One of the things with memoir—with the amalgam of memories and writing—is that you’re not sure if you’ve written this before, tried to write this before, or started writing it before, or if you just thought about it, or if you’re remembering it right, or if, in all the times you’ve tried to write it or thought about how you’d write it, you’ve somehow changed things so much, or simply didn’t remember as much as you thought you did, which then becomes a question of what you’ve been thinking was important about that thing, and if that is not entirely true, importance being the weight of the value that the imperative to write about it derives from. And all of this is especially true, or especially unsettled and unsettling, when recounting traumatic events.
This morning, after a particularly hard week at work, I finally managed to get down “on paper” my recounting of the events of November 9th, 2011 on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. I realized, just a moment ago, that it was weird that it felt good to do this, considering the nature of its content and the fact that the world is flooded with this sort of content— the latter being enough to cause me anxiety on a daily basis. Part of it, I know, is the fact that it feels good to write after I haven’t in a while (feels good in general, really), while the other is that idea that processing shit is good, and feels good in its own way regardless of how painful it actually is. I guess that is the weird contradiction of successfully navigating things like trauma and conflict- it feels “good” to sit with or process the world, to face it and do one’s best to deal with it, even when the it is a nightmare. And of course “good” is a malleable signifier here: it feels satisfying to “make progress” (ugh language breaks down), but also: it is simply better than not dealing with it, which seems to me not enough to be able to define something as “good,” but better than simply saying “it is what it is.”
Relatedly, I have decided a couple things regarding the “10 Years In The Bay” memoir ‘zine that I’ve been working on and planning on having available on Xmas: A) it isn’t going to be available until my birthday, and b) it is going to be structured as such: 10 episodes from the last 10 years. So far the table of contents includes a confession and the best date award for 2018 (as seen on my Medium), the events of 11/9/11 at Cal, a particularly exciting adventure in Death Valley last year + my trip to NYC in the summer of /19 (a sort of Emi-G appreciation episode), a riot, a bar fight, an account of my holidays with the children, an account of the most heartbreaking evening I’ve ever experienced, my leaving UC Berkeley, and, of course, the death of my mother.
If you’d like to make sure and get your hands on a copy, you can sign up for my Patreon now and it’ll arrive in the mail in February of 2022. Also relatedly: if you are already a patron keep an eye on your mailbox as the next installment of The Peregrine Eloquent is on its way! I’ll post a story about it on Insta soon probs.
Ok that’s all. Gonna go for a walk and a bike ride xoxo