Why Vulnerability is a Gift in Memoir Writing

June 17, 2014 By
Flicker Creative Commons

Flicker Creative Commons

This week I’m honored to welcome, Kathy Pooler,  my very first guest blogger. Her upcoming memoir, will be published next month.  I’ve enjoyed reading Kathy’s blog posts for over a year and when I discovered that she was writing a memoir about abusive relationships, I wanted to get to know her better.  Abuse is also an important topic for me as well. Last month I got to read her final draft, an uplifting story about emotional, domestic abuse and the two failed marriages she left behind.

A huge problem in our society today, domestic violence, both physical and psychological, destroys lives and families all around us, every day. Many women, and men, too, stay with their abusers, afraid to leave them, believing that he or she will mend their ways and become the dream spouse they thought they had married.

Kathy’s courageous story is about her journey through hell and back in order to protect her children and herself.  She transforms from a submissive, naive young woman, into a mature, take-charge  adult, willing to take risks in order to become the confident and loving wife and mother she is today.  It’s filled with lessons for those among us who find themselves in similar relationships.

Do keep an eye out for Kathy’s book next month.  You won’t be disappointed.

***

 Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ― Brené Brown

Kathy Pooler

Kathy Pooler

How do you write about pain that was so deep, you don’t even remember how you felt?

You blocked it, buried it, stored it away for another time, then went about the business of your life. Going through the motions, Doing the best you could . Trying not to think about it.

Too. Darn. Painful.

That was me at age thirty with two small children, knowing I had to leave their father. And again at age forty when I had to flee in broad daylight with my children from a second marriage for fear of physical abuse. I had no choice. It was a matter of survival.

For years, I lived with guilt and shame when I faced the reality that my choices led to two emotionally abusive marriages and years of turmoil for myself and my two children. That shame hung around me like an uninvited guest who taunted and harrassed. I journaled my way through it, went to counseling sessions, prayed, cried, shared with friends, but all of that did not change the fact that I could not un-do the damage that had been done. I lingered in a sea of self-doubt, confusion, regret that was too painful to confront head-on.

In my upcoming memoir Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away From Emotional Abuse, I expose my vulnerabilities and flaws in order to find the answers to the question that plagued me for years:

How does a young woman from a loving Catholic family make so many wise decisions about career, yet so many poor decisions about love that she ends up escaping with her two children from her second husband for fear of physical abuse? 

 In order to write this story, I had to revisit the past I kept hiding from. I had to dig deeply and keep digging. In doing so I had to be willing to look at my mistakes and failures.

I had to allow myself to be vulnerable.

None of this was easy or painless.  Many times, I put the story aside to give myself some breathing room.

When I was in the midst of the writing, I didn’t even know what my story was. I just kept writing whatever came to mind.

I began searching. I looked for pictures from the mid-70s of a young father reading to his children who were nestled in his lap. I listened to 1970s music. “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, from Joy to the World took me back to the night we were engaged. Happy faces. Hopes. Dreams.

The marriage that couldn’t be started with the same hopes and dreams of any twenty-something couple in the 1970s then took a turn down an unfamiliar road, a point of no return. And again, in the 1980s when a second chance marriage at the age of thirty-nine left me fighting for my life.

Through the vulnerability—the raw, searing pain of self-discovery—I slowly began to feel compassion for the young woman who tried so hard to have a loving relationship and provide her children with a stable home.

Writing helped me to heal. After a while, I began to experience compassion and a spirit of forgiveness toward the men I chose to marry.

I embraced my inner strength and developed insights into my motivations and decisions.

I forgave myself.

The guilt and shame melted away as I realized I acted in good faith. In writing Ever Faith ful to His Lead, I discovered that I had become a stronger person as a result of all I had endured and it has left me feeling transformed and empowered.

Vulnerability is not a weakness. It took courage and perseverance to break down the tight shell I had created around myself to protect myself from the truth.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful that the risk it took to blossom” Anais Nin

I had to face the darkness before I could see the light.

In writing my memoir, I have let the pain go with a spirit of forgiveness, compassion and understanding. Ever Faithful to His Lead provides a message of hope, resilience and courage that I want to share with those who need it the most—women who need to claim and honor their own strength within to find freedom from abuse.

