What did I mean to say about The Weight before I got sidetracked hanging out the laundry (which probably only made sense if you read the transcription I stuck behind the paywall)?

Here’s a snippet of that March 2006 entry both for retroactive context and the rest of this post:

The separation between my body and my spirit is like the separation of church and state! I don’t “live” in my body anymore than I “live” in my wood and glass house… I don’t even know if it’s so much that I hate my body as I have a thoroughly distant relationship with it.

My whole life used to be an out-of-body experience. I was either in my head (or on the page) trying to make sense of everything, or out of it altogether, busy with mindless activities, like housework. Doomscrolling works, too.

Over the last year my body and I got to know each other much better thanks to what I call The Maladies, a series of breadcrumb symptoms that led me down paths to nowhere, medically speaking.

(Except for a fussy gallbladder, chronic left-sided sinus inflammation, an allergy to dogs, and the nebulous catch-all of menopause.)

Nevertheless, I got somewhere.

First, The Maladies brought me to The Sixes. No, it’s not just next-level navalgazing.

What I am looking for in my old journals are the unique patterns of my health over time. Also, mentions of my mother’s and grandmothers’ health because, you see, I arrived at my menopausal transition without a single living direct female blood relative with whom to compare notes.

Second, and more importantly, The Maladies reliably twitched me back to my center, a place deep beneath the branches of my entangled nervous system, far below my meaning-making mind, where I snuggled into something that is both my Self and so much more than a single Self can contain.

Multitudes, as Walt Whitman said.

What I was starting to say before the laundry pulled me away was how I got from the total body disconnect of a 25- and 35-year-old woman to a mostly integrated middle-aged one.

I had some help.

Until last year, I outsourced the care and comfort of my body, especially if it involved any brand of alternative medicine. I never met a cold plunge-herbal-homeopathic-massage-yoga-breathwork-reiki-cleanse I wasn’t willing to try (maybe Ayahuasca, but only because I hate mushrooms).

But The Maladies kept tossing symptoms at me that defied float tanks, CT scans, psychic readings, votive candle pleas, and prescription drugs.

That’s how I ended up in the care of Dr. Jacey Goddard and Dr. Daniel Gibbons, at RiverTree Osteopathic Health. Inconceivably, I’d never experienced osteopathy in my lifelong quest for optimal health. I thought “D.O.” was just another way to say “M.D.”

I needed help with my crossed-wire nervous system, constant low-level anxiety, and tsunami-like panic attacks. A friend and RiverTree patient said she knew just the people.

You can learn more about osteopathy from an internet search, but suffice to say the focus is the whole person and not compartmentalized systems of a person.

By the way, don’t go to classical osteopathic doctors if you want to find out what’s wrong with you. They look for HEALTH in your body not a disease.

Subscribe now

Dr. Goddard teaches an online course called The Art and Science of Healing from Within, and hosts biweekly online meetings for those who sign up.

Between the self-paced modules and the experiences of others in Dr. Goddard’s group, I learned I have resources within me that promote and support my own health. No CBD drops needed.

“Self-healing is our birthright,” Dr. Goddard says.

Really?

It’s still kind of hard to believe. The “fix” I searched for all my life was never out there. It was always right here in my very own body.

I call the experience insourcing, a felt sense inside me of my own okayness. And more. When I get down in there good and deep, there is so much love underneath the tangled cables of grief (that never had any outlets to begin with).

It wasn’t easy. I’ve cried some of the ugliest tears of my life since February 2025. Learning to live in my body and feel things instead of dissociating is one of the hardest lessons I ever willingly signed up for, and kept coming back to again and again.

Do I still have The Maladies? Yes. Probably. Sometimes. Not always.

But that’s not the point.

Subscribe now

“Down periscope,” Dr. Goddard says, “You just gotta keep feeling into that center, dropping down into yourself, and staying inside.”

Especially when so much pulls you out.

Maybe you have your own physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual maladies.

Even if you don't, just look around.

We are living through an ongoing compounded collective trauma that future generations will wonder about as surely as we try to understand what it was like to be alive during the Great Depression.

Insourcing may not change our historic circumstances (but imagine if more and more people learned how to truly center themselves). And it’s not a cure-all - or a substitute for medical care.

But The Art and Science of Healing from Within is a good place to start on the path to better health.

Maybe even a better world.

The Sixes: My Reading from the Journal of Yesterday project for 2026 is a series of paired posts drawn from the diary entries of 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. Part 1 - for paid subscribers - shares transcription from one (or more) of these old journals. The intention here is to show my stripped down, straight from the heart, awkward and messy humanness with no claim to good writing. Part 2 - for everyone - reflects on it with the full power of my narrative might and the hope that with craft comes connection to readers in the here and now.

ICYMI: The Sixes, Pair 3, Part 1

ICYMI: The Sixes, Pair 3, Part 2

Why do I still write about the hurt feelings caused by a 15-year-old boy when I was a young adolescent?

In 1986.

Twenty years later in 2006.

In The Sixes last month, 40 years thence.

I am explaining things to myself (lately, to you), getting my story straight, a bloodletting in ink (and we all know how effective that medieval practice turned out to be).

However, though I wrote about it over and over for years and years, I never actually felt the rage, humiliation, unfairness, and betrayal of that sadly foundational, life-shaping experience.

That’s how it works. You pack away what hurts, especially as a child, because it’s too painful to feel.

Without someone to model how to unpack those feelings, to help iron out the wrinkles of perception without judgement or shame, they remain capsule wardrobes of rupture, no distinction between the clothing and the skin.

You wear them as if they are you and not what happened to you.

Subscribe now

At times, I am nearly incapacitated by the fear of what other people think of me. I’ve got plenty of fight, flight, and freeze in me, but mostly, (I’m afraid obsequiously), I fawn.

Fathomless are the depths to which I was hurt because I believed people didn’t like me. Specifically, because of what someone else said. No one ever listened when I tried to defend myself, so I turned to the ever-present, patient, and forgiving page. It never doubted me, or gave me a down-the-nose look.

My outrage and confusion stayed balled up inside, yet came out in writing like stains on a sweatshirt worn days in a row, obvious and yet no longer connected to the original slip from spoon to tongue.

“‘Ongoingness’ is the enigma of traumatic suffering…,” writes Shelly Rambo in the study, Spirit and Trauma.

“Trauma is not solely located in the actual event but instead encompasses the return of that event, the ways in which the event is not concluded… Trauma is what does not go away. It persists in symptoms that live on in the body, in the intrusive fragments of memories that return.” (Rambo, 2015, pp. 8-13, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology).

I got good at writing from my own life, but it didn’t get me what I most wanted, the compassionate understanding of another human validating what I felt. No matter how much I understood myself, I longed for someone else to understand me, too.

If all that journaling, “processing,” and venting was actually useful, I wouldn’t have repeated the maligning experience of middle school almost exactly when I divorced my first husband.

He disparaged me throughout the ordeal, and probably long after, and maybe still in a dark corner of his heart.

I probably don’t have to say that I totally get it. And yes, of course, my ex-husband was hurt, and not his best self. I can say the same of JB, who was a child, too, like me.

I wish a grown man could have spoken of his own difficult feelings without trashing me, the mother of his kids.

But what does anyone know about the right way to manage awful feelings at any age, ever?

Subscribe now

Still there are people who give me a black, disregarding, oh-I know-all-about-you look even 15 years after the dismal time of my divorce. It used to send me into a tailspin of anxiety, apology, and aching regret every bit as much as when I was a girl, all those feelings reawakened at the subtlest dismissal of my existence.

But I brought all of this on myself, didn’t I?

Ah, the stubborn ongoing stain.

There’s nothing my ex-husband actually needed to say about me. He was defending himself, making his voice heard, telling his side of the story because, instead of committing my divorce experience to a journal, I blogged about it in Love On The Run.

Blogs were brand new back in the 20-aughts and 20-teens. I was already a 30-year apprentice to personal writing, plus my Bad Mother Chronicles blog was wildly successful on the old RaisingMaine.com.

I blogged about my divorce because we split (in part) because my ex-husband read my journals. Repeatedly. The private page was no longer a safe place. And I finally found what felt like the understanding I so longed for in the comments section of my screen.

But I hung myself out to dry.

Who puts their underthings on the clothesline for all to see?

Some people really hated Love On The Run. I see now I was amiss in my subconscious bid for emotional validation from the Anonymousphere. And it’s taken all these years to put myself out here online again, afraid I’m just looking for an audience for the unmentionables.

Anyway, I was busy raising kids for the last 15 years. In a community where I felt a bit shunned, to be honest, one way or another.

No more potluck invitations. Parents I once laughed with at toddler gym or soccer games greeted me flatly as they looked away, at anything else.

I shrank to the tiniest version of myself, the most banally acceptable, and even that wasn’t small enough to not register as an X in place of the woman I used to be.

It was exactly how I felt in high school - with fewer distractions from the pain of it and 1,000 times the shame. My kids had to live in this distortion with me.

Subscribe now

A lifelong friend and peer-to-peer psychiatric group facilitator, recently told me, “When the righteous victim story is suppressed, the victim drama rises up.”

Repetition compulsion. Re-enacting trauma. It’s noted throughout the literature I read over the six years I studied the impact of trauma on adult learning.

Rubbing at that stain that never comes out.

Unconsciously calling back what hurt.

To heal it.

To feel it.

I knew when I launched A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday that transcribing old journal entries and publishing them might land for readers like laundry. It doesn’t matter that it’s not dirty. No one even hangs clean clothes outside anymore.

But there’s nothing like fresh air.

The sight of a nightdress sweeping its arms back and forth on the line in a neighbor’s yard, opening them to the sky on the upswing, and floating like a prayer to the earth on the down, always makes me smile.

