Life After Memoir: Puzzle Pieces, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, & Lavender Tea

Life After Memoir: Puzzle Pieces, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, & Lavender Tea

Life After Memoir: Puzzles Pieces, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, & Lavender TeaYou open the box delicately, but confidently. You drop out the promised 1000 cardboard cutout pieces of colors, speculating their ultimate purpose. Turning each piece over, one by one, to their sole speck of indefinite image. 

1 . . . 2. . . 3. . . 

You strategically pull aside the ones with a straight edge, meant to create the border. Piece by piece, you work diligently to put the whole puzzle together. There is a feeling of a calming urgency as you work. A subtle, yet serious pastime. 

            But then one day, you manage to place the very last piece. 

999. . . 1000. 

Now what?

This was the initial notion I felt just after publishing my memoir. Now what? So many pieces of my own 80-million-and-twenty-piece jigsaw puzzle, with an erratic color scheme and jagged, dicey cutouts to boot. I had planned and revised. I had written and rewritten. I had literally read that thing forward, backward, out loud, in accents, and in every other free moment of my waking life. 

But then one day, I managed to place my very. . . last. . . piece. 

And, just like the puzzle, I didn’t really make a plan beyond my own delicate jigsaw story. I soon realized exactly why. 

To write a memoir, undoubtedly full of thawing secrets and otherwise fizzled fireworks, one will become fairly accustomed to walking hand-in-hand with their farthest-reaching emotional fear. That is until your words become globally accessible in multiple formats. For me, that is when the real fear set in. 

I suppose I would have never done it had I allowed myself to really think about the repercussions of selling and sharing my words and stories. Thinking about eyes scanning and thumbs flipping, especially those whom I personally recognize, was enough to get an unfamiliar somatic response from my insides.

Soon I was googling things like: Symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I couldn’t quite understand it, nor did I want to. I certainly didn’t want to admit my fear to anyone, and I most certainly didn’t want to admit it to myself. Yet my body would surely tell me the only way it could. My symptoms persisted.

The fear, you ask? 

It was all-encompassing. It was being terrified with sharing some of my most deep experiences with the world. It was the anxiety of my newborn writing proficiencies or lack therein. It was the possibility of hurt feelings from real people that were meant to be ancillary characters only. It was coming at me from all directions and it was crushing and twisting and full of emotions that don’t even have words to associate. 

Crumbling down upon the very strongest part of me: my core. My center. 

My gut. 

Those feelings sat and wreaked havoc on my innards. It was like a strong poison had oozed into my cells, attacking each one individually yet all together just the same. My stomach was in knots and I was on the toilet for a month and a half. 

But then one day, it was over. My body-brain connection had held on long enough to call a truce. 

I got up from the toilet and immediately started writing again. 

As reviews began to trickle in, so did social media messages and emails. Some people wanted to share my book with a friend. Some wanted to congratulate me for a life well-lived. Some people even wanted to hug my book, or me, or both. 

Just as I didn’t know what to do with my puzzle as it was complete, I also didn’t know what to do with these new connections. I hadn’t allowed myself to think that far ahead. I didn’t know my book could have been “everything [someone] needed and more.” I didn’t realize it might be important to others in the way it had been for me. 

My memoir journey began just over fifteen years ago, with little to no notion of anything other than to find a new home for some pain that no longer served me. But perhaps that is exactly why I didn’t allow myself to look beyond my completed work, that kittens playing with a string puzzle. Or whatever that obscene image of my life’s story might be. 

The immense weight of your own experiences and inherent wisdom used to help guide another human being. To give a reader the inclination that everything will, indeed, be okay. And watching you nod in a symphony of humbled belief. To connect as if we just spent the last light of day sharing stories and secrets over a swelling pot of lavender tea. And hearing your shared experiences echo firmly against my own. To be the passive companion along for your own self-reflective ride. And wanting to hold your hand to thank you just for entrusting you.  

The power that words hold is immeasurable. And when you share those words, it becomes far beyond anything that words, themselves, can even describe. The connection. That power is reserved for the most intimate, yet extending emotions that are too complex to be made into things we can simply understand. 

I finished my puzzle and, in turn, found that the real objective actually began at that moment. Snapping apart the seemingly perfect fit pieces, the accomplishment alone made it so easy to destroy the thing I had worked so hard to create. Because that was never the point in the first place. 

Finding my fear to be more powerful than everything I had ever known, made me more alive. Made me more connected. Engaged. That rooted fear, bigger than you and me, became the reason why I have both lost and found myself in my writing. More vast than the seas, more colossal than our universe. And that is most fantastically frightening. 

It is precisely what keeps my blood pumping, fingers pecking, and neurons firing. All just to enable me to stop and smell the roses, or lavender tea. With you.

—

Her call to write was a quiet, yet constant voice, that Ryan Rae Harbuck finally listened to. Her debut memoir, when i grow up i want TO BE A CHAIR, launched in February 2022. A Colorado native, Ryan has always found solace in the mountain air and has always been up for an outdoor challenge—as far as her wheelchair wheels could take her, or beyond. She has been a teacher and a swim coach, but enjoys being Mom the most. She and her husband, Andrew, live in Denver with their two mudslinging, car-vrooming young boys.

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A CHAIR

Her story has (not) defined her.

From where she sat, her perspective of the world was both quite ordinary and rivetingly extraordinary—from a paralyzing car accident in her teens to traveling overseas on a journey of self-reflection to becoming a mom. Throughout everything she experienced, she fervently believed in following her given path.

She wanted to trust its trajectory. She wanted to be sure.

Her story is not about a chair.

Her story is about her strengths and how they rose out of her instinctive vulnerabilities.

Her story is about her struggles and how they became her victories.

Her story is about being willing to hold it all, for herself and the whole of her world.

Everyone has a chair. That thing you are bound to or unwillingly defines you. An element that makes you different from the rest. One that you have little choice in the matter.

What’s YOUR chair?

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing