what would you write if you weren't afraid?

You Don't Know Now, But You Gon' Find Out

Now, you may not know what you’d write if you weren’t afraid. I seldom do. It’s a moment-to-moment struggle. But if you’re passionate to find out, then you’re ready. God help you.

- Mary Karr ; The Art Of Memoir

Photo by Erin Song on Unsplash

I accidentally started writing my memoir, and let me tell you—once I realized that’s what I was doing, it started to suck. The moment I named it, fear rushed in.

A writer is one of the first things I ever wanted to be. I mean, I wanted to be a marine biologist too, but writing came first, even if I didn’t say it out loud. World-building has always been church to me. Every summer for a decade, I filled a black-and-white Mead composition notebook with a new “novel.” I was the kid with a hundred half-full notebooks. Pages that housed characters, timelines, & mythologies—hiding a whole cosmos under my bed.

I’m 33 now. And nothing has changed.

But writing has never been easy for me. Not just technically—but spiritually. I touched on this in I Might Be P*ssy, but there’s more to say about my relationship with fear. With silence. With talking back.

Some days there’s a thick, humming quiet lodged in my throat. Calling myself a writer feels like bragging. Feels like a dare. Feels like I’m inviting the world to laugh at me.

And yet, when I’m stitching a paragraph together and I find the language for something I’ve carried so long that it’s fused itself to my ribs, I feel peace. A stillness I can’t find anywhere else. A homecoming.

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

ii.

I almost wish I wrote Talking Back. bell hooks pulled the language straight from my throat—words I swallowed for years. I was loud. Too loud. Mouthy. Smart in a way that scared people. I asked too many questions, and I didn’t know when to stop. So they punished me. Called me fast. Called me grown. Called me crazy.

My father is Jamaican, so “no back chat” was more of a threat than a rule when I was growing up. Keep talking, and someone was absolutely going to pop you in the mouth. My mother used to get so mad at me. “You always want to have the last word!” she’d say. And she was right. I did. I still do. I wanted to win. I wanted to outwit the adults. To be sharper, quicker, righter.

I lowkey thought adults were stupid and mean. Not all of them, but enough to necessitate keeping score.

Even then, I could feel when something was off. There was a rhythm I trusted in my body, a kind of internal metronome for truth. And when something someone said didn’t sit right with that rhythm, I couldn’t let it slide. I had to speak up. I had to talk back. I couldn’t help it.

But the rules were impossible. “Be quiet!” but also, “Answer me when I’m talking to you!” Pick one. How was I supposed to do both? Everything in my body said don’t let this go. Everything in my training said hold your tongue. And I was caught in between.

My mother called it sass. Disrespect. But I think it was clarity showing up early. I just hadn’t yet learned how to wield it gently.

iii.

"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it."

Writing a memoir is not the same as journaling. It’s not making up a story about yourself with the names changed and the edges softened. It’s not metaphor, or a therapy session (though it often feels like one). It’s a very specific unveiling. Memoir writing is about making it all mean something.

And the thing is…I used to know how to do this. To speak truth to power. To raise my voice. But over time, that muscle atrophied. Not because I stopped feeling, but because I stopped believing it was safe to feel out loud. Even my journals became war zones; tear-streaked and coded, all climax, no context. I couldn’t name what happened, but I could trace the outline of the bruise. I learned to write around the truth, and convinced myself that was enough.

But when I go back now, I don’t cringe. I cower. Because the girl who wrote those entries was dangerous. She knew things I’m still trying to forget. She was already a writer, even in her silence. Already Truth. She just didn’t have a mic yet.

So now that I’m writing this memoir for real, I have to ask myself:

What would happen if I stopped lying?
What if I didn’t metaphor it, or lace it in poetry?
What if I just said it?

Would the amphitheater burn? Or would something holy be released?

Maybe that’s what memoir really is—not a timeline of events, but the sound of Truth stepping down from the stage. Refusing to perform. Refusing to thank the audience. Refusing to lie just to make others comfortable. To be comfortable myself.

I am trying to write from that place. The un-coded, un-rehearsed, unruly voice inside me.

I am trying to remember how to speak without shaping my voice around your needs.

And I’m scared. I’m scared that who I am doesn’t matter as the world falls apart. But I’m writing anyway. Because soulwork says it does. Matter. That I matter. And so does the story of who I am.

Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!

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