To Thine Own Self Be True

Six months have passed since this blog had its last posting—six hundred words on two quotations that summed up what I’d learned in eighty-five years of responding to the question found in the Book of Micah in the Hebrew Testament: "What does Hashem require of you?” 

 

The prophet offers the following unadorned but profound response to that question: “To do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God." (Tanach translation of 6:8)

 

To illustrate his response, I used—in that July posting—what I’d gleaned from my journey with Meniere’s Disease. A quotation from Maya Angelou and one from Philo of Alexandria encapsulated the gift of gratitude that had grown within me as I’d stumbled and stuttered my way through life. 

 

However, that posting, in and of itself, stopped me in my tracks. I admitted to myself that I was talking the talk, but not walking the walk. How so?

For eighteen months, I’d been working on a memoir. I started with the ten years following my departure from a Benedictine convent, but I could not find the warp of those years

 

So I began again, this time with the twenty-two years before entering the convent. Once again, the tapestry of that period eluded me. I found myself entwined in the weft of the events that had resulted in my experiencing—even now—the diagnosed symptoms of PTSD. 

 

Writing a memoir is a humbling exercise. I had hoped to find healing; instead, I found how often my actions had hurt others. Night after night, since July, I’ve tried to find sleep. It’s ignored me, insisting that I sort through the events of the past, making culpa again and yet again each night for my many mistakes and misunderstandings. Guilt and shame ensnared me.

 

In truth, I’ve spent months beating up on myself for not being that person Micah encourages us to be. For those of you who have read my memoir about the convent, this probably is not surprising. Always I am haunted by the need to be perfect—a need breed and born in the traumatic years of my childhood.

 

Repeatedly in the past six months, I’ve given up writing; I’ve let go of my love of the cadenced sentence that evolves into story. 

 

A friend of many years recently observed that I’m a concrete thinker, not an abstract one. To me that meant that I wasn’t a deep thinker. So how could I write anything worthwhile if I didn’t have the intellect to find its meaning? Only one answer presented itself to me: throw in the towel.

 

But there’s more to this story then my depression, reluctance to let go, and, yes, despair. 

 

And this is the more: As I listened to a Fannie Flagg book in audio last weekend, a sudden peace settled within and about me. A peace born of the acceptance that I may not be a deep thinker, but I am a storyteller. That is my identity. I’m not mother, wife; baker, cook; photographer, sculptor. No. I am a storyteller. 

 

Then let me embrace that. Let me tell the story just as it meanders through the labyrinth of my mind. Let me let go of seeking the metaphor, the smooth transition, the telling word, the ah-ah moment. 

 

Let me simply tell the story of my life so as to follow my mother’s legacy. Many more times than once, she said to me as I grew up, “If you look for good, Dolores, you will find it. And if you look for bad, you will surely find that too.”

 

This weekend, I realized that I do look for good in others, but I fail to look for it in myself. I’m oblivious to it. Looking within, I find only the worse in myself. 

 

I tell you now that in this month of December 2021, I have committed myself to looking for the good in what I have done and said. In the way I have touched the lives of others. The memoir will be the whole of who I am—failure as well as triumph.   

 

I will be kind to myself.

 

Peace. 

Photograph from Wikipedia.

Note: I have no idea why so much of this appears as if it's printed on ticker-tape! Technology continues to baffle me. Peace.