Child psychologist D.W. Winicott said, “It is a joy to be hidden.” Even after 46 years, journal-keeping remains my special delight.

But, he adds, it’s “a disaster not to be found.”

So if you found me, well…

Thanks for looking.

(What does any of this have to do with the first part of this Sixes pair, The Weight? Maybe nothing. This reflection went in a totally different direction. Pair 3, Part 3, coming soon.)

Rambo, S. (2015). Spirit and Trauma. Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology.

(Richmond), 69(1), 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020964314552625

The Sixes: My Reading from the Journal of Yesterday project for 2026 is a series of paired posts drawn from the diary entries of 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. Part 1 - for paid subscribers - shares transcription from one (or more) of these old journals. The intention here is to show my stripped down, straight from the heart, awkward and messy humanness with no claim to good writing. Part 2 - for everyone - reflects on it with the full power of my narrative might and the hope that with craft comes connection to readers in the here and now.

ICYMI: The Sixes, Pair 3, Part 1

Mon. March 18, 1996 Whitney Avenue, Portland, Maine 6:30 pm

I did a stupid thing. I weighed myself at GNC while I was at the Mall getting my glasses fixed. I should first say that before I even put my quarter in the machine, the GNC guy said that the machine was “going heavy” lately. So maybe I don’t weigh quite 177 pound. I didn’t ask how off the machine was. Maybe two pounds, maybe twenty. I don’t know. I have no way of knowing now that I’m home.

And I didn’t need to weigh myself to know that I’ve gained more weight than usual this winter. Weight is such a big deal to me. As I was driving home, I thought about something one of the aircraft mechanics said to me shortly after I started working there.

He said, “You can’t handle all the attention you’re getting.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but today I did. I’m really not comfortable being complimented about my body and the men at Northeast Air are all eyes. They’re lascivious. I’ve never been able to use that word honestly before I started working there. They make me feel uncomfortable about being attractive. I don’t feel good when they look at me because I’m just a body to them, just tits and a big smile.

So among many contributing factors, I think I put on weight to protect myself from them, to make myself less desirable. I know enough now to know that weight doesn’t matter. It’s who I am. But I’ve been really uncomfortable there as a woman.

Read more

Autobiography “brings together one’s prior selves and images of significant others without which the story cannot be completely told,” Brady says.

If I was working from memory alone, I could doodle over the splotchy moments of my life, the icky ones, applying broad strokes to make my story whole.

But that feels like glossing over them.

Instead I turn to my primary source material to corroborate my own story as if I am the chief suspect in a conspiracy. Of what? To keep myself from myself? Myself from the truth of myself? Or to protect myself from the lies I told myself about myself?

Shedded skins.

All the journals, yearly engagement calendars, boxes of newspapers, letters and photos, feathers and stones I no longer recall the significance of.

Evidence of lives, selves, beliefs, and relationships I outgrew.

But didn’t exactly leave behind.

Subscribe now

1. “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”

~ Florida Scott Maxwell (cited in Brady & Larson, n.d., p. 14)

I am learning how to be “fierce with reality” without old emotional flight plans, like numbing instead of feeling what I feel in my body, or intellectualizing so completely that I gaslight myself.

The trick to looking back is being willing to see, and not just with a casual yes, well, that happened glance, but with a kind eye toward the person you used to be.

You can’t block, select, and delete events in your life that embarrass you anymore than you can revise all the endings that broke your heart into ones that were never meant to be.

Life, even bent to narrative form, is not a story.

I was a boy crazy girl.

I have to face this first to be “fierce with reality.”

2. “When the subject was 14… she began to pursue male attention, like the cartoon cat who turns around and begins to chase the dog. From there on out, her pursuit was dedicated, the subject was never without a boyfriend, or several… What this study is attempting to ascertain is why? Why did she do this?”

~ Claire Dederer, Love and Trouble

I used to hate that boy crazy girl.

I hated her because my parents hated her, that wild child they couldn’t control, a monster of frantic wanting that replaced their daughter with a mouthy, blubbering, wrathful, unpredictable creature they didn’t recognize - never mind want - as their own.

A monster. I was a monster.

Maybe they didn’t hate me all the time. But my adolescence was the final proof of everything they feared for me, feared of me, and worst of all, vaguely feared in themselves throughout my entire childhood.

By the time I hit 15, I hated myself enough for all of us.

“Of course you were boy crazy,” a psychologist I saw last year pointed out.

I was reading 1985 entries at the time, horrified that even as a 14-year-old, I was obsessed with relationships. I was the Lady Whistledown of Woolwich Central School.

“It makes sense,” he said. “A child with insecure attachments would likely be very interested in making secure ones.”

“Hardly,” I said, “I was never attached for very long.”

“That’s also the pattern of someone with relational trauma,” he added.

Relational trauma. Insecure attachments.

Just another way of saying it was my parents’ fault I was a monster.

And I wanted it to be mine.

Subscribe now

3. “Children who are deprived of love have two difficult choices: yearn for love or succumb to numbing indifference and contempt for others. Lovelessness is excruciating in its banality. It robs a child of her vitality. It leaves no physical welts or scars, just devastating, enduring emptiness. Lovelessness has no language, poetry, or music. It is unnamed, hidden from view and disabling … many assume the capacity to love is intuitive, but it is not.”

~ Laurie Kahn, Baffled by Love

It had to be my fault, all of it.

As long as it was my fault my parents hated me, I could make them love me, too.

The psychologist said this belief was “relentless hope,” and gave me a book by Martha Stark, who studied people who won’t let go of such illusions (delusions).

People like me.

It’s a defense mechanism, Stark writes, so you don’t actually have to feel the pain of being hurt by someone you love, someone who disappoints you (over and over and over).

Relentless hope keeps unbearable grief at bay.

I am exceptional at this.

4. “I say that refusing to write your story can make you a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monstrous. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.”

~ Melissa Febos, noted in a 2024 journal, possibly from Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Once a monster, always a monster.

I raised three kids to adulthood, dedicated a career to helping other kids complete high school, and tried relentlessly to get that monster off my back, lose it down a dark alley, give it the slip so it never finds me again.

But the monster never leaves.

She is always just around the corner, and under the bed, jumping out of boxes, the shadow that moves through every picture, an erasure trace on every page.

She’s seen it all and sticks around, howling through the volumes of my handwritten life, feeling every outrage and injustice on the page so I don’t have to in my body, in the consensus reality where I never wanted to feel hated ever again.

Maybe the monster is not all I am.

But honestly, I am all of her.

And as much as possible, I left her out of the story.

In all the passes I’ve made over the material of my life, I’ve never written a single draft that included high school except as a quick glance. It’s as if the boy crazy days never happened. And neither did the weeks I slept on my best friend’s couch because my mother and I were fighting (again), my father caught between us, always taking her side, maybe - probably - rightly so, but I needed someone to see me, too, to remember I was their child.

I was a child.

Subscribe now

5. “We may find the key to our liberation only when we accept that what we once did to survive is now destroying us.”

~ Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide for Caring for Self While Caring for Others

I think about it sometimes. Not keeping a journal.

How am I to be whole if I keep living separate lives?

Writing was what saved me in the apocolypse of my adolescence. As ashamed as I am about what I wrote as a teenager, I cannot imagine who I’d be if I didn’t write it.

Maybe a real monster.

And yet if I go on like this, I’ll always be split in two, endlessly sewing myself together, shadow to self, only to rip myself apart again when it’s too much to bear witness to my own sorrow.

All I’m saying is I want to be whole. Can writing be more than my savior?

Is it possible to write from integration and not dissociation?

6. “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, also jotted in a journal, and probably from Letters to a Young Poet

Maybe re-membering has more to do with imagination than documentation.

No, the facts don’t lie. But neither are they the whole truth.

I was a boy crazy girl.

I can’t edit that out.

But I know now what I really wanted was just to be close to someone who let me love them and loved me, too. Consistently. No take backs when times got tough, like when you become a teenager nobody was prepared to deal with.

If I knew this back then, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a monster.

But the monster is my better angel now.

7. “There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. Those are the signposts. The cardinal directions.”

~Inspecter Armand Gamache, of Louise Penny’s Three Pines mysteries

I don’t know.

I need help.

Was I wrong?

I’m sorry for all of it.

My parents, without whom the telling of my story would be incomplete, were imperfect, just like me. They never had a teenage daughter before I became one. It was the first time for everyone. And they were tailed by their own monsters, trying to outrun their own mistakes.

And yet despite all the hurt, healing must happen in relationships. I am sure I read that somewhere, but I don’t know who said it. Maybe it was the psychologist. He was a pretty smart guy.

He also said, “You can’t heal relational trauma alone.”

And you can’t heal it at all if you don’t start by calling it what it is without blaming anyone, including yourself.

I was a lonely girl who wanted to love and be loved. I had no clue how to have this - BE this - when I was 15. And for most of the decades that followed.

It’s taken some time, but I’m learning.

The Sixes: My Reading from the Journal of Yesterday project for 2026 is a series of paired posts drawn from the diary entries of 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. Part 1 - for paid subscribers - shares transcription from one (or more) of these old journals. The intention here is to show my stripped down, straight from the heart, awkward and messy humanness with no claim to good writing. Part 2 - for everyone - reflects on it with the full power of my narrative might and the hope that with craft comes connection to readers in the here and now.

ICYMI: The Sixes Pair 2, Part 1

I was 15 in 1986 and a freshman at Bath Junior High. At the time, only the upperclasses attended Morse. Hyde, a private boarding school where my mother worked, was just down the street. I lived with my parents and younger brother on the Woolwich-Wiscasset town line, about 15 minutes away.

