What an Old Biography Revealed

A while ago, I received an email from an editor asking if I would like to update my biography. He planned to repost on his memoir site one of my pieces that he had originally published years earlier. When I read those fifty words, I thought about the woman who had written them. She had a handful of online publishing credits and a few more in local print magazines, none of which exist today.

I was taken back to that newby writer who published her first personal essays on her new blog site, “Magical Thinking.” She wrote non-fiction pieces with a flurry, fingers never tiring, brows never at ease when trying to make deadlines for her town’s magazine. She even had her own photos accompany the features.

Once a newlywed, she unpacked boxes in her new home of accordion folders stuffed with pages from a slush pile. She fingered through and read the beginnings of essays, paged through journals, and flipped through a sketchbook of charcoal drawings of trees.

I think of this time, especially the beginning of the summer, when back then newly married, my husband suggested I take the summer off to decide what I wanted to do next. I couldn’t fathom working more days at an international bank in corporate cash management than I needed to. It just wasn’t me. I told my husband that I wanted to write . . . as in, a book.

The stars had aligned, I thought—approaching a new decade of living, reading old essays and completed poems, my husband opening the door by suggestion, and . . . drawings of trees! I wondered what it all meant.

The green light was lit. It was time to reinvent myself. But could I do it? Could I be a writer? Could I trust myself that I was making the right decision?

It was once all about meaning.

I quit work and dove hard and fast into all things memoir, folding into it personal essays where meaning was the star of the story. Fiction writing was next, carrying a newly trained eye for the weight of meaning like any good radar detecting a target.

Until a more mature self realized meaning only went so far.

Insight goes beyond meaning to discover a perspective, or even a resonance.

There are many words for insight: understanding, perception, awareness, clarity, even wisdom.

In simple terms, think of a leaf. It falls from a tree branch. It may mean the season is changing. But our insight tells us that renewal may only come from letting go.

I look back on it now and see that quitting my job meant I could write full time. But what became clear was that I would not be where I am today as a writer if I had not felt affirmed by my husband’s suggestion and made a leap of faith in myself.

From the folders of my long-ago writing past, I saw I was already a writer—an essayist in the making. As a young girl, the long walks around the perimeter of my home, weaving through bushy oaks and maples in my yards; stopping to watch bees whirring around the rose blooms in my mother's garden; sweeping an open hand along a row of lilac bushes and carrying the fragrance in my palm; sitting beneath the flowing boughs of the willows—all left footprints leading to a revelation of who I would become: a wanderer of forests, a meanderer through the woods, and a writer of the natural world and our connection to it.

I think of how we spend many moments digging for meaning in our experiences and then stop there as if we have figured it out . . . or not. But it’s the insight that teaches. It nestles in with our big-picture lives as we grow to learn more about ourselves. And sometimes we don’t see that until we read a biography of our lives written decades ago.

I long for my young self in a way that I miss her writing, so raw that her sense of voice in telling stories sounds untouched and her words read uninfluenced by editors or the style of polished writers. Though her words and voice have now matured, her sense of innocence and simplicity in her writing have not been lost.

Perhaps this is the best insight from this writer.

Insight is the nugget of gold that shines with wisdom.

And the wisdom, as I have learned, is to trust yourself. You can do it.

This one from Marcel Proust tells me that an experience itself may not change, but our way of seeing it does.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

I thought this quote by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem—a reshaping of the self that comes with aging.

"I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."