Memoir for me, and it’s different for everyone, but for me it’s been an investigation of the totality of mind-body-spirit. And through it, through the writing down and the pondering and the revisions, the insights piled up and became an expansion. For as I wrote the stories and dispelled the mysteries, new questions arose. Questions that could only be answered by going deeper into the feelings.

Remembering the feelings is equally important as remembering the events. One memory brings forth another, and another, and another. The memory of feelings is still in my body and mind, and the uncovering, the piercing through the layers of obfuscation and darkness, transforms not only who I am now, but my ideas of who I was then. And so both are healed. Transformed. Past and Present. Now, and in the Now, where there is only Now.

Writing memoir, I have had to go into myself. So deeply into myself that I got out of myself, watching my life as I would a movie, without attachment to the drama, and seeing everything that unfolded as necessary to my growth and understanding.

The first book revealed itself as a mystery. Hence the subtitle, The Memoir That Solved A Mystery. Through the writing, which lasted over a period of fourteen years, I was able to reveal to myself the answers I had been seeking. The answers a part of me had known all along (deep within), which I hadn’t been able to access until I took the time to explore all the highways and byways of my experience as a young person. Fleshing them out, laying them bare on the dissecting table, and making connections.

The second book, the follow-up, is currently in the revision process. (I almost said still in the revision process, as if I should be further along by now.) I had to step away from the book for a few months while my understanding caught up with my ideas so that my ideas could now reflect my new understanding.

Before I go on, sometimes I have to wait for the new insights to filter through. Sometimes I have to wait until I am more brave to write my truth, or write the intuitive perceptions that have come to me—and ignore the ego that says—You can’t say that!

My reality is such that just because I was brave once does not meant that I will be brave again. And yet I have found—and here’s the kicker—that once I can lay my fingers on the underlying truth of my feelings, the shame disappears. The fear of what others might think disappears. Because truth has a resonance of its own. A purity. And it is without ego.

My current working title is, The Nancy Who Drew a Pillar of Light. Because now I’m aware that both my drawing and writing have served to expose the shadows, so the light could be revealed again.