Vulnerability has been a gift that has allowed me to heal and share a healing message.

***

 Kathleen Pooler is a writer and a retired Family Nurse Practitioner whose memoir, Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away From Emotional Abuse and work-in-progress sequel, Hope Matters: A Memoir are about how the power of hope through her faith in God helped her to transform, heal and transcend life’s obstacles and disappointments:  domestic abuse, divorce, single parenting, loving and letting go of an alcoholic son, cancer and heart failure to live a life of joy and contentment. She believes that hope matters and that we are all strengthened and enlightened when we share our stories.

She lives with her husband Wayne in eastern New York.

She blogs weekly at her Memoir Writer’s Journey blog: http://krpooler.com
Twitter @kathypooler     https://twitter.com/KathyPooler
LinkedIn: Kathleen Pooler: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/kathleen-pooler/16/a95/20a
Google+:Kathleen Pooler: https://plus.google.com/109860737182349547026/posts
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4812560-kathleen-pooler
Facebook:
Personal page,
Kathy Pooler : https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.pooler
Author page:
Kathleen Pooler/Memoir Writer’s Journey: https://www.facebook.com/memoirwritersjourney
Pinterest  (http://www.pinterest.com/krpooler/)

One of her stories “The Stone on the Shore” is published in the anthology: “The Woman I’ve Become: 37 Women Share Their Journeys From Toxic Relationships to Self-Empowerment” by Pat LaPointe, 2012.
 Another story: “Choices and Chances” is published in the  “My Gutsy Story Anthology” by Sonia Marsh, September, 2013.

 

Filed Under: Abusive Relationships, Domestic Abuse, Memoir, Mental Health, Navigating Through Life, Trauma Tagged With:

Pain And Suffering

April 15, 2014 By

IMG_1087“We suffer because we marry our instinctive aversion to pain to the deep-seated belief that life should be free from pain. In resisting our pain by holding this belief, we strengthen just what we’re trying to avoid. When we make pain the enemy, we solidify it. This resistance is where our suffering begins.”

 Ezra Bayda, “When It Happens to Us”

It is difficult to get rid of the sting of adversity we often find ourselves surrounded by. Whether it’s a health issue, a relationship problem, or some other circumstance, we deem it unfair and find ourselves going to war with ourselves to keep it at bay. But none of us exits this world without experiencing pain and suffering.

All we want is to feel good. We want to be happy, knowing our own minds, surrounded by family and friends who understand and support us. And that’s the way it is much of the time.  But then pain comes calling in the form of loss and fear. Sometimes it crushes us. We feel desperation. We get depressed or anxious. We scream and cry trying to make the hurt go away.

But pain is what it is. It’s like the weather. It’s an integral part of our lives. Screaming and crying won’t make it go away. Even when the sun is shining and roses are in full bloom it’s nearby. If you aren’t feeling it now, you will before too long. The thing is that as quickly as it arrives, the weather changes and you find yourself back in the sunshine, unless you choose to cling to the stormy forecast.

While our house was torn apart by the renovations we chose to do over the winter, I spent my time suffering.  I just wanted my house back, with nobody else in it.  I ranted about the four weeks the contractor had promised us that turned into eight. I was living in a hotel without a decent kitchen to prepare healthy meals in. I was gaining weight and having one big old pity party. I was forever readying myself for the next problem that would add to my stress.  I was miserable, as well as miserable to be with.

When I decided to sit with my suffering and just let it be, I realized that I had been allowing myself to be a victim. I asked myself, “Who is it that had set up these circumstances?”  It was of course me.  I’m the one who wanted wood floors in the kitchen rather than the stone tile that made my back hurt.  I wanted the laundry room moved upstairs so that I wouldn’t have to lug dirty clothes down into the basement every day.

As I simmered in my pain, I remembered that I had choices. I could be unhappy and negative about my life or I could allow the sun to shine and pay the price of feeling homeless for a couple of weeks while my house got a lot easier to live in.  I chose to look at the positive side of my circumstances. Sure, I was annoyed when things went wrong but then recalled what I’d have in the end.  I try to remember this when other storms blow in, be it something I choose or not.  Stormy weather comes and goes  just like the sun.  That’s just the way life is.
Filed Under: Change, Life, Navigating Through Life, Quotes Tagged With:

Doubt

April 1, 2014 By

DSCF0803As I sent the last of my first draft manuscripts out to my beta readers and heard the whooshing sound that my mac provides, telling me it was sent, I had second thoughts. “Oh my God, what have I done? I should have rewritten it again. Everyone will see how badly I write and how boring I can be.  I know I’m very repetitive.  My grammar is awful and my spelling is worse. They’ll hate it, I’m sure. I should have just written it for myself and forgotten the publishing part.”

