Why I Wrote a Memoir

with Joan Didion, George Michael & Elton John

When my mom was 16 years old she told her family she was having a nervous breakdown and would have to quit high school. At the time she thought this was an ingenious plan to get out of going to school, which she hated. She spent several weeks sleeping before she realized that the only person she had been fooling was herself. “It wasn’t so much a breakdown,” she says now, “as a breakout.”

When I began to unravel in the summer of 2021, I could feel what she meant. To breakdown suggests a weakening structure, a crumbling apart, like an old rust bucket trying to hold it all together. A breakout is when an internal reality demands escape, those parts of yourself you have kept swallowed down and locked up and tamed. If you ignore the call for too long the insistence turns to madness and there is no calm way forward. It explodes. And it breaks you apart. It shatters you.

When it happened to me I knew what to do, what my mom told me she had done. I slept. And I wrote. Mostly it was journaling, stream of consciousness and dreams I had about being visited by my dad’s ghost. I became obsessed with the version of Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me where George Michael sings with Elton John. I played it on an endless loop. And then somewhere in the writing, I started a memoir. I started writing the story of how I became an addict and then a minister.

At the time I wasn’t even sure I was a minister anymore. That part of myself lay all around me in fragments. But every day I picked up one or two pieces and tried to remember. What had it all been about? I looked for the threads to see how it all tied together.

When I was in seminary following a fresh call to ministry, the thread was clear. It all makes sense now! I would say to people. My whole life finally makes sense. And then I learned, from my breakout, that change is the only certainty. That sometimes nothing makes sense. Because it all felt suddenly absurd. I had to write the story again, and this time I had to include everything. Even the parts I didn’t want to tell.

In her essay “Why I Write” Joan Didion says, “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

I wrote to find out what was hiding in there. I wrote my way out of madness. Eventually I joined a writing group and I would show them pieces of what I’d written. Does this make sense? I would ask. Every time they said yes, I was surprised. It helped to have them tell me what they saw in my story. Only then could I go back to the page and write more.

The scariest part was that I needed to write to finish the break out. The only way out was through. I’d kept it all locked down for so long, everything so tamed, that even madness couldn’t release it. Only when I sat down and started typing was something inside me allowed to be free. Only when I gave up the old story completely was I able to get honest. I swear sometimes while I wrote I kept my eyes closed.

“The path of healing,” I wrote in my journal at the time, “is a sacrament of apostasy, where again and again we are asked to renounce what is not true, the lies we have been told and the lies we have told ourselves. Again and again we are asked to liberate ourselves and others. Again and again we are invited to abolish the systems that keep us boxed up, afraid, and contained. The rejection of these systems, people, beliefs, organizations is relentless. The healing path requires that we encounter them and dismiss them in their dishonesty. It requires that we choose love and compassion and caring, even when that choice requires loss and grief. In fact, sitting in the shadows of our pain is a critical part of the process. Love always brings us to this place of recognition before we transcend it. And transcendence doesn't mean rising above. It means integration.” 

I imagine the path of healing as a spiral. We see it in the milky way, in the sea shell, in our own DNA. It is the fibonacci sequence. It is the sacred labyrinth. It reaches out with infinite potential. Every time we feel we are going back we have actually moved out farther and have been given the opportunity to see this ground once again from a new perspective. 

In Greek myth, Ariadne is the keeper of the labyrinth where the Minotaur lives. When her love Theseus goes into the maze to slay the monster, she gifts him a ball of thread to use as a guide to find his way back out. Writing, for me, is like following Ariadne’s thread. I write entirely to travel the maze of my mind, to break out rather than break down.

Ariadne also gifted Theseus with a sword to kill the Minotaur. But for me to heal I travel with Love instead. The monsters I face are just another part of me, after all. And I try to make peace rather than violence. The monsters have their own stories to tell.

Who are the monsters and how did they get there? And will they ever get free from the labyrinth? To paraphrase Joan Didion, if I had known the answers to any of these questions, I wouldn’t have had to write the memoir.