The Patten Free Library was a popular place for kids to hang out, especially in the second-floor stacks where, as long as we were very, very quiet, no librarian ever checked on us.

When I wasn’t hanging out with friends there, we were in and out of each other’s homes on both sides of the old Carlton Bridge. But rehearsal for the Young Peoples’ Theater production of “West Side Story” kept me pretty busy.

But not too busy for all the boys.

1. “Crush On You,” The Jets

10:04 am Monday, Feb 17, 1986

Dear D.

Hi. It seems like for a long time guys don’t notice me then all at once there are so many admirers that I don’t know what to do with them…

My mom + dad decided to let me have a Valentine’s party so I began planning it. R says, “Oh, Shelly invite M, I bet he’d love to see you again.” He was at school that Monday, that’s why he was brought up. So I called him and invited him and when he got to my party he gave me three carnations. Two pink and one red w/a bunch of leafy stuff for looks. It was sort of mutual that we would mess around, I guess. I didn’t want to, but it would’ve been, well… not rude, but it would have seemed like I led him on if I didn’t…

I’m beginning to regret ever having laid eyes on him! I definitely regret doing anything with him since I don’t even have any feelings for him. I like him fine, but that isn’t enough to fool around on. There should be something more than pretty flowers.

…Yesterday, I met B at the library again. I feel so cheap because after we were together I started liking him as much as I did before his three week escape. I felt so good about us again and I really wasn’t worried about M since he’s going back to S. Portland + I probably won’t see him again ’til this summer.

…Wait, one more thing. C, J, and P were also at the library and I spent a little time talking to them. So, C calls me up at 9:30 last nite and says, “Shelly, I know someone who wants your body wicked bad” (how vulgar!) and it turns out to be P, a sophomore, tall, cute, on (the) J.V. basketball team for Morse, popular. God, I feel so flattered, but I don’t know him so I can’t say I like him although I am interested. It’s too good to be true, isn’t it? I have to be careful and not screw up like I did with other guys.

2. “Kiss,” Prince

Home, 8:51 pm Tues. Feb. 18, 1986

Dear D.

Hi! A’s over here. We met J, C, and P today at the library. I like P, a lot. I don’t know why. He’s so nice, I couldn’t believe it. He was polite and understanding and just very nice. I know I said I wouldn’t do anything because I don’t know him, but he asked (yes, asked) if he could kiss me. Nobodies ever been so polite about things along that line with me. So I let him kiss me, and kiss me … That’s all that he did, though. I mean we didn’t French, or do anything else.

…I really couldn’t believe P liked me, but now I do. I thought all he wanted was a piece of ass, but last night A + I went over to C’s house (at 8 o’clock!) and watched movies for awhile. I laid on C’s waterbed with P and he didn’t even try anything. That stands for something, I guess. C and J both think he really does like me. I hope so. He’s so nice. I told him after he’d been kissing me awhile to wait because I didn’t know him that well and he stopped without getting all huffy and uptight. I admire that. I’m really attracted to a guy who can control himself.

I tried to explain to him how it is with people in his class and me. He seemed to understand what I was saying. I told him how I used to leave the library if sophomores were there because I was afraid they’d say bad things about me or make fun of me. In fact, I feel uncomfortable still whenever they’re around. They snicker and act really rude. He didn’t bullshit me and say, “oh well, they don’t know you” or things like that. He sincerely thought about what I was saying. I appreciate that a lot. Then he said I shouldn’t worry because when I get to Morse I’ll have at least one friend and I’ll definitely make more. I really like him. I want to get to know him a lot better. I think it would be really worth my while. Maybe he’s what I need right now. He’s serious, and humorous, and sincere, and sweet. Well, I won’t write about him anymore because, I don’t know. I just won’t.

…I don’t know how serious P is about me. I mean, I don’t know if he wants to go so far as to “go out” with me since I told him how most of the people (I guess from what he tells me, I’m exaggerating) in his class won’t give a chance and get to know me as a person and not as JB’s ex-girlfriend who wrote vulgar notes he passed around for everyone to read.

3. “True Blue,” Madonna

Home, 9:45 am Wed. Feb. 19, 1986

… Is P too nice for me? I always get nervous around supernice guys. They give me the creeps because it’s like underneath all that niceness is a bunch of ulterior motives. I don’t know if I can explain it. Nice as in personality and thought should be reserved for Monks because normal guys who are also “nice” (mind + soul) have an evil side to them. Maybe he was being “nice” because I don’t know him very well and vice versa and he didn’t want me to think that all he wanted was a piece of ass. He seems very human. I mean, he has his good and bad points. I want to get to know him a lot better.

… One thing I always catch myself doing is comparing any new prospect to JB. I have always let JB get into my relationships, but not this one. It’s time to put JB in a time capsule and bury him a thousand feet deep…

12:18 pm

…C should be coming to get me pretty soon for rehearsal. I’m looking forward to talking to him about P. I’m looking forward to just talking to him. I love him, he’s the best friend I’ve ever had. If he ever has an awakening of the heart for me, I’m willing to have a relationship more than friendship. C is so “kick back.” He doesn’t take much seriously, but unlike B, he takes me seriously as a person. I really truly love him. He’s like a brother to me and I’m like a sister to him.

Rehearsal, 3:16 pm

C is being an ass today. He acts like a jerk when I’m in a bad mood or I don’t feel completely happy. He always yells at me when I sulk. So what if I’m sulky. He obviously doesn’t care. Yes, he does. He just doesn’t like to see me sulk even though he’s zoning out quite a bit today also. I just wish he wouldn’t yell at me though. I’m not always sulking contrary to his belief. I asked nicely what was wrong with him. I was concerned. He shows his concern by yelling, “Shelly, you’re always sulking! Stop sulking!”

Read more

People blocked Longfellow Square, and other central locations along Congress Street. They gathered to protest the Department of Homeland Security’s “Catch of the Day” sweep, targeting 1,400 people who live in Maine.

I sent texts to my other two sons while I waited, inching along in the fog of exhaust that climbed in the air as the temperature fell.

“Have fun tonight,” I pecked to my middle son, who planned to meet friends in the Old Port after work.

Hours would pass before he saw it.

“Be safe,” I added.

My youngest son often spent evenings in Portland, visiting friends, swilling strong coffee in cafes, or browsing bookstores.

“Are you here?” I sent him a blurry picture of the crowd.

“Not tonight,” he replied.

I sighed, half with acceptance because I fully expected him to be in the throng, and half with relief.

Because we live in a time called You Never Know.

I am the mother of men in a time called You Never Know.

You Never Know what will happen. Where. To whom. Or when.

As if you ever do. As if I ever did.

Subscribe now

Never.

Never in the wildest depths of my Complicated Grief the year after my mother died could I - even unintentionally - fear-manifest the world we now live in for my six-year-old boy in his karate gi, practicing his first kata. Or my three-year-old “Toilentator” with his toilet brush sword. Or my baby about to take his first steps.

Yet here we are.

At the Longfellow intersection, police rerouted the busy Friday night traffic, gesturing to make their directions clear.

Chants of “No justice, no peace, get ICE off our streets” followed me as I turned left, and wound through the West End behind a driver obviously trying to match up their GPS guidance with the one-way streets, braking, backing up, hitching ahead.

It was no trouble. I was in no rush.

My oldest son was driving the other way around Portland’s downtown giving a friend a safe lift home because his friend is an international student living in Maine with a legal study visa, and the sort of skin color targeted by ICE.

And because You Never Know.

The march was wrapping up by the time we settled into a window seat at the Green Elephant Bistro. Protesters waved signs at us as they walked by. We gave them thumbs up.

My oldest son studied the menu, comparing the Siamese Dream Curry Noodle with the Thai Ginger Noodles, as if this was the most important decision he’d ever make. If only. I suspected what was really on his mind was the choices a good man sits with when his country is on fire.

He picked the Siamese Dream as surely as I know he will fight for peoples’ rights to live, work, and study in this country without fear of persecution, deportation, and execution.

My own entree was a mild pineapple fried rice, which I ate slowly, listening to my son compare actual Japanese history to the FX adaption of Shogun, which we recently watched.

A born teacher yet to embrace his gift for synthesizing complex ideas across centuries in a way that makes them relevant today, he launched into an analysis of samurai strategies that avoided bloodshed. I’m usually his rapt student, but my mind and heart wandered (just a little).

My oldest son is the only one of my kids who remembers his grandmother. Barely. And not exactly. It’s more of a felt memory, he says, of being loved. The other two were so young when she died, but I hope somewhere in their nervous systems they encoded love, too.

I held onto these children for dear life, my life, and their lives 20 years ago. And every year since, every year always (though I’ve loosened my grip). In the saddest of early days, I loved them frantically, scrabbling to a shaky emotional high ground where I could live without their grandmother, who loved them every bit as much as I did, even if our relationship with each other was always fraught.

My kids were what I lived for in the fallout of my broken heart.

We didn’t talk about it. Not exactly. But what was on the table between my oldest son and I over dinner Friday night was what we might die for to be on the side of history that values moral decency, human life - all life - and the good of the planet we share.

Because You Never Know.

You never do.

Someone with an “ICE OUT” sign tapped the glass of the Green Elephant as we sipped our lemongrass and jasmine tea. We looked up as a group of protesters walked by, words of resistance frozen in breath that trailed in the air behind them.

We looked up and met their eyes.

The Sixes: My Reading from the Journal of Yesterday project for 2026 is a series of paired posts drawn from the diary entries of 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. Part 1 - for paid subscribers - shares transcription from one (or more) of these old journals. The intention here is to show my stripped down, straight from the heart, awkward and messy humanness with no claim to good writing. Part 2 - for everyone - reflects on it with the full power of my narrative might and the hope that with craft comes connection to readers in the here and now.

