I’ve been tossing together memoir notes and ideas for several years but until recently, didn’t have a workable focus for the project. Then like a flash, it came to me that I should write about my thirty years as a member of a not-well-known organized religion. I left the fold ten years ago.
My grandmother, Louella Martin
Thus far, my writing on the project has flowed smoothly – a good indicator that I have something worth sharing, but I stopped just before I planned to write about a meeting I had with my father’s mother when I was about ten years old. At that point I stopped, remembering that a few years back I’d written a short memoir about that meeting in one of my writer’s notebooks. I set the project aside.
A few days later I decided to go through a stack of notebooks and magazines while I was de-cluttering my office. I came upon a very thin gray notebook I didn’t recognize, and opened it, and there was the memoir about my grandmother! Definitely a synchronicity as I wasn’t looking for it at the time!
This felt like proof-positive confirmation to me that I should continue writing the memoir. I needed that because I’d been having qualms… worrying that God might strike me dead for telling the truth about what happened to me as part of that religion. You see, like many religions, there’s a huge taboo about writing anything remotely negative about it. A true sign of a cult is information control. And though I still love aspects of this religion and plan to write in glowing terms about what I liked, that hesitancy and conditioning got to me!
Well, the project lives on…
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