Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember

The thing is, I’d lost my voice in so many ways already, before the stroke even occurred.

The year 2013 was an enormous fall. On an autumn day that year, Mr. Paddington and I took time to coast down the concrete slide in Berkeley’s Codornices Park. On that day, I decided that as miserable as I felt I would seek a minute of pure joy somehow. My thinking was that I could hold on to those few seconds and say, “Today I felt good, even if for ten seconds.”
That is how I clawed my way back. I would hold on to the small parts of good, even if the good parts were just one percent of my day. I would then try to expand that one percent however I could. I would hold on to any part of happiness, even if fleeting.

The birth of my daughter will be the best thing that year. The best person that ever happened to me. That moment preceded by all the moments previous. That moment, impossible without struggle.

The goal is to write a story that enters emotional memory. To make it so readers will remember your story and your writing, because you have struck something in their heart until it reverberates in their mind.

No one told me that getting better meant becoming different. And that different meant a sense of loss. And that the loss would eclipse improvement until I saw improvement.

I raised my hand. Prompted to speak, I said, “I’m a really private person.”
I hardly knew the other people in workshop. I didn’t know him. I had gone through a war with my body, and I felt tender.
He listened with steady and unblinking eyes, eyes that at one point in his life faced psychological and physical torture in a Nigerian prison and behind which lay a brain that withstood and survived that torture and then thrived. He asked a question that was more than the question, in the softest of voices: “Then why are you a writer?”
I closed my mouth.
He said that a writer cannot be private like that. We must share our truths. We must be brave.

Storytelling is emotional. It is about asking people to remember something that meant something to you, and the only way someone can remember your story is if it strikes the heart, at the reader’s emotional center. And it must be authentic.

There is so much I do not remember. I wish I could. And that is so much a part of my obsession with photography and journaling—I wish never to forget, even if it is inevitable. I wish to remember all the details.

Sometimes friends told me their own stories during my recovery. I am thankful to them. Deeply thankful. These friends knew I was a writer and told me their stories with the intention of awakening the storytelling part of my brain. Not the “Oh, I had a medical situation too” stories or “My father was once sick” stories or “Someone I know also had a stroke” stories, but real stories about their lives, about their families, about moments that meant something.

This part of recovery is so private; to everyone else I looked fine, and the improvements I made were measurable only to myself. This is the part where the doctors left me, having said they could not help further. The therapists had said their work was done months before that. My friends had tired of hearing about my illness. This is the part where I still knew there was a ways to go and I was not sure I would get there but I had come this far so I knew I had to keep going.