On and on I went staging a pity party, and doubting myself, until I realized that horrible inner critic of mine was on the prowl, giving me a hard time, and shaking the ground I stood on.  But then I snapped to, and started fighting back.  “It’s just a first draft.  Sure it’s not perfect.  My grammar and spelling stink.  So what! That will all be taken care of later when I hire a professional editor. How would I be able to fix it if I didn’t send it out to others so that they can help? I’m way to close to it right now.  I need to go out and work in the garden or take a walk. And you, Doubting Dotty …  you can just take your words and flush them down the toilet. ”

That tirade continued for another fifteen minutes before I realized that my neck was sinking between my shoulders, I had a headache, and the pit of my stomach was roiling.  It was time to let it go.  I was turning myself into an anxious mess.

I went out into the garden and started removing the dead leaves of the hellebores I so love at this time of year. Their spotted white, pink and purple flowers are a bit late this year. They’d been beaten down and battered throughout our amazingly dark, cold and snowy winter.  They need to bathe in the warm spring light. When I was done they were all standing tall and breathing deeply.

I decided to do the same thing.  Doubting Dotty isn’t in sight and I hope she stays away forever.  But I know all too well, she has a way of sneaking in the back door when I’m not looking.  She’ll probably be back in the near future.  When she shows up again I’ll just go out into my garden, get my hands dirty, and be with my plants.

Filed Under: Fear, Navigating Through Life, The Garden, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What Have I Done With My Former Self?

March 25, 2014 By

DSCF0597This past weekend I spent time at The Virginia Festival of the Book.  It’s a yearly event that pops up every March, bringing readers and writers together to share their love for words, books, and the pleasures of writing.  Once I was a participant when I did a poetry reading with the members of my poetry group.  But that was centuries ago and being in a group of other poets, I didn’t feel terribly vulnerable.  In the past few years I’ve been an attendee taking note of what is happening in the world of writing and publishing.

As I considered and then started writing my memoir over the last few years, I wanted to know what the climate was like out there. Being shy, anxious and intimidated by experts, I’d spent years working extremely hard selling my visual art. I also self-published an instruction book about an obscure rug hooking technique long before self-publishing became a hip thing to do.  Within the art community, I found other artists, agents, and galleries to be a very mixed bag of friendly and unfriendly beings often with noses stuck up high in the air.  I hated making cold calls to galleries, museums, and trying to get myself noticed.  It went fairly well and I was showing my work across the country. But feeling overwhelmed by having to be a sales person, which I wasn’t, I signed up with an agent who claimed she’d get my career of to a great start.  A couple of years later, having paid her up front for work that wasn’t helping me much, I fired her because she was all about making money for herself and not considering me, her client.

On the other hand my book, Australian Locker Hooking: A New Approach to a Traditional Craft, which I originally published back in the ’80s, was very successful because I knew who to market it to.  At the time I had a small flock of sheep and angora goats.  I spun their fleeces into yarn, dyed the wool with natural dyes, and wove or knitted the yarn into sweaters and a variety of other goods.  I knew other weavers and spinners all over the map and belonged to all of the organizations weavers and spinners belong to. It was the hippy, back-to-the-land era and I bet on the fact that this particular technique would turn out to have a hot market. I went to conferences, wrote articles for magazines, advertised to the niche I belonged to and ended up reprinting that book a number of times. I sold a total of eight thousand copies to shops and individuals all over the world before being a book seller got old. I wanted more out of life. I tried getting a publisher interested in taking it over but found no one game to take on this “small” project.

A few years ago, when I was told that writers had to build their own platforms and do their own marketing, I was not a happy camper. I wanted to write, not put myself out there even before I finished writing my intended book in order to sell it. I had been there, done that. Entering my 70th year I wanted to have time to do a bit of traveling and simply enjoy life. I had mistakenly believed that once a book is under contract with a publisher, that entity takes over all the dirty work like marketing.