ICYMI: The Sixes, Pair 1, Part 1

Today is my 35^th birthday and today is my mother’s funeral. I can’t even begin to reflect on this. Sometimes I think it’s funny and sometimes I think, of course, it would be this way…. I want to light a candle for my mother.

Wed., Jan. 11, 2006 Home 6:35 a.m.

I tried to light a candle for my mother that day. I tried four times and it would not light. There was plenty of wick and no draft, but it kept going out. I have no explanation for this except the one that popped into my head at the time, which was that my mother didn’t want me to light a candle for her. I feel like my mother doesn’t want me to grieve her … at least not right now. I don’t know why I feel this way. We didn’t resolve anything before she died. I’m beginning to believe it was unresolvable. My mother was consumed by guilt and terrible feelings about herself. And I feel terrible that I couldn’t get past my pain to just love her, but then every time I moved in that direction, she’d hurt me again.

I don’t think she felt she deserved to be loved. None of this was resolved, and I do not often feel her spirit near me. I felt her at Stonecoast [MFA residency] when I looked out at Casco Bay and she wants me to know she could swim, which was not something she could do in life. I felt her one night last week when I was sobbing, but she was not close. It was as though she was standing at a distance. Wherever her spirit is it is not with me. As in life, now that she is dead, I am still the least of her worries.

Read more

If one more writer describes either their personal or rough draft writing to me as “vomit on the page,” I’ll …

Well, I don’t know what. But I’ll definitely flinch inside. Because those words hurt every time. I hurt for the writer who says them.

They say, in a head-tilted apology, shrugging, “Oh, it’s really awful. It was just vomit on the page.”

My gut twists as the soft self-deprecating punch lands in me. I wince, possibly even visibly. A falling sad face, eyes pinched.

Because what I hear is “I am afraid everything I wrote sucks so I’ll just refer to it as a gross, embarrassing bodily process that can be flushed down the toilet and mopped up from the floor.”

Why, for the love of all literary endings, would you refer to the beginning of your writing process as spew?

Throwing up is generally not associated with a good start to anything. In fact, it’s usually the (bad) end. But you feel better after purging too many tequila shots, or gobbling leftovers long past when they should’ve been chucked. I get the metaphor. It feels like a total release - even relief - to get words on the page.

But words on the page are not puke.

I must insist.

Subscribe now

Because if everything I wrote in my journals and rough drafts over the last 44 years is chunder I not only never bothered to clean up, but carefully preserved and ported from attic to attic to attic for decades, I’ve got bigger problems. Like hoarding. Or a special brand of narcissism.

But I didn’t just keep a bunch of barf.

Because writing is not vomiting on the page.

There’s a reason for your words, even if it’s private and just for your own pondering. That goes for journal stuff not meant for anyone but you and narrative stuff you intend to put out there as a story someday.

Your words are your wonder, your wishes, your wisdom. Those shiny, polished words that get published first come to you as shy, clumsy, unsure words stammering in a new language spoken from your heart, your mind, your soul.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to declutter, for example, in my own 200+ page fever dream draft. There certainly is (so very much), along with a deep cleaning. But it takes a gentle broom to coax the cobwebs from the corners and brush the dust bunnies out of a manuscript. Not a heavy wet mop and steel wool.

This goes against the (cliche) advice to “kill your precious darlings,” attributed to various famous writers. I always had it was Dorothy Parker.

You shouldn’t have to kill anything, most of all something you made. Let it go if it does not serve you or the craft of your work. But treat it like a small lost spider you remove from the bathtub and carefully shake out the window.

“Save everything you write, even if you don’t like it, even if you hate it,” children’s author Gail Carson Levine writes in Writing Magic: Creating Stories That Fly. “Save it for a minimum of fifteen years… At that time, if you want to, you can throw it out, but even then don’t discard your writing lightly” (pg. 5).

This is better advice for those of us who keep an extensive archive of writing that went nowhere (at least not yet).

Subscribe now

I say all this because I’m rebooting A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday to be what I intended when I started it 18 months ago. I wanted a space to reflect on old writing, particularly from my journals. Not because I wanted to reveal myself by sharing private entries for a public audience. But because it’s curious to me that I wrote so much for all these years, and kept it all.

Why?

Since I have it, why not crack into it? What’s always been true? And also always bullshit?

Who am I? Who was I? Do I remember that right? What’s changed in me, people I care about, my communities, the world? What’s still the same?

A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday was always meant to be a reflective experience, a conversation between Self, remembered Self, and written Self.

With that intention in place, I’ll be posting twice a month in two parts. Part 1 will be transcriptions from old journals or other ephemera from my writing life. Part 2 will reflect on it.

Part 1 is for paid subscribers only because, let’s face it, it feels a bit like undressing to post writing never intended for a reader. I won’t be stripping - this is not a personal writing peep show. But I am willing to show myself in the spectrum of my humanity. And that’s a vulnerable act worth the price of admission.

Part 2 is for all subscribers because what I hope to share more than anything I once wrote is how to reflect, learn, incorporate, and grow from it now.

I hope you will follow along and even find inspiration for handling your own old writing, and once lost Selves.

But whatever you do, please just promise me you will stop calling what you write vomit on the page.

Find a new metaphor.

You can do it!

You’re a writer!

“A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no special training and my own training was against me.

“I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.

“In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.

“I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.”

Adrienne Rich, excerpt from The Will to Change, found in the pages of a 2006 journal

Sometimes writing is not a thinking process.

I thought I’d work on one of the two pieces I began in the Southern Maine Writing Project Summer-Fall Institute for ProWritingAid’s first Novel November (NovNov). I was psyched to begin major revisions because these projects had fermented long enough in rough draft form. If I love anything about the writing process, it’s revising (because revising IS almost always a thinking process).

There was a third project, though, one that began from a prompt during a SMWP fall workshop led by Wendy S. She gave everyone a box of 20-sided dice and a sheet of 20 fall-themed prompts. We wrote what we rolled.

Mine was “takes place at a football game or sporting event.”

It’s over 200 pages now. I am at almost 80,000 words, my adjusted target after I crested the NovNov goal (before the end of the challenge) and realized 80K was the average length of a first memoir.

I am just a couple thousand words away from a solid, wholely unpublishable, fever dream draft!

When writing was a thinking process, I’d say my story was about my bad relationship with my mother because it was hard for her to be a parent when she was a traumatized child, too.

Just when we reached that adult grace period of potential repair after a break from living with each other in which we both had enough space to grow up, my mother got sick and died.

I’ve probably forgiven her for most of what hurt in our shared history. Parenting children to adulthood through my own incalculable mistakes gave me a lot of perspective on the gap between intention and outcome.

But I couldn’t get past the dying.

I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to figure out what I could have done differently so my mother would still be alive.

Because everything, everything was always my fault. I’m always the bad guy in the story of my life. It’s my intrinsic narrative position. I never depict someone else’s awfulness without dragging my own out from under the bed where a sensible person would keep it hidden.

I fall on my pen over and over again to humanize others, show my understanding of where I personally went wrong, and demonstrate what a compassionate person I am, how much I’ve grown through the challenge of relational trauma, and forgiven those who hurt me. That’s Ethics of Memoir 101.

But that’s not actually the truth, not entirely. Not if I am really, really honest (also, according to Ethics of Memoir 101, something you probably ought to be).

It amazed me on the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death that I stumbled upon a 25-year-old piece of writing reflecting how desperately I wanted to believe she loved me, even to the point of saying it didn’t really matter because … well… God was there if it didn’t feel like she did.

And it’s true. In a very general, spiritually diluted way, sure. God is always around.

But much as a sense of divine grace is always appreciated, God cannot stand in for real, reliable, consistent, loving relationships with (imperfect) people you can (still) count on to be decent most of the time.

Subscribe now

My entire life, especially in writing, was driven by the search for what was wrong with me that made my mother treat me the way she did. Journal after journal after journal, in block print as an 11-year-old, in rage scrawls as a teenager, in the Morse Code dots and dashes of my missing years, and in the relentless hope penned in a Mother’s Day piece as a 32- or 33-year-old woman, I longed for my mother’s love.

I tightened that screw on myself after she died. I must have been so awful that dying was her only way out of our toxic relationship, her final silent statement about everything I so desperately wanted to put to words.

This was my intrepid narrative (mis)take.

That is until NovNov and writing that wasn’t thinking, not just another hit piece on myself.

I poled my way forward, following, nearly blind, line after line no matter where they led - a Morse High School varsity football game at McMann Field, 1976… Three Wise Men made out of amber Michelob bottles… the window of a North Conway Inn. I suspended knowing anything at all, even - especially - my old story, risking the possibility of an entirely new tale.

Somewhere in those almost-80,000 words I stopped being the antagonist. I no longer deserved to be smacked around because I wouldn’t stop “running my mouth,” or emotionally ignored because I “always had to be the center of attention” (and not a child with legitimate needs for care). I stepped out of the story my mother told about me (the oldest one of all) and into the story of who I really am.

Someone willing to be the villain again and again just to be fair, so as not to blame, who writes over 200 pages in less than two months dedicated to solving the mystery of why love hurts, but you’re supposed to believe it’s love anyway, and accept it because if you don’t, there is (was) no love at all.

A girl who hid her own experiences for 43 years undercover, in the pages, between the lines of handwritten books.

A woman who is an adult survivor of the insidious sort of childhood trauma that not only created mistrust and defensiveness in foundational relationships built on betrayal blindness, but remained an imprint on every relationship I’ve had ever since.

