Written by: michaela renee
5/22/2009 5:09 AM

The text came through and it said, “my copy has arrived.”

The words in and of themselves, and perhaps even put together don’t seem that important. Unless of course it’s a copy of a birth certificate for your newborn baby, a copy of the escrow documents on your first house, a copy of the divorce settlement or… your Memoir being delivered to the man you wrote about.

Suddenly I realized I had written about my life, in painstaking detail, and suddenly I began to feel exposed.

While I share a lot of information with the world, the things that affect me most deeply have always stayed very close to my heart, and suddenly I realized that all those things that I’d chosen to protect over the years were available…on Amazon.com. I felt like I’d taken a scalpel, cut out my heart, sprinkled a little bit of my soul on it and uploaded it to YouTube. Why did I do this?

Because somehow if I put my thoughts on paper I’m able to let some of the memory go. Because the words are there for me to remember when I need to, the joy when I want to, and in cases of sadness, for the moment when I finally can.

Also because I have high hopes that one sentence, one phrase, or one paragraph will touch someone, inspire them, or even just verbalize a feeling they’ve felt.

But when the first copy of the memoir arrived and the text came through instead of being overjoyed, the feelings of excitement were swallowed with worry.

The perfectionist in me re-read the PDF galley of the book twice, and caught all twenty-odd typos; the friend in me wondered if I‘d given enough gratitude in the acknowledgements; the little girl in me wondered if Mom and Dad would be proud and the ex-wife, girlfriend, roommate, and other half of a whirlwind romance in me wondered if sharing my half of a two-sided story was fair. In my effort to stay true to myself and to the story, had I managed to do them all justice?

Putting your inner thoughts on paper to share with the world is like walking around naked.

That was the best analogy I could draw.  The writer’s block that stemmed from the word I felt, the simple word ‘exposed,’ drummed up such a strong wave of emotion that no matter how hard I tried, my brain refused to let my pen (heart) touch the paper (the world). So instead I ended up writing a poem.

Copyright ©2009 Michaela Renee

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