THE MEMOIR NOTES #15. Panning For Gold: Turning Your Experience into Story

Plus: the power of mapping your life, and a repost that shares easy ways to "collect and gather" your stories and other inspiration!

Nov 26, 2024

“We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something - make something -with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habituation for the burden of our witnessing.” - memoirist Patricia Hampl.

Hi, Friends,

This realization shifts the narrative we might hold about what has happened to us. It helps us reframe our stories from passive reflection into an active journey of discovery, creation, and understanding. We are entrusted with every experience we encounter. Let that idea sink in for a moment. It may feel heavy, but it also fills us with a profound sense of purpose. Life isn’t simply a series of events happening to us; it’s a sacred trust, inviting us to engage deeply with our experiences and to craft meaning from them.

So, how do we begin to create something meaningful from what we’ve been entrusted with? It’s not about writing a comprehensive autobiography that chronicles every day of our lives. Instead, it’s may be more like panning for gold, searching for those moments that shimmer with truth and insight. If you’re sitting there thinking, I don’t know what those moments are, I invite you to remember this quote, also by Patricia Hampl:

“I don’t write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.”

We’re embarking on a path of discovery. This is about granting ourselves the space to re-member, to map out the key moments that have shaped us, and to understand them in fresh, illuminating ways. Let’s embrace this journey, recognizing that each experience is not just a passing moment but a potential gift waiting to be opened.

Why Your Story Matters

Leslie Leyland Fields said it well: “Every time we lock up a person, an event, even an entire decade in the Closet of Forgetting and Denial, we’re robbing ourselves of the strength and wisdom that can come from those experiences.”

Our stories matter because they carry wisdom and strength. When we turn and look back at those key moments, we’re not just dredging up a painful past; we’re reclaiming the wisdom from our experiences. And sometimes, that act of remembering can - in part- redeem those moments.

How to Begin: Mapping Your Life

You may be wondering, where do I start? The thought of mapping out your entire life can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it all or all at once. Start with a manageable slice of your story. Maybe it’s a pivotal part of your childhood. Maybe it’s a transformative decade. Maybe it’s just one key event that you want to explore more deeply.

Here are three practical tools to get you started:

1. Create a Timeline or Life Map

This is a simple way to visualize the key events of your life. You can draw a timeline on a piece of paper and mark pivotal moments, or you can create a Life Map, a more expanded version where you include little images and memories alongside each event. The benefit of this approach is that you begin to see the arc of your story before diving into specific memories. It’s like stepping back to see the forest before zooming in on a particular tree.

2. Use Notebooks

Most memorists keep notebooks to capture their thoughts and reflections. You can jot down key memories, events, or even just fragments of memories without the entire story. Sometimes, you don’t know exactly where a memory fits yet, but capturing it in a notebook gives you a place to return to when you’re ready to explore it further.

3. Post-It Notes on the Wall

This is my personal favorite. Grab a large sheet of paper giant sticky notes as a backdrop( or just use a wall or the back of a door) and then, as memories come to you, jot each one on a small post-it note and place them on the wall. This way, you can move them around, cluster them together by a period of your life, or organize them in a way that starts to tell the story. When you’re ready, simply pull a Post-It, off the wall and write about that particular memory. This is also a great way to help yourself always have something to write about. No writer’s block for you!

These methods help you focus and prevent the overwhelming flood of memories from crashing in all at once. They create structure, allowing you to map out the life experiences entrusted to you in a way that brings clarity and insight.

Finding the Gold in Your Story

As you begin writing, you may notice certain themes or threads that run through your life. When I see these recurring patterns, I note them in a separate notebook so that I can return to them later. These threads are the gold—the insights, lessons, or wisdom that emerge from our stories.

And remember, this isn’t about creating a detailed timeline of your entire life in one sitting. Start small. Focus on a part of your life or a specific event that you want to understand more deeply. In my own experience, I found that mapping out even just the first ten years of my childhood was enough to uncover patterns and insights I hadn’t realized were there.