(By the way, it’s nothing short of a miracle that I have a career, that I was married - twice - and that I raised three kids who I connect with regularly, and that I have some good friends. There are days when the complex PTSD makes it hard to get out of bed never mind into a Zoom meeting where I’m convinced everyone hates me. P.S. The depersonalization of screen interactions doesn’t help. But more on that maybe … never.)

Here’s the sticky thing about writing from life: You cannot possibly know what a piece is going to be until you write it, which is kind of funny because unlike fiction (unless it’s auto-fiction), you lived it. You ought to know how it goes.

But if you know how the story goes, is there really much more to tell?

Writing is not always a thinking process. But it just might be the feeling process that leads you at long last to the story you never knew was your own.

You go looking for one thing and find another. It’s always the way.

My mother died 20 years ago. She died of ovarian cancer at age 55.5 on Dec. 27, 2005, after surviving mesothelioma, a diagnosis she received when she was 47.

In three days, I will be 55, just like 20 years ago I was 35 three days after my mother died.

My mother died and it was still my birthday even though it was her funeral, tricky to schedule at the local Catholic church during Christmastide, squeezed in between celebrating the birth of Jesus and when the three kings arrive.

Five people brought a cake to the funeral reception, and said happy birthday to me, and in an enjambed breath, I’m so sorry.

It’s a difficult time of year.

My mother died and it’s also still Christmas.

It’s always Christmas.

Christmas comes with all its heavy promises and Christmas goes delivering only half, and not the ones you want because they are the ones you never speak, leaving you to make grace from disappointments both too insignificant and enormous to name.

Christmas happens no matter what it takes.

And I’m still waiting for my mom to come back to me, riding shotgun in Santa’s sleigh, giving directions he obviously ignores.

This morning as I grieved the anniversary of her dying again in my journal, I thought, hey, maybe I should go back and read what I wrote every year on this day and post about it for my neglected Substack readers.

I didn’t get very far in the personal archives before I found what I wasn’t looking for.

Mother’s Day

(2003? 2004?)

I was sitting on my grandmother’s screened porch waiting for a good chance to leave while my mother hid behind the (Portland) Press Herald, and my grandmother talked to Oprah on the TV. I was waiting for one of my boys to really cross the line - break some knick or other, or pull down the window blinds on their heads - waiting for something to force us to make a hasty retreat without lame excuses, and uncomfortable hugs and kisses. But it didn’t come. The boys played like strange grubby-faced angels, nimbly handling fifty years worth of souvenirs and porcelain treasures without so much as a fracture. I began to drum my nails on the table, but my mother looked up over the paper in a way that my grandmother didn’t observe, and I knew I should just sit there, all right? Just sit there.

I thought of sitting. I thought of how I sat on some low rocks on Monhegan Island once watching the same ocean tunnel over and over again through a series of rocks and crevices, spitting its force into my face so I could feel it on my cheeks. I thought of the landscape artist who asked me to move that day so she could paint, trudging off with her easel clattering against her back to the next perfect spot. (I thought of) the bewildered family from someplace far away who would’ve picnicked right there if I had but given them an inch of space.

I thought of how certain I was at that moment, staying alone on Monhegan, keeping to myself, that God loved me, that his love was everywhere, that I could be alone in the world and know that some divine source held me, believed in me, would see me through.

But I can’t sit on my grandmother’s screened porch with my mother and with her mother and be certain that they love me at all in that way. Certain, I mean really certain. We sit here cut off from each other, separated by a million small and big betrayals, saying unspoken prayers to an unseen God, and no words to each other. Except that somehow I know they both love me. And they love each other. And it’s strange that we should all three of us enthusiastically put our faith in something as unquantifiable and unverifiable as God, and yet withhold it from the people who share this journey with us.

But it’s true. My mother loves me, and your mother loves you. It’s just that mothers are people, too. If your mother suddenly lets you watch Nickelodean (cartoons) all afternoon while she reads The Da Vinci Code, know that she loves you. If she spends more quality time scrubbing the grout between that bathroom tiles than doing anything with you, know she loves you. If she once shook her head in withering disapproval at the very short skirt you thought conveyed your legs nicely into the world, know that she loves you. She loves you even if she’s dropped you off at daycare every weekday morning since your sixth week of infancy, if late at night she stands on the porch smoking cigarettes, if she talks too much on the phone, or has never made a meal that wasn’t frozen or contained in a box. She loves you.

Your mother loves you if she whispers the words to your sleeping head, or if she screams it from the window of a speeding car. She loves you even if she betrayed you in the worst ways, lost her temper and slapped your face, failed to stand up for you when you were wronged, or simply pulled the crocheted couch blanket over her head and avoided everything.

It’s easy to believe in the love of a universal divine force, a perfect love, an unconditional, forgiving, sublime love that receives all and heals all.

It’s easy to sit on windblown rocks on Monhegan Isalnd, or any island, and imagine being one with all creation, but the test of our faith is in our relationships with each other, our imperfect relationships with incomplete people, who more often than not don’t say what we want to hear when we want to hear it, who seek to fulfill their own ambitions, who get tired and grumpy, or inspired and crazy, who long for this or that, who sometimes can’t do unto us in the ways we would have it done.

Let it be enough that God loves us perfectly, and let us accept our mother’s love for its unique expression of her temperament, life experience, and quietest prayers. My mother, her mother, your mother, all mothers everywhere are working it out as they go along, and if they don’t stop to kiss away every bump, or mop up all the tears, there’s always something we can turn to for unconditional comfort.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Maybe this year my mother finally made it back to me.

In my own words, yes, but neverthless, exactly what I believe she’d come back to say if she could.

Do me a favor if you read this far? Call, text, or if you are very lucky and she’s nearby, go hug your mom today.

My imposter syndrome doesn’t trouble me too much as a writer; although, I am often paralyzed by Lynda Berry’s two questions, “Is this good? Does this suck?”

Do I wish there was a book on library shelves with my name on the spine to point to as a marker of my accomplishments? Of course I do.

But I don’t (not yet).

Hopefully, the Times Record and Coastal Journal archives are tucked away in the Sagadahoc History & Genealogy Room at the Patten Free Library. My byline is in there somewhere from my time as a community reporter and later, editor.

But if the last years of the Coastal Journal never made it to the newspaper collections, I am consoled by the copies I keep in my attic. Proof, if only to me, that I actually did something recognizable as Writing in the nearly 20 years since I earned an MFA.

Anyway.

I wouldn’t be a very good writing teacher if I believed that publishing your stuff is the only thing that qualifies someone to say they are a writer.

Subscribe now

And yet, I felt I needed to do “ISFI,” as it’s known to the fellows, to call myself a writing teacher.

If anything gets me going on what a fake I am, it’s standing before a group of people entrusting me to guide them to the page where a galaxy of interesting, imaginative, and insightful material waits to be discovered or recovered through the unlikely (also unreliable) implement of a pen.

As if the words are already there in invisible ink, waiting to be revealed.

Well.

Kind of. Kind of they are.

All the ISFI mentors had to say when it was “slice of life” time was a single word - freedom, for example - and 12 scenes from 12 very different writers poured nearly complete into our notebooks with metaphors as natural as blinking and images that danced off the page.

I can’t explain it.

Yet I see it happen over and over again, not just in the college writing classes I used to teach, or the writer’s studio workshops I once led, but in every Gateless, Amherst, and Proprioceptive writing group, and so many other generative writing experiences I’ve had the privilege to be part of.

It’s magic, simple and true.

Maybe it’s haughty, but I never felt like I had to qualify to be a writer - at least not to myself (not really).

Word play has been part of my day since I was 11 years old just like brushing my teeth is something I’ve done since I was old enough to do it myself. If a writer is not who I am, then I have no other explanation (or excuse) for the quirks that compel me to share so much of my life on the page, often to deleterious personal effect.

But I’ve always felt I needed a credential to do just about everything else.

It was because I wanted to teach that I got an MFA in creative writing at Stonecoast, in the early days of what has become a very competitive and deeply respected program.

(It’s only now that I would have only a nailbiting chance of getting in that I wish I could earn an MFA all over again for my own craft and creative growth.)

Nevertheless, that advanced degree was not enough to make me feel like a Real Writing Teacher.

I also earned professional certification to teach English language arts to students in grades 7-12, even though (until recently, but more on that another day) I never set foot in a K-12 classroom.

If I had the time and extra money, I’d enroll in the programs to certify me to teach Gateless, Amherst, and Proprioceptive writing. But to be honest, I’d rather attend those workshops because I am blessed to live in an area with amazing facilitators of all these methods.

Besides, even with such gold star approval, I’d probably still feel like a phony, and I’d be all kinds of conflicted about charging people just so I could tell them to go write (even though, like me, they’re happy to pay for it).

But after ISFI, I feel differently about myself as a writing teacher. It’s not just because I can soon call myself a “teacher-consultant” (although, that’s just the kind of professional moniker I like).

It’s because, in the words of the National Writing Project, “writing is essential to communication, learning, and citizenship,” and I am now part of a community of educators, many of whom don’t even identify themselves as writers, who care about writing and its accessibility for all. How democratic is that?

The civic-mindedness of NWP appeals to my values as a writer, teacher, journalist, and adult learning specialist. ISFI is a synthesis - really - of everything I’ve experienced, and maybe who I already am.

What is my teaching if not a sort of lead that writers spin into their own kind of gold? Who am I if not an alchemical instigator?

How incredibly cool is that?

Writing is a creative process, but not a rarified one. Anyone can do it, especially if they want to. There is nothing intrinsically special about being a writer (probably why I never felt I needed to qualify). However, there is something remarkable about wanting to teach it.

A pen to one person is a wand to another, to the writer dowsing for inspiration, often crossing the landscape of imagination, of memory alone, but for those times when they come upon a teacher, mentor, guide, who points in a direction that may just take them somewhere.