But being passionate about getting my story down on paper and believing it has the potential to help readers who find themselves traveling down the same road I had, I decided I’d move forward with the project.  Even through the darkest of days, I made myself believe that my book would happen and that someway, someday, it would sit on bookstore shelves and sell.

As I pull the pages of my first draft together, I need to think ahead and begin exploring whether or not I will self-publish it, as I originally intended, or send it out to a few small publishers which several people have encouraged me to do. Either way I’ll need to do most of my own marketing. Both options have pros and cons.

That is what made the Festival of the Book, so valuable to me, this past week.  I talked to a small, nearby publisher, I talked to agents, and independent publicists to see what was what.  I talked to other writers, some of them at the same stage I’m at. They were all friendly, helpful, and encouraging. But what amazed me the most was my own behavior and reactions to them. I was not shy. I was not anxious. And I was not intimidated as I had been just a few years ago, when my inner critic told me I was stupid if I thought I could write a memoir. I suddenly realized those experts were in the same ballgame I’m in. They want to sell books and I want to sell my book.  I’m looking at them the same way they’re looking at me,  trying to judge whether working with any of them would be a fit.

Part of me had been dreading opening the publishing can of worms, but this past weekend I found it exciting to be doing the work.  On Sunday, when it was all over, I found myself, feeling low and let down.  I wanted more. As intimidated as I felt signing up to attend a nonfiction writing conference a few weeks ago, I’m now excited and can’t wait to get there and see what happens.

In the meantime, I’m happy but wondering what the %$#? happened to my former self and who is this new person living in my body now?  Isn’t change great?

 

Filed Under: Books, Change, Memoir, Navigating Through Life, The Virginia Festival of the Book, Writing Tagged With: , ,

A Kick Butt Year

March 18, 2014 By
Celebrate!

Celebrate!

It’s been an amazing year so far.  First, I got myself through an eight weeks home renovation that was only supposed to be four weeks long.  I LOVE the changes we made and I can say it was well worth the struggle and wait.

Second, I’m almost halfway through the 21 Day Sugar Detox without many complications and am feeling great.  I’m really looking forward to the end when I can add back some things like blueberries, strawberries and mangoes, but it hasn’t been that bad at all.  I still have a few cravings from time to time, but they are much more manageable than they used to be. My clothes are getting bigger on me and I’m really happy that I started what at the time I thought was probably an insane idea.

But number three is the biggy! Think fireworks and champagne. Think I never thought I could do it.  Think I’m amazing.

What is it you ask? Well, this past weekend I FINISHED THE “SHITTY FIRST DRAFT” OF MY MEMOIR!!!

It may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but for me it is. You’re thinking, “Hey girl, that’s only the beginning.  It’s not published yet.”  Well you’re right and of course I know that.  But really, I often thought  I’d never get this far. I wanted to, but there were moments throughout the process when I thought, like the sugar detox, “This is an insane idea. Who cares? This is too painful. Why don’t you just jump off a bridge instead?”

But I’ve learned so many new things about myself and for the first time ever, I admit that I’m stubborn. When the inner critic starts slamming me with, “You’ll never do it,” I answer, “Watch me.”  Yes, it’s only the first step and there is a very long row to hoe ahead, especially since I hate being a salesperson.  But one day, somehow, one way or another, it’ll get done. I can almost smell the finish line.

I will spend time this coming week attending presentations at the Virginia Festival Of The Book, which is an annual event.  I’ll meet peers who are also writing books and will have the pleasure of hearing Jane Friedman, talk about ebooks and marketing.

Next week I’ll be doing a reread and fixing the worst problems. Since I edit as I go along, hopefully it won’t be too bad a job. Then I’ll send it off to my beta readers, take a week off, then get back to work on it so that I can have a decent draft to take to a no-fiction writing conference I’m going to in May. Over the summer I plan on working on a final draft and begin looking into how I want to get it published.

So if I keep kicking butt like I have been, maybe sometime in the not too distant future there will be an even bigger celebration going on here. Wish me luck!

Filed Under: Memoir, Navigating Through Life, The Virginia Festival of the Book, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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