Something that is hard for me

Sitting here, at 4 am after surgery, I am thinking about a prompt that I was given recently to write about something that is hard for me to deal with. 

Reconciliation is part of everything I write about. Writing my memoir was itself a journey of recollection and reconciliation. To remember, is to reconcile. You must. How you remember and frame the past is a way of recovering from your past trauma. It's not as if you can change the past, you can't, but you can change your perspective. 

People who aren't writers sometimes ask me how to explain what I write and often ask me if I write biography. Usually, I respond that I write creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction is a broad umbrella that encompasses essays, memoir and other forms of "true" stories. 

My memoir pieces tend to focus on a specific time and place. These pieces, which range from essays, to poetry to stories, are always a way for me to write with purpose on issues such as what is memory? It is also a way for me to discover who I am now, and who I was back then.

Writing is a process and a practice and a way to understand the inherent fragmentation of memory and the challenges of how to capture time, place and character. It's not easy. Especially hard for me is the choice in my first person stories of whether to write in present or past tense. I prefer present tense because it's more active, but it's a fallacy because I'm writing about the past... get it?

Writing memoir is ultimately a way of capturing myself as a character back in the day and now. It's a way to bring my father back to life, as least on the page. Memoir was, and is, a way for me to forgive others and myself. It's also a way to celebrate the good times. 

What I think is ultimately hardest for me is not reconciling the past. What's hardest for me is being in the present (despite my somewhat ironic preference for present tense in my stories). As a writer, I'm always writing about what has happened, and as a person, I'm constantly focusing on the future, and on what WILL happen. 

I have so many goals as a writer and performer, and I try to visualize them into being. What some call manifestation. But I want to be in the now, in the here and now. Yet, the now is so fleeting. And it's more difficult to write about.

Here's to being in the now. The here and now. Right here. Not where I will be or where I was. 

Let's talk about where I am.