And waits to hear all about it when they get back.

Do you believe in magic?

I do.

What’s up with this red suitcase? Stay tuned for opportunities to write with me, beginning in January 2026.

For more information about local and/or online Gateless, Amherst, and Proprioceptive writing groups, drop me a note. I am happy to connect you with writing teachers who specialize in these methods.

Are you a writing teacher, too? Please share a link to your offerings in the comments!

Director’s Address to the 2025 Graduating Class of Boothbay Region Adult & Community Education, June 10, 2025

I need everyone’s help about halfway through this speech. I need you to shout “Surprise!” Let’s try it. All together now. Ready? “Surprise!” I think you’ll know when to say it, but don’t worry, I will cue you.

Today is your high school graduation, a day maybe you thought would never come.

It’s terrific for those who clip-clop along K-12, and canter through college and beyond to advanced degrees, all between the ages of 5 and 25 (preschool and Ph.d programs not included).

But that’s not all of us, or even many of us.

It’s not you. And it’s certainly not me.

Don’t be fooled by this fancy gown. And the hood? I just got it a month ago when I earned a Certificate of Advanced Study in Adult Learning from the University of Southern Maine.

I didn’t get there by walking the straight and narrow. Like you, I walked Thoreau’s “narrow and crooked path” to be your adult education director.

Subscribe now

I barely graduated from high school in 1989. I spent most of the early 1990s working as a waitress right here in Boothbay Harbor. I went to college, but for the better part of the decade, I was in and out of various programs like an educational criminal just “doing time.”

You’d never guess this girl who signed student loans only to skip classes would end up being anything other than a debt slave with nothing to show for it.

But at age 31, married, and pregnant with my second kid, I finally earned a Bachelor’s degree. Five years later, pregnant with my third, I earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

And that’s enough of my story. Today, we are celebrating yours.

But in either case, one word captures most of it:

Surprise!

You never really know how something (or someone) will turn out. Life, like any other fantastical story, requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief.

This is the simple and direct heart of my practice as an adult learning specialist.

We call it Boothbay Region Adult & Community Education.

But in my heart, I come to work every day at the School of Second Chances.

There is no witchcraft and wizardry like at Hogwarts. But there’s just as much magic.

A 17-year-old who quit attending school regularly in 8th grade, and just had a baby could go on to academic accolades. You never know. Give her a couple decades.

Just because a 20-year-old stops showing up to work on his High School Equivalency Tests (HiSET, formerly GED), abandoning steady progress through the subject areas to be a sternman on a lobster boat (and possibly making more money than all of us), doesn’t mean he will never finish his high school credential.

It just means not now.

There are no foregone conclusions. No one who enrolls with Boothbay Region Adult & Community Education ever gets written off - or out - of the story.

Even when you “ghost” us - as every single one of you has done at least once in your time with the program - we keep the light on for you. We know you will find your way back when you’re ready.

(Allow me a moment to digress. You may notice a “stranger” here with us today, who no one recalls ever seeing at Boothbay or Wiscasset Learning Lab. Xxxxx first contacted me back in 2023, enrolled with my other program, Midcoast Adult & Community Education, passed three HiSETS, and then completely disappeared. He resurfaced two weeks ago to say he was ready to finish. And, well… a nearly perfect score on the writing exam and a passing one for math - thanks to the instructors’ “crash course,” and we could call Xxxxx’s story “The Ghost Who Got It Done.”)

Whatever your story was before you walked through the doors of the School of Second Chances - and into my heart - I hope it’s very different as you walk out. Let this high school equivalency diploma be the plot twist that opens even more doors - doors you didn’t even know existed, and could have sworn were not there before.

“It’s never too late… to be whoever you want to be,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald said. But many of us may not know yet exactly who we want to be at any given age. This also presumes that being is somehow outside of who we are right now, and thus something we can go out and get.

No doubt you got something when you made the commitment to completing high school with Boothbay Region Adult & Community Education. You are high school graduates now. But this tells us only what you did, not who you are, and even less about who you want to be.

Even if you think you know, it may only be for a little while. Because the wonder of your amazing human life is how it changes, bending this way and that as you learn and grow.

Thoreau’s complete quote goes like this: “Find some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

I found mine at the School of Second Chances, and as you leave Boothbay Region Adult & Community Education, and the hallways of heart, I hope you find yours, too.

Director’s Address to the 2025 Graduating Class of Midcoast Adult & Community Education June 12, 2025

I want to tell you a story about a high school dropout. As you all know I don’t like to say “drop out,” but it was 1966, and that’s what they called it back then without a second thought as to how it sounded … how it sounded like failure and giving up.

This 17-year-old kid left high school to get a job. His 16-year-old girlfriend was pregnant, and he wanted to provide for his new family. He had plenty of skills to make a living, from fixing cars to fishing. He already raised his three younger siblings because his parents were … unreliable. He knew the wrist temperature of a warmed bottle, and how to fasten pins to a diaper so they didn’t poke.

Unfortunately, his girlfriend’s parents had other plans. She was sent away to a convent where she lived with other teenage girls waiting to give birth to babies who would be taken away.

Subscribe now

Though his girlfriend went back to high school after “caring for a sick aunt,” the kid figured why bother?

He enlisted in the Air Force and served a tour in Viet Nam. He was a combat veteran by the time he was 20.

Fortunately, for me, he was also my dad.

I don’t want to mix up the timeline. My older brother was given up for adoption against my parents’ wishes. My parents stayed together and went on to elope five days after my mother turned 18 and a month before Dad left for boot camp. I came along a couple years later.

I share all of this because until last week when I burst into tears at the school board meeting as I thanked the district and community for their support during my three years as your adult education director, I never made the connection between my family origin story and the work I do.

That’s pretty weird, huh?

It’s as if the fact that my parents had to leave high school didn’t make my job as adult education director more meaningful, as if my heartfelt belief in the potential of all of you to live rewarding lives isn’t deeply inspired by the people who raised me.

I’m a storyteller so I see relationships between things that others may not. No doubt if I asked Dad, he would say in his taciturn way that I am only imagining things.

We never talk about the GED he got in the service. My mom has been gone now for almost 20 years, and I missed my chance to ask her how hard it was to walk back through the doors of Morse High School to be a senior when all she wanted to be was a mother.

But I know how hard it is. I know because I watched every single one of you set aside whatever shame you may have felt to walk through the doors of Medomak Valley High School and enroll in this adult education program.

Now leaving high school is not an awful thing for everyone. In fact for some of you it may have been the absolute best thing you could do at the time. But when you made the choice to come back to finish, you did a brave thing.

That was just the beginning of your story, and today does not mark the end. Today you become not just high school graduates but high school graduates who overcame many challenges to get here - whether those challenges were circumstances beyond your control, negative beliefs on continuous replay in your heads, or a combination of the two.

I hope you leave here today with more than a high school equivalency diploma. I hope your sense of dignity and self-respect is restored. Not everyone who leaves high school comes back to finish it. And there ain’t no shame in being among those who do.

My parents went on from their high school experiences to, in my dad’s case, a career as an OSHA safety inspector at Bath Iron Works, and my mom as business manager at Hyde School. They raised me and my younger brother in a house they owned in Woolwich.

I’ll leave you this evening with something my dad used to say. It was the closest he came to talking about being a high school dropout:

“Don’t you evah, evah, evah let anyone tell you who you can be and what you can do.”

He didn’t, and neither should you.

Maureen Stanton and I will be in reflective conversation about her new book, The Murmur of Everything Moving, at Mockingbird Bookshop in Bath this week. Read my review here.

I am excited to ask so many of the questions a writer thinks of as they read a great book - in this case, a memoir that moved me to tears at times and wry laughter at others.

I read some scenes in Murmur over and over again to parse out how the author left me breathless, my senses attuned as if I lived the very same experience.

Some memoirs carry you away, but it’s the ones that bring you home that deserve extra attention to the crafting of them, especially if you are a writer.

Maureen and I will talk about what she included and what she left out of the book. I am also curious about choices she made writing about the taboo subject of death.

Of personal interest to me is how Maureen survived writing through such difficult and emotional material. At work on my own memoir over the last couple of years, I kept ending up at urgent care or the emergency room with this or that random wild symptom. Sometimes I sat for hours reading or knitting in the waiting room because I felt safe there (and often left when my nervous system calmed down before a nurse even called my name).

When I asked Maureen in our pre-interview chat about how her experience writing (and re-living) one of the most challenging times in her life, she said, “Oh yeah, I cried every day. I was a mess. When I re-read the journal I kept at 15 (for Body Leaping Backward), I became 15 again in my body.”

Oh.

If you want to hear more about Maureen’s life as a writer, and ask your own questions about The Murmur of Everything Moving, please join us at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 15!

(My apologies for the brevity of this post. It’s graduation season in adult education. I am very busy helping learners make it to the commencement march in early June.)

Subscribe now

The monthly writers’ group I started in January evolved into simply sharing from our private writing (past or present) and holding kind and respectful space for whatever the writer wanted to bring forward. There is no critique and no feedback except for thanks and praise. You don’t even have to read. You can just listen.

We discovered the act of sharing our intentionally selected innermost thoughts and feelings - and hearing those of others - helped us feel less alone in our own worries and wonderings. The more we notice what we have in common with each other in this bitter and divisive time the better for everyone. All who have a relationship with themselves through writing are welcome.

If you would like to join the read aloud, please email me your interest and a bit about your background with journaling. I want everyone to feel safe in sharing so while you don’t have to “qualify” to participate, it would be good to know the role personal writing plays in your life. I will send you the link to join.

Disclaimer: The Personal Writing Read Aloud is not group therapy and no one is qualified to provide interventions or support beyond basic human compassion.

