Why I Started Writing My Story

“I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.” ― Naomi Shihab Nye

I started writing my story because of silence, because of shouting and the sound of broken glass, and my mother’s face in the morning, sometimes marked by the night before, sometimes turned away to show how truly hurt she was. Because of the empty bottles on the dining room table, the glasses half-filled, the sense that whatever had happened was terrible, a threat to happiness. That happiness was the talk at dinner with my parents telling stories, their laughter, and their devotion to the creative work that seemed the only choice in a world marked by greed and war, in a world that watched the Vietnam War rage on, in a world where men in suits, a certain suit, decided, napalm or more dead soldiers? I started writing my stories out of love, fear, and anger. Someone needed to tell the truth, to illuminate the dim corners of the past, my father’s broken childhood, my mother’s ambition thwarted by those who believed a woman with three children and a husband had no business designing houses.

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I started writing my story after I found refuge in the love of a friend who I could trust to tell secrets, who listened even when the story was sad or scary, who told me I would do great things and if I didn’t, she would still love me. I started telling my story after she died and I believed my heart’s pain would never cease, after I fell so hard and fast in love I could barely breathe, after I hurt that love so deeply he could not bear to witness as I descended into another story, a false narrative of addiction and self-hatred, of bad choices, and the tolerance of lies.

I started writing my story because there was nothing else, no refuge from the truth, from loss and betrayal and the lies my parents had woven, the grief of a family that might have continued in its denial but the broken heart revealed everything. She left behind her precious child and because I was the storyteller I wrote that story through rage and the gradual awareness that I must choose between life and death so I chose to tell the story and then was given a narrative of redemption, recovery and the chance to love again despite the fear.

There was shame and sometimes the story dead ended in failure, lost jobs, lost marriages, a child who seemed hell-bent on destruction but still, we hope. I started writing my story as an act of rebellion, of pushing back, of rejecting violence and hatred, and a belief that everyone deserves to be loved. To be safe and given the possibility of a life unshadowed by lies. I started writing my story for my students who trusted me with their stories, who sought the truth and faced lives I could not fathom. Their stories of survival, of finding light in places that had been left dark, to help them break the silence, to give them a belief in the meaning of their lives. I started writing my story like a person willing to go first into the ocean, off the cliff, diving into water that offered no promise of safe return.

Safety is overrated.

I started writing my story because of those others who dared to tell the truth, who gave me hope that would transform the lonely world I inhabited with other lives, other places, love stories, loss of self, never giving up hope, survival, and the fact that most of these stories illustrate the dance of being human, of trusting in the words and letting go.

– Molly Moynahan