Six

When I am away from a place to put my words I can feel them stirring inside of me. They assemble themselves neatly into lines that feel natural and pitch-perfect only to vanish the moment my writing utensils are near. It’s frustrating as hell. I have this time, I have this space, and my words elude capture, like they’re not really mine at all.

What if this happens the entire time?

What if I can’t ever make my own story real?

What if I’m not meant to author this thing I feel compelled to create?

Day Seven

Board games consumed and connected us together, a little family huddled inside from the rain and the cold, the woodfire blazing in the stove nearby. I ate my own bodyweight in sesame snack sticks and felt immensely better about life in general. And also I won a game of Five Tribes without even trying, which is saying something, knowing I face three other vicious players in this household.

Day Nine

While walking the youngest dog, I watched his back end slip out from under him three times. He has the canine equivalent of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (in dogs it’s called Degenerative Myelopathy) which is not curable or even treatable. He’s barely five years old, and this disease will end his life sooner than any of us expected. Something about watching him shake off the struggle of getting his hind legs to respond shook me out of my writing funk. And so I finally started. Words fell into place, and as the pages filled, I allowed myself to skip around, to abandon all hope of editing for now, and to just let my writing be imperfect.

Day Ten

It snowed this morning. The air was frigid and damp, and even the dogs didn’t want to walk much further than the end of the driveway. Yesterday was cold and clear, and I dug out several enormous laurel roots and stumps from the backyard, all of which is now blanketed in white, as though it didn’t happen. Like the world edited me out and smoothed over the wrinkle of where I’d been just a second beforehand.

This is the day that I am finally realizing the gravity of taking on a project like writing a memoir. It’s not like fiction or newsletter posts. I can’t expect to sell myself short by only including easy moments or joyful outcomes. Over and over I return to the Thomas Dougherty poem “Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words,” and I know I have to look at my own wound to speak about it.

But that fucking hurts.

Day Eleven

Sometimes spending time writing means a whole lot of memory gazing. I sit here and try to find the right words to describe these moments that are crystal clear (flawed as my own memory may be, at least it looks pretty to me). I wish I could say that it’s without distraction, that I have some super zen space and ability to keep my eyes narrowed on the vision of what my memoir will look like, but I’m simultaneously nervous that I might end up writing myself down a one-way dead-end alley (okay, ironically I once drove a bus down that very thing, and it didn’t go so great).

Let me restate that. Yeah, I am afraid I’ll follow a tangent that isn’t worth keeping later. But the actual fear? It’s that by telling my story I am also telling the stories of others, and that’s a huge weight to bear. Will I be accurate? Should that matter? Is it enough to tell my side of things?

Better yet, will they forgive me if I fail?

Day Twelve

Sometimes the writing just stops and there’s nothing you can do to turn it back on again.

Day Fourteen

As soon as I cannot write (what with packing, flying in an airplane, taking a minivacation), my brain is ready to pick up the pencil again. This happens all the time. Away from a place to write, my mind fills with the right phrases and descriptions, with amazing ideas and vibrant messages I yearn to share.

Day Fifteen

While it is next to impossible to see the transgender community around me (since so many of us do not self-label with trans pride stickers, pins, flags, or colors), it is equally refreshing to be in the company of visibly gay and lesbian couples in a foreign city. I delight in their freedom and joy, and I wonder if they see me as a fellow queer person in my now “straight-looking” relationship with my wife as we also wander the bustling sidewalks hand-in-hand.

Day Nineteen

Grief has this funny way of consuming me, of eating up all my reserves and pressing me down into nothingness for a while. Somewhere at the bottom of that, I can see that I am not alone in this very specific grief – for Nex Benedict, for Brianna Ghey, for Matthew Shepard. And for those of us who have survived, who continue to survive each day, sharing that grief is important. I can’t think of a better way to share it than by writing.

I am sick with knowing that so much of what I write is the pain and trauma of living in a world that does not want me. Writing about joy would be so much more beautiful, but I am still waiting to stop running long enough to feel that joy. So for now I’ll share the hard parts in hopes that something better is around the corner.

Day Twenty-one

Apparently writing your own memoir consists of a lot of staring at a blank page. It takes effort to get my fingers typing, but once they move they take on their own momentum.

Sadly this also means that some of the stories popping out aren’t part of the memoir I intend to write. But a story is a thing with a life all its own, and who am I to deny it the chance to breathe?

