What is Speaking my Truth in Memoir: How to Tell your Truth in Memoir

Now, the topic for this video actually came up at a recent social I was attending, and the conversation came round to the recent Harry and Meghan docuseries on Netflix. And a person in the conversation said, I agree with them. They've been hurt. They need to tell their truth. And that got me thinking about two things. One, is it wise to be telling our story or writing our memoir while we are still hurting? That's a topic I'm going to discuss in another video. In this video, I want to raise the topic of the other item that caught my mind, and that is what it is to tell our truth. Hello, I'm Brenda. This is Write Your Story, and I'm here to help you to write your memoir. What I'm going to say next has nothing to do with a docuseries. I have not seen it. I do not have a Netflix subscription, and I honestly have no intention of watching it. So what I'm talking about now is a topic that's come to my attention that I think we need to think about when we are writing our memoirs and we are indeed telling our truth. What is truth? Very simply, the Oxford Dictionary defines truth as that which is in It is the opposite of falsehood. When we're talking about my truth or your truth, we're talking about our perspective on a fact or a reality. We're opening up about our feelings, about our emotions, about our opinions. We're giving voice to things before we may have kept shut down, and that we've kept within us. And we now give voice to it, and we now say, this is what happened to me, and this is how I responded. Or maybe something happened that nobody knows about, and you've kept it very quiet for such a long time, that now to tell your truth is to actually bring this out into the open. But when we do that, we need to recognize there's a twofold agreement we make. The one is we're going to tell it truthfully and honestly. We are not going to falsify any events in our lives. That is just not how we are going to tell our memoir. We are going to tell the truth. Now, there may be a difference in how we remember this. There's this faulty recollection or memory we have, and so we may need to kind of draw on some things in order to complete this memory. But that is very different from falsehood, from falsifying. And I love the way Marion Roach Smith says, we all know the difference between faulty memory and lies. And so we take on this agreement when we write our memoirs, when we tell our truth, that we will tell the truth, that we will not falsify our events. And we will also then not represent other people in a negative light unnecessarily. We will not cast onto them things that they are not responsible for, things that they did not say, things that do not apply to them. Those are the twofold agreements we make when we tell our truth. So we give authenticity to our lives. We give authenticity and validation to our emotions because we're actually speaking about ourselves and what has happened to us. And there's a lot of benefit and value when we write our memoirs to process and understand our lives, to process and understand situations in our lives, to understand ourselves better, to understand our families better. Those are all the benefits of writing memoir. However, when we break these chains of silence, or we give voice to our shame, or we start to say things we haven't spoken about before, or we name the things that we're all aware of in our families, but nobody's actually made it public before. When we do this, we can cause discomfort for others or we can cast other people in a negative light. Anne Lamott has this to say about that situation. She writes, you own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. Now, the first time I read that quote, I chuckled at it and felt really good about it. I thought, yes, I agree with her. Now, when I look at it a little bit more, I'm thinking, hmm, I think there's some caution we need to apply when we are writing about other people and we're telling our truth. So I don't disagree with her statement. I would just say we need to be cautious. And there are two things that I want to draw out of her statement. The one is, you own everything that happened to you. The focus of our memoir is what happened to us, our perspective. It is not the opportunity for us to now cast aspersions on other people, to falsify things in order to make ourselves look better, to tell expanded stories about our lives so that we look more interesting. If we've had an ordinary life and some difficult things have happened, write about your ordinary life and the difficult things that have happened. Do not give yourself more credit than you are due. The other item I wanted to talk about with regard to Anne Lamott's comment is that she says, if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. And I think, again, there's a caveat here that I'm going to talk about in my next video, which is with regard to writing our memoirs while we are still hurting. Yes, we're going to tell honest stories and truths about our life, our perspective that's not always going to reflect well on other people. But if we're doing it while we are hurting, there's a real danger there. And we're going to look at that in my next video. Now then, we're going to look at item number four, which is how do we tell our truth? And I