Stepping Beyond an Eclipsed World

While writing the initial drafts of my memoir I engaged in an exercise: I read the start of a chapter I had written about the earlier days of my recovery from the multiple injuries I had suffered after an elderly driver struck me. I focused on each sentence, each word and visual detail, then created a list of elements –objects, emotions, as well as the atmosphere of the piece – I anticipated would continue in the chapter. I then read the remaining pages, realizing the tone of the entire chapter smacked of self-pity in my telling of how I felt about the many bruises I suffered. I had failed to see beyond my own marred body, or ahead of me – that I would eventually heal (perhaps I needed the element of time to create emotional distance). In other words, the prose I had chosen was drowning in self-absorption.

Particular questions surfaced: would I continue to wallow in the bruises I sustained? Or would I be able to see beyond my eclipsed world shadowed by pain and, instead, recall the children I had cared for as a nurse, with the intention of showing how others suffer too?

Reading the chapter again, through the lens of my list, forced me to examine the self-indulging narrative I had crafted from a more objective stance. Even though my body would never be the same as it was before the accident, it would come to function quite well. On the other hand, a child who I had long ago cared for as a burn nurse, who I initially included in the chapter, did not regain even half the function she once enjoyed. Hopefully, in stepping back from the page, we return to it with 20/20 vision. In doing so, we are primed to craft a story that is unique on its own merit, yet universal, for we all encounter suffering at some point in our lives.