Day Twenty-two

My sleep has been fickle and disrupted. There is some science behind why, but I’m happier ignoring that and instead blaming the words stuck in my throat. I want to say them, but I’m afraid.

What am I afraid of?

Stupid stuff, mostly. Like bad word choice. Appropriate grammar. Nosy glances stealing before I’m ready to share. Vulnerable moments. Exposure. Confessing the truth.

Which is the point, but still.

Day Twenty-three

My stomach doesn’t want to do this.

Day Twenty-four

I am bound for an entirely wild destination, nowhere near here, nowhere near anything I’ve seen or done in (almost) thirty years. The laptop I usually write on will stay home, and my writing companion will be an incredibly boring spiral-bound notebook and pen. This is a curveball for my process. I haven’t written on paper in decades. But paper has benefits. No charging required, writing in half-light still works, and those bits of sentence starts can’t be easily erased or forgotten. Sometimes it’s nice to see the process and the product at the same time.

Day Twenty-five

The shape of the words inside me is alarmingly dark at times. They are unexpected and brutal, and I worry that there is nothing beneath them, no redeeming chapter of healing or triumph. This loss that I feel is a false shadow, a mental construction. Like a paper city that could burn or crumple or succumb to the damp.

Day Twenty-six

Talking about loss feels like examining a fresh wound under a bandage. It’s gross and messy and painful. Tears are often right at the edge of my throat. My words get choked with them, and so I opt not to speak to keep them at bay.

Day Thirty

How does a heart heal from a thing like this? It is as though some piece of me has died, gone cold, been excised from my being, and here I sit grieving the self I once knew. Worst of all, anger cannot save me. I am forced to confront my pain unarmed. Disarmed.

Emotional pain is not unlike physical at times. Did I feel this way in the moments where I willingly submitted to top surgery or to my hysterectomy? And how does grief collect in the hollows, like cold air in valleys just prior to daybreak?

Day Thirty-one

How do you explain to the world a story that involves so many things but is isolated, curated, siloed? Great idea, write a memoir about body parts. Stupid realization, I am clearly more than body parts. And in connecting myself to myself I am disconnected once more, this time intentionally. And that’s not part of this story, but it’s part of me, which means it is in my limbs, in my organs, growing in my hair, thick in my skin.

Trans people are always accused of cutting parts of ourselves away, but how often does anyone hear about where we were cut away first?

Day Thirty-five

No one tells you what will happen when you start to process your life on a granular level, but I’ll share this with you. Shit gets real.

Day Thirty-six

Shit is getting real-er.er.

Day Thirty-nine

Counting pages and words and characters doesn’t move you any closer toward a goal. It’s like staring at the part of the map you already traveled and expecting it to tell you something important happened along the way. Why do we do it? Aren’t the photographs a better record?

Day Forty

Finishing now seems like the worst goal I could invent. I’ve barely started anything, life has collapsed on top of me, and I’m left feeling even more bewildered than where I started. This isn’t a book. It’s not a memoir. It’s a messy bunch of papers (real and virtual) filled with unedited drivel that means something to me and probably isn’t even intelligible to anyone else, and why is it that the first sign of frustration always results in self-deprecating bullshit?

Why shouldn’t I keep trying?

Why wouldn’t my words be worth writing?

Day Forty-two

I guess… I’m here? And this is a beginning all over again. Which is confusing and painful and hard.

And then, out of the blue, someone I didn’t even know said thank you. So maybe I really am here. And this might be a beginning all over again. And that is confusing and painful and hard. But maybe it’s the right destination anyway.

---

If you’ve made it to the end of this journal-kinda-thing, don’t feel bad if you need to take a nap. That’s reasonable. I’ve done it. So much happened. So much. Things that have changed the course of life entirely happened. Like it was really that big in many ways. And I wonder if that’s what happens to a lot of people who set out to write a memoir and are fortunate enough to get a good block of time to attend to that work.

My work is far from over. In truth I took time away from everywhere for a lot of reasons, not just to write a book. And now that life has resumed a new but familiar pattern I am still plugging away at chapters and sections. I’m a long way from finished, but there are many parts of the process that have been enjoyable and necessary and cathartic and fulfilling. I believe I will complete this work, and I truly feel I’ll even find a home to get it published once I’m there. I don’t need to know what that looks like today.

Lots of you have offered words and actions of support and praise already. Thank you for those things. Every like, every share, every restack, and every subscriber who joins here brings me joy and encouragement that I’m heading in the right direction.

Your trans friend,

Robin