think what's come to my mind as I've pondered this is a saying that a friend said to me once, which I think is really pertinent. We were talking about a dilemma I was in where I had been presented with two truths, two perspectives, two ways of seeing an event that did not coincide, they did not agree. And I had my feeling of whose side I actually thought was the truth and whose side was more a perversion of the truth to suit that person and to present themselves better. So that is the situation I was discussing with a close friend. And she said something that really impacted me. She said there are always three sides to a story. His side, her side, and then the truth. And that struck me because I realized then that we all see our happenings, our truth, our life through our own filter. And that doesn't mean that our perspective can't be discussed and told. We need to be very aware, though, that our filter does A, put us in the better light, and B, our filter can actually skew what actually happened and how we've interpreted it because of us, because of our baggage, because of our issues. So for example, something can happen that triggers me and I can respond in a way that's confrontational and aggressive, and I can feel offended because of this. But that is not actually what was meant when the event happened. It's the way I interpreted it, the way I took it because of who I am and my triggers. And so my perspective on that event is this is what this person said, and this is what they meant. But actually, I'm wrong. Actually, it's not. It's the way I've interpreted it because of who I am. It's my side of the story. It's a detraction from the truth. So can you see the challenge here where this is my perspective? This is how I see it. But actually, I've filtered it, and I've taken it the wrong way. So that's why I feel we need to be very careful when we're telling our stories to realize that we're going to write about our stories. But one of the things we want to do when we write our memoir is come to understand ourselves and the situation better, not just to put everything on the page in order to get it off our chest. When we write our memoirs, we have to be, A, empathetic, have empathy for ourselves, empathy for the people in our stories. Even the protagonists have some degree of empathy and curiosity. Curiosity as to saying, This is my story. This is my take on it. Can I learn something else or new different from it? Is there a different understanding I can come to of my story, of my relationship? And that's something I experienced in writing my memoir. It was only through writing my memoir, through getting through a lot of stuff and out on the page, which is important because I was hurting. So watch out for that other video. In writing and processing and putting my story on the page, I was able to eventually come to a different understanding of my relationship with my father. If we do that, does it actually then denounce all our hurt and push it aside and say it doesn't matter? No, that's not what I'm saying. Those hurtful situations still happened. But in writing my memoir, in processing it, in coming to understand it, I actually came to see a different way of this narrative, of this one that I had always pigeonholed as being negative, that there were actually some positive elements to it that I could now draw on and live from that place. That's not to say the negative elements were no longer valid. They just didn't have the same hold over me. And that's what I'm trying to convey in how we actually write our memoirs. We write our memoirs, we tell our truth, but we tell it honestly. We tell it without just getting it on the page and off our chest and too bad who gets caught in the crossfire. That is not how we want to write our memoir. And I think this has been very well illustrated for us in the memoir Educated by Tara Westover. In this memoir, Tara Westover speaks very plainly, very honestly about complicated things in her family. She talks about dysfunctional relationships. She talks about bullying from an older brother. And at no time in reading her memoir, does the spirit of anger, judgment, or stabbing her family in the back come across. Granted, I'm sure her family are not happy with what she said, but she has never discussed her family or her story from a place of anger or hatred or dislike of them. In fact, it comes across that she loves them very deeply. And if this is the context in which we write our memoirs, in which we give voice to our stories, then we have done it with integrity, which will be evident in our storytelling. And how others respond to it then is beyond our control. So that's the topic on this video. It's a more in-depth topic on this concept of what it is to tell my truth and the responsibility I believe that comes with it and the way we should approach it. And it still now may leave us feeling, well, I've been hurt. I've been really hurt. What am I supposed to do with that? Because I actually don't feel empathetic towards this person. And I have no curiosity about them other than to mention what happened. Well, we're going to look at that in my next video. So do subscribe, click on that notification bell so that you know that it's coming. And we'll look at that topic in this next video as we look at how it is that we go about writing our memoir.