I wish I knew why I am drawn to this idea of documenting one’s life too.
It feels like a curse much of the time.
Always making notes, always writing, always feeling behind, always feeling like I missed too much, and always asking “Can I do something with that?”
And yes, memory is such a funny thing.
It can not be trusted, yet it is all we have of limited time and the fading preciousness of life.
Honestly, I’d rather be in the library carefree reading.
Documenting one’s life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit. I have always wanted to live as a beginner, and writing a memoir in some ways defies that notion, but I consider this book as a first installment in an ongoing story. I don’t know why some memories have persisted while others have faded, but I trust tenacity, so those are the memories I have written about. This is not a chronological fact-check of my life, and I am sure my sisters or my husband or my children remember some of these events very differently. I have abandoned my reliance on the external facts to support an individual truth, and everyone is entitled to his or her own.