Read more

A Publisher’s Weekly Editor’s Pick, Murmur tells the story of Stanton’s love affair with Steve, an electrician and divorced father of three small children, who not long after she moves to Michigan to be with him, is diagnosed with stage IV cancer. The couple, not yet 30 years old, stop at nothing to save his life. They pursue potential life-saving treatments at an expensive out-of-state hospital with the same all-in commitment that marked the whirlwind beginnings of their relationship when they met by chance in the New York bar where Stanton worked.

Murmur is a love story that does not rely on storytelling tropes of high romance. Stanton’s narrative is unvarnished in its honesty about what the experience of being in love with Steve meant to her. It was not the fairytale a book jacket blurb might make it seem. Additionally, Stanton’s frank exposition detailing Steve’s dying creates a poignancy only utter truth-telling can speak.

All of which brings me to “to thy known self be true.” I will leave the deservedly wonderful reviews of the story of Murmur to other hands. I agree with all of them. You should read Murmur for no other reason than it’s lyrical, surprising, and, personally, I couldn’t put it down, especially given its heartbreaking subject matter.

Subscribe now

I read memoirs not only for entertainment, but also for what I can learn about the craft from other writers. As I work through the trip hazards of my own memoir, and as someone who used to teach writing from life, for me what stands out in Murmur are the ways the narrator both shows us who she was at the time and how she becomes who she is.

There’s a certain amount of known self that Stanton brings to Murmur that is worth calling out for its authenticity. I believe this narrator is the person she says she is. I can’t say I feel that way about the narrator of every memoir. Some leave me somewhat in doubt, often because the author makes herself seem either a bit too shiny or even more often, a bit too much of a shambles.

Stanton is neither.

As the narrator of Murmur, she is an ordinary person who fell in love and stayed onboard for the whole ride despite its tragic turn. She could be anyone, but in the clear specificity of how she shares herself with the reader, she can only be herself; yet strangely, she also drops away, so that I find myself in her. Or her in me.

I don’t know why anyone else reads, but this is exactly the experience I want to have. I want to feel the emotional current of the story right along with the characters. I want my world to tilt along with theirs. I want to cry and laugh with them as if the story is my own. I want to arrive at the last page with protagonist’s arc tattooed on my heart.

Stanton is, of course, telling the story. But she does not rest her reliability solely on her position in the narrative. She also shows us who she was at the time in a variety of ways; for example, in lines from her journals, always of particular interest to me since I have so many of my own and struggle with how to incorporate them.

We also see Stanton described in family film clips, in reactions of other characters through dialogue, personal action and interior reflection, well-chosen memories from childhood, and even a self-portraiture class where she practices drawing in a mirror, literally seeing herself.

In this way, the narrator becomes her own corroborating witness, giving us the story not only through the recall events from her own point of view, but also through the dynamic inter-relationship of time, other perspectives, and the give and take of hindsight.

All of this creates a rich “known self” that achieves the “monumental task of transforming low-level self interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value…” Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story.

In a time when we need more representation of the complexities of human experience and fewer memes that distill it into moments, memoirists should read Murmur and make note of Stanton’s choices in how she reveals herself to be both complicated and true.

The Murmur of Everything Moving will be out next week. Please join Maureen Stanton and I for a book launch reading and interview at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 15, at Mockingbird Bookshop in Bath, Maine. Hope to see you there!

I love to read. If you would like me to review your memoir or other work of creative nonfiction (especially if you include material from old journals) with an eye toward the lessons or insights it shares about the craft of writing from life, please reach out.

From her website: “Maureen Stanton is the author of The Murmur of Everything Moving: A Memoir (CSU Press, 2025), winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, forthcoming in March 2025; Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), winner of the Maine Literary Award for memoir, and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting (Penguin, 2012), winner of a Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays and creative nonfiction have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, New England Review, Florida Review, River Teeth, Sport Literate, Crab Orchard Review, The Sun and many others. She’s received an Iowa Review prize, The Sewanee Review, Pushcart Prizes, the American Literary Review nonfiction award, the Thomas J. Hruska award in nonfiction from Passages North, the Penelope Niven Nonfiction Award from Salem College Center for Women Writers, a Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Maine Arts Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.”

Subscribe now

It’s a simple (but exhausting) process of looking at objects and tuning into my body’s response to them.

Do I get the lump of a happy memory in my throat? Or does my stomach knot with regret?

Am I smiling at that clay whatchamacallit made by … which kid? I hold it to my chest and close my eyes. That’s right. I remember. It was supposed to be the dog from “Wallace & Gromit.” Though I press my eyes together, as if I can turn them backwards, I can’t see whose fingers pinched and poked it into shape. It could’ve been any of my kids taught by the same art teacher at the school where they all attended fourth grade.

Other thingamabobs bring more complicated recollections. Do I still want to smash that glass lemonade pitcher hand painted with flowers that I received as an apology I didn’t really accept for a slight I no longer recall?

Why do we hold onto hurtful reminders? I ask the same of some old journals, too, but I don’t consign the nasty ones to the burn pile. There’s often remarkable insight rising up through all that writhing and rage.

If I had the courage to read them, that is, which lately I don’t because there’s so much to be really fucking angry about these days - real injustices against living, breathing humans, travesties of incalculable consequences unfolding in real time. I just can’t go back and relive 1987 right now. Oh, for the days when my greatest crisis was a boyfriend’s mom coercing his friends to get him to break up with me. Seems so old-timey, even quaint. Now my personal disasters are collective humanitarian ones, too.

Anyway.

I ferret away things in the attic that might yield some future insight into the past. I line up the snarly items along the rafters betwixt and between the beautiful ones. No one can ever say I don’t take (or keep) the bad with the good.

I tell myself, maybe I’ll write about it one day ….

My attic is full of writing prompts just waiting to be unboxed.

This vacation I am drawn to the corner where my kids’ childhood is kept.

If all three boys wore it, I still have it, including a green tie-dye with a red-washed heart in the middle. It’s not an undergarment to me. When I close my eyes and sniff that old suit, I see the babies who wore it, wriggling in my memory, on the changing table I eventually gave away.

But why have I kept the cloth diapers and all the covers? Maybe because I cherish the tin of ducky-head diaper pins, given to me by my grandmother, that once secured my mother’s nappies. The collection is complete, I tell myself, puffing my breath at the possibility no one will ever want used diapers, even with heirloom fasteners.

Not so the knit baby blankets and crocheted baby blankets and baby blankets hand-quilted by my Aunt Sally, patron saint of all my domestic arts. Someone will love these. Right? I know I did.

All of it is packed in the cradle my uncle made when my first son was born. Now if anything could travel down the generations, let it be the fine craftsmanship of that swinging crib lined with the all that was made by so many hands.

Where to begin unpacking it all? In writing? In better boxes? What am I keeping here? For whom?

The future feels so uncertain.

I used to be so sure of things like generations to come, but now I worry. I wonder what will become of us, any of us, given that present days have come to this.

In this moment, I am fretting about the very planet we are passing down, and the political and social structures in which children will grow up much more than whether any grandchild-yet-be will want a backpack of loved-up stuffies.

I wish I could save the polar bears in my attic, and the penguins, and the bees.

I want to line the walls with maps of what the world once looked like, so future generations will know the road back to Kindness, Justice, and Peace.

Yes, I return to the past for comfort, but also because I want to remember.

The whole world is worth saving.

Right along with everything else in the attic of my heart.

Next:

You don’t keep a journal for 43 years because you’re divinely inspired, or destined to be a great writer (or even a published one).

Maybe some people do.

But for me, after researching and writing a capstone paper in trauma-informed adult education, after years of Internal Family Systems therapy, preceded by decades of introspection, self-help, and counseling that began when I was 16, I understand that I was fractionated in fifth grade. The emotional parts of me subdivided onto the page when I was 11 years old.

It was a trauma response.

Lately, I wonder if I am even a writer since the practice began the way it did. Do decades of journals, an MFA, 12 years writing for newspapers (five in the editor’s chair) make me one?

I like to think so. I chant this CV to myself in the darkest hours of doubt as proof that yes, I am a Writer.

Maybe you are convinced, too, but I don’t outline these achievements as a play for reader reassurance. Obviously, I accomplished some things as a writer. Even I can’t deny it in the echo chamber of my most intractable negative beliefs.

Instead what I am sitting with is where the writing comes from … for me. Why do I do it? What is my purpose in sharing it?

Subscribe now

I wonder if writing was just a way to get by as a child who wasn’t sure she existed as a single identifiable self, distinct from others. Was that all it was ever meant to be?

I got pretty good at writing, since I did it every day. But I also brushed my teeth. That didn’t make me a capital-T Toothbrusher. As time went on, praise from high school English teachers made me think, hey, yeah, I must be a Writer. I even went to the Bread Loaf Young Writers Conference at 17, one of just two juniors picked from the state to attend.

I was in and out of the University of Southern Maine for a decade, taking all the writing classes the English department offered, some twice. I finally finished a B.A. in Vermont College’s low-residency adult degree program in - what else? Creative writing.

But I’m not sure I really cared about language, craft, and convention like other writers did. A pure desire to entertain, make people think, or later to report the news was not underneath the secret trapdoor at the bottom of what motivated me to write. Nor was there a poetic wish to uncage the homing pigeons in my heart so they could deliver lyrical messages with creative aplomb.

Did I love writing? Usually. Was it a joy to emotionally move people with what I wrote? Always.

But honestly? All I ever wanted was to be seen.

That’s clear in the work I spun directly from my life, like a couple published short stories (long ago in the time before motherhood), zines, blogs, and newspaper columns.