Reclaiming Your Story

In the end, this process is about more than just writing down what happened to you. It’s about reclaiming your story, finding meaning in it, and perhaps even discovering the wisdom that was hidden in the moments you lived through. Every experience has been entrusted to you for a reason. By mapping them out, facing them, and calling them out of the dark, you can reclaim the strength, wisdom, and insight that come from each moment.

So, grab a notebook, a poster board for your timeline, or a stack of Post-Its, and begin. You’re not just telling your story; you’re uncovering the treasure within it. And we need your insights and wisdom.

When we share our stories, it builds connections that help us realize we’re not so different after all. It allows others to see their own experiences mirrored in ours, which can be incredibly healing. This isn’t just about sharing our lives; it’s about validating each other's experiences and creating a sense of belonging. In a time when it’s easy to feel isolated, opening up takes courage and vulnerability. It sparks conversations that can lead to personal growth, compassion, and a stronger sense of community. Ultimately, our stories have the power to transform, heal, and unite us, creating a rich tapestry of human experience that highlights our shared journey.

I am sharing a helpful repost for you in case you missed it. Heart’s Content has grown significantly in viewership in the last two years. I share the simple ways I began to “collect” my stories and inspiration.

KEEPING TRACK

My journals and tracking tools...

Feb 22, 2022

Last week I shared my simple approach to morning practice. This week, I am sharing journaling practices.

While I do admire the creativity of other people’s bullet journals, the thought of hours of advance work and preparation just to set up a journal, well, it makes me tired before I even begin. My journals are all about ease, fun, anti-perfectionism, and the consistency of just showing up to the page. Sounds a lot like playfulness, eh?

You’ll find below some of the journal processes and tools I am using in 2022. Some I have used for years and others are brand new this year. Actually, that’s a pretty good description of how I approach things in general. I like to keep what remains life-giving in the old, and stay open to the magic of the new.

Daily Journaling and Tracking Tools:

I do not collect a lot of “things”anymore, but I do collect my activities and experiences in my journals. It anchors me and helps me stay more awake to my life as I am living it. An unexamined life, and all that…

(I’ve shared some links for you in an effort to make it easy for you to see what I use. I DO NOT receive a percentage on sales from Amazon. This was just the easiest way to show you. )

New to me this year: I track my daily activities in a mini-logbook. Quick notes on how I spend my time. The term logbook originated with a ship's log—a maritime record of important events in the operation, management and navigation of a ship. For me, it’s a way to support my often unreliable memory. “Where were you at 5 pm on Dec 5, 2021?” One moment, please. Grabs logbook. Flips pages. HERE. Ron and I always joke that if we were put on the stand in a courtroom we wouldn’t possibly be able to remember where we were and what we were doing a week ago. Now I can. Takes seconds.
Inexpensive Spiral Notebook: This holds my Morning Pages and Writing Practice. Daily morning pages via Julia Cameron and dedicated writing practice via Natalie Goldberg. Nat G. suggests filling a spiral notebook with writing every month. I follow her lead and buy cheap, playfully-designed 100-page spiral notebooks and fill one a month with morning pages and writing practice. This is the private space where stuff gets worked out.
Daily Diary - This is where I track my gratitude + journal something that was important to me from the day and make my gratitude lists. I may also doodle, draw, collage, and or explore questions on paper. It’s a working journal-diary not a pristine keepsake, though it’s precious to me. It’s full of meanderings, mistakes and also buried treasure. I often share from this journal.
Love quotes? Me too. This year I started copying a quote daily into my 5 -year quote diary. Check in with me in five. So far, I’m enjoying this process. I sometimes forget and have to go back and add a quote and that’s fine with me. Tip o’ the hat to Austin Kleon for the idea. ( Update: yeah, I didn’t really keep up with this.)

I hope you found something helpful here. These journaling practices grew over time. They’re easy and enjoyable which supports daily consistency. Journaling not only increases my daily creativity and self-reflection, it provides a record of sorts, of my life experiences, insights, questions, and themes as they arise. It’s an evolving guidebook from me, to me. It’s also one of the ways I commune with Spirit. Over time, it becomes a treasure trove.

I’d love to hear about your journaling practices or if any of these options inspire you to begin!

xo Mary

Heart's Content

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