But it didn’t matter if it was a book report, research paper, coverage of a five-alarm fire, arts features, character profiles, or even board reports, a little bit of me always sneaks in with a silent subtext of “see me, see me, see me.”

That’s writing as a trauma response right there.

I can’t “unsee” it.

The snotty, judgmental voice in my head sneers, “See, you do just do it for attention.”

Share

This voice used to live outside my head. It’s the fractionating voice that caused me to split, exiling parts of myself to the page in the first place. Everything I did as kid, every display of emotion (especially strong ones), each need and desire, all the questions, ideas, and opinions that flew from my mouth without a tether holding them back was just to get attention.

I know now that what I really wanted was connection. I still do. But that doesn’t stop the auto-replay of voice-mailed shame stuck my head whenever I sit down to write for anyone but myself.

There’s safety in keeping your own counsel. Why else the idiom?

But it’s no way to live. At least not all the time. And it’s certainly not helping me put my work into the world, except to my Friendly First Reader, or my sympathetic weekly writers’ group, and in occasional Substack posts to supportive readers.

Who went to a pitch contest, got an agent interested with five pages, and never delivered the requested manuscript?

Me.

Subscribe now

Which brings me to my present concern.

Am I a writer because I kept a journal for 43 years, and all of the writing-related activities noted above, plus what I call the trauma-dump draft of a memoir? Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time lining up words. I even have a few things to show for it. But it seems that while I have always written, and will always write, being a writer - writing itself - is more than … well … words can say.

I’ll try.

Writing is about intention, you know? It may be spontaneous, but it should also be deliberate. Writing isn’t just putting words on the page. It’s also dancing them around into better light and complementary shadows. Writing may have a mind of its own, but it’s always in the hand of the writer. A flute, for example, makes its own notes, but it cannot play itself. And it’s in the playing that music is made.

I’m not sure that’s what I do in writing, especially my journals. No. In those … hmmm … everything that comes to mind sounds not only cliche, but wrong.

I am not more my “true self” in personal writing than I am in conversation with other people. I mean, I try to say what I really think, but the filters of past relational trauma make it tricky. It takes me a long time to trust that I can truly say what’s on my mind without fear it will be used against me. Plus, I have a terrible track record of trusting people I absolutely shouldn’t and not trusting those I reasonably could.

Share

Likewise, the trouble with saying I “unmask” in writing implies that I am other than who I present myself to be in day-to-day roles. I am not another person. I am the same teacher, knitter, mother, friend, community member, and so on. However, on the page, I’m not as tongue-tied, debilitated with worry about what other people think, nervous, and awkwardly insecure.

“Unfiltered,” yes, particularly in journals. But that’s not to say what I write is “what I really think or feel” forever and all time. What I “really” think and feel is as complicated, subject to impression, revision, and evolution as it is for anyone else. Just because I write about it a certain way today doesn’t mean I will consider it the same way tomorrow.

It’s lonely talking to yourself for over 40 years. I wish I could say all of it out loud and interpersonally. Responsibly, too. I haven’t always been kind. At times a flash of snarling words gets out, like mad dogs at the door of my mouth. In writing, as well, sometimes I am too precise, for others uncomfortably so.

There’s work for me to do here - relationally and reflectively. These ongoing efforts continue in therapy, healing relationships, and learning to trust myself, and people who deserve it. None of this has anything to do with being a Writer.

I see two writing tracks now in a way I didn’t before. One for private growth and development. And in parallel, another for the sake of writing itself - to intentionally make public - and not just to unconsciously reveal a desperate need to be seen.

I’d hate for anyone to say, well, look, that’s all she wrote, it’s all right there, all she was and ever will be, a subdivided child who used writing to cope with being ignored, who paraded around on the page like she knew what she was talking about, who now thumbs through the scrapbook of the Writer she might have been.

I am considering - maybe for the first time - the writer I want to be. Who will I become as a writer now that writing is no longer just a trauma response?

If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t be writing this.

(I’d be a published memoirist, already …)

If you would like to figure out how to go from personal writing to putting it out there, I am hosting an online monthly writers’ group for those who want to join me in engaging with, reflecting on, and polishing up primary source material. I can’t promise any of us will be Published Writers as a result, but I can say you’ll probably know yourself better and maybe even care for yourself a little bit more. If you pick up a yearly subscription, this round of writers’ group is included. Monthly sessions will continue quarterly.

I was inspired by a Modern Daily Knitting webinar called Bullet Journaling for the New Year, taught by Felix Ford, the Knitsonik “celebrator of everyday life.” Bullet journaling rocket popped my daily ruminating into a galaxy of new creativity in 2017. Since then, I’ve incorporated many aspects of the process, especially the artsy ones.

I didn’t make it to the live online event, but I watched the recording of Felix’s workshop in advance so I could get the gist of it. I culled the ticket stubs, snapshots, greeting cards, and Dove chocolate wrappers collected in the pockets of my Moleskines for collaging into my year in review.

I thought I could do it all in one long Winter Solstice weekend and finish it before Christmas Eve, but I hand wrote 1,113 pages in 2024 (not including everything I composed on my laptop for classes, work, and my memoir project). That’s a lot of personal - and sometimes painful - writing to inhale in one deep breath. I made it as far as the end of March. Maybe I will finish by the new year. (Also, maybe I won’t.)

I listed books I read, gathered here for you because the handmade page is not complete. According to Goodreads, I read 37 books - 13,014 pages - in 2024.

I collected pictures of all my knitting projects, and other things I made. I learned how to knit lace with Erineen Designs in the Maine Yarn Cruise Knit Along, and how to make a fancy hood in Laura Nelkin Designs’s Cowltopus Mystery Knit Along. And in another week, my first-ever temperature scarf will be done.

I am working on a page for all the quotes I jotted down from sources that resonated with me. I plan to embellish them with washi tape, stickers, and crude cave painting illustrations.

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take awhile, you are fierce with reality.” ~ Florida Scott Maxwell

I love a good list, but I wanted to pay attention to certain things, to be “fierce with reality” in my review. What were the lessons of 2024? Did I learn them? What did I work through? Where am I still stuck?

Because, believe me, there’s a lot I want to leave in the first half of this decade, and I know if I don’t give that some love, I will lug it with me into 2025 like I’ve done all my writing life (as almost 43 years of journals shows). I won’t make you carry it with me by recounting it all. I am pretty sure everyone is juggling their own lifelong lumps of coal.

I generally followed Felix’s template, recording and illustrating highlights and (lowlights) of each month. But I adapted it in a couple of key ways. First, I kept coming across things that tugged at me to write more about. So I made a list of writing prompts I can turn to when I need a little inspiration in the coming year.

Second, I discovered there were things I couldn’t say any better as an official consensus reality writer than the way the behind-the-scenes scribe in me already did. And, this is actually rare for me. I struggle to let a good metaphor speak for itself. Anything can be improved with editing, right? Sure, I love writing, but the creative process really starts flowing for me in revision.

I wanted to gather these wild philosophical - and sometimes poetic- moments (pearls, if you will) because they corroborated my own ongoingness. These words reminded me of who I really am, opened my heart, and made me feel less alone (which is interesting considering I am talking about a personal, internal circuit of self, or should I say, selves?)

I called this collection Pearls of Wisdom on the fly, but I suppose I could’ve used another cliche and said, Playbook for When the Going Gets Tough.

Or how about Words to Remember Who You Are? That’s a spontaneous revision right there (keeping it real).

I am stepping into the poetry of my life like one of those trapeze artists that uses scarves wound around wrists and ankles, a beautiful gravity-defying dance.

I’m stepping in the poetry of my life. How about you?

Is there a better way to leave last year behind than a circus act that vaults me into the next? Will you join me?

I intend to write and share more now that I’ve completed my certificate of advanced study in adult learning (equivalent to a Master’s because I already have a MFA). Going back to graduate school was not something I planned, but I earned so many credits taking classes for my professional director of adult education certificate that matriculating made sense. My capstone project in trauma-informed adult education rounded out the degree requirements this semester, but I still have to pass a state-required exam to cinch this goal. Meanwhile, where have I been since the first of August when last I posted? Running adult education programs for four school districts in Midcoast Maine. It keeps a girl busy, you know?

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I look forward to connecting with you in the New Year!

Love,

Raye

Subscribe now

I didn’t realize it would be 60 days, according to META rules, before I could change it back to Raye, the name I’ve used for over 30 years.

I’ve told the story of how I went from Shelly to Raye many times since the first of June. No, I am not now and never was in a witness protection program. I was not trying to reinvent myself in my early 20s, though I appreciated the fresh start of going to college like anyone else.

I am not trying to be someone I’m not. I simply become more and more who I am.

Some people say, “You’ll always be ‘Shelly’ to me.” It’s spoken like a secret, as if the person knows something about me that others may not simply because they “knew me when.”

When was that exactly? Who was that me?

Only a very special few have known me through all my names, speaking to me in every language of myself.

In celebration of switching back to Raye on Facebook today, here’s an excerpt from a chapter of my memoir-in-progress that explains what’s in my name.

(Thank you so much for being a free subscriber to A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday. Just signing up to read my newsletter supports the courage and commitment it takes to put myself out there. I will continue sharing generously as I read and reflect on a lifetime of personal writing. This is the first time I am putting content on the other side of the paywall because it’s part of a project I hope will be published one day. I am also curious about how paid subscriptions work. Just this once, if you do not want to become a paid subscriber right now, you can visit my website to download the excerpt. I am sharing it there, as well, because I realized that my website subscribers don’t know about A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday, even though the project sort of began there. I invite them to join us. You can skip all this clicking around and read the excerpt - plus enjoy other perks - immediately by becoming a paid subscriber: $5/month or $55/year! However, you choose to engage with my work, thank you for continuing support it.)

Read more