Latest / The Imperfect Impulse w/Bree O'Connor / Ep. 18: Pleased to Meet Me

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Ep. 18: Pleased to Meet Me · The Imperfect Impulse w/Bree O'Connor

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SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Imperfect Impulse with Brie O'Connor.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Brie O'Connor.
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I thought today might be a good day to talk a little bit deeper
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about process,
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SPEAKER_00: in particular,
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SPEAKER_00: my process.
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I've always found it intriguing to listen to other artists talk
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about how they get
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SPEAKER_00: from point A to point B.
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SPEAKER_00: Not because I need to emulate,
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but every once in a while I find it comforting to see that I'm
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not doing anything
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SPEAKER_00: too crazy or out of the norm.
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SPEAKER_00: And every once in a while I get new ideas.
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SPEAKER_00: And in particular, I do have multiple disciplines.
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SPEAKER_00: But today, I want to talk a little bit about memoir writing.
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SPEAKER_00: I've always been a journaler.
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SPEAKER_00: And five or six years ago, I began this stream of consciousness.
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SPEAKER_00: It started with a recurring nightmare that I've had since I was a child.
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SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a plan.
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SPEAKER_00: I just needed to figure out this stupid nightmare.
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SPEAKER_00: It was really plaguing me.
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SPEAKER_00: And in this nightmare, I'm walking into my grandmother's home.
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SPEAKER_00: My grandmother had this one-level, three-bedroom house.
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SPEAKER_00: And when you turned into the hallway...
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There was a door midway through the hallway that separated the
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living area from the
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SPEAKER_00: bedroom area.
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And whenever I walked through that door in real life,
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there was just a creepy feeling.
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SPEAKER_00: My grandmother's family,
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SPEAKER_00: my father's family,
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SPEAKER_00: was beset by a lot of tragedy in their immediate family.
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SPEAKER_00: I won't go into it because it's a long-sorted story,
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SPEAKER_00: but as a child,
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I remember walking through that hallway and rushing through it
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to get to the
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SPEAKER_00: bathroom at the end because I always felt kind of
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SPEAKER_00: yucky in that hallway.
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SPEAKER_00: Now in the dream,
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go down that hallway and it kind of lasts forever and when I
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get to the bathroom
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door all of a sudden a whole other piece of a house opens up
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before me and in this
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house there's no lights there's no electricity it is old and
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decrepit and in every
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SPEAKER_00: single room there's some kind of horror and
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SPEAKER_00: Repeatedly,
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SPEAKER_00: I would be forced to,
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SPEAKER_00: in this dream,
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to go through the house because as soon as that bathroom
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hallway door closed behind
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SPEAKER_00: me,
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SPEAKER_00: grandmother's house disappeared and the only way out was through.
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SPEAKER_00: And throughout my life,
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there's been new rooms and new horrors to explore in this house
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until I reach...
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SPEAKER_00: Sometime in my mid-20s,
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SPEAKER_00: I found an attic space in this house,
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SPEAKER_00: and it was the only quote-unquote safe space.
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SPEAKER_00: As I have aged, in this recurring dream, I get to the attic space faster.
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SPEAKER_00: There's still a presence,
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SPEAKER_00: but there's a place to create my home there,
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SPEAKER_00: and every time I dream about it,
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it has some new element in this attic so here you go we have
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like this subconscious
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very obvious symbolism of generational trauma and healing that
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I desperately wanted
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to understand when I started writing these stories about it I
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really needed to
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SPEAKER_00: chronicle
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SPEAKER_00: what was happening in these dreams.
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SPEAKER_00: As I continued writing,
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SPEAKER_00: of course,
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like exploring these rooms called to mind certain experiences
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in my formative
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SPEAKER_00: years.
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SPEAKER_00: And I followed those stories and I tried to write them in as a
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present tense as I could because I wanted to explore those
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feelings that I had and
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SPEAKER_00: what was my experience.
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SPEAKER_00: Also to try and grasp the reality of those formative experiences.
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SPEAKER_00: I wrote a lot.
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All told in this exploratory phase when I had no idea what the
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hell I was writing and
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SPEAKER_00: I probably spewed out about 300 pages of stuff, at least.
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There's probably more by now,
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probably closer to 400,
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of which most of it has been thrown away.
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Well,
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okay,
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not thrown away,
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but placed in a folder for my own benefit,
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not for sharing.
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SPEAKER_00: This was a really, really lengthy process.
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I wasn't sure that I was necessarily wanting to write any kind
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of memoir or
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SPEAKER_00: autobiography or anything.
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SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to understand
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SPEAKER_00: some things for myself.
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SPEAKER_00: But as I went back and looked over all of the pieces that I had written,
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SPEAKER_00: I started to see some patterns.
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SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about this before.
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SPEAKER_00: Humans are a pattern-seeking animal.
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SPEAKER_00: Patterns have helped us survive as a species.
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SPEAKER_00: Patterns helped us figure out where to find food, how to avoid danger,
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SPEAKER_00: how to understand the world around us.
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So that is probably one of the greatest tools in a
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storyteller's toolkit is the
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SPEAKER_00: ability to make connections between disparate events.
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SPEAKER_00: Now,
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we can get into the idea of meaning and the truth is is that
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meaning is not exactly
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a truth it there's no right or wrong answer we ascribe meaning
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to patterns that we
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SPEAKER_00: notice and
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that those connections are highly personal and may not be true
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for someone else who
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SPEAKER_00: has similar patterns,
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SPEAKER_00: behavior patterns or life experience patterns.
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SPEAKER_00: And someone else might ascribe a different meaning.
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SPEAKER_00: Some people may use those patterns to perhaps explain the will of God or
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SPEAKER_00: the role of provenance.
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SPEAKER_00: Others may look at those patterns and look at personal accountability.
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Other people may look at those patterns and see a reflection of
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family structures
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SPEAKER_00: repeating themselves over and over again.
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SPEAKER_00: And I guess the point is here is those are all correct.
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It is what is the most meaningful for you becomes your quote
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unquote truth.
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One of the things that I began to really look at was emotional
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and physical
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SPEAKER_00: violence and my attitudes toward sex and sexual development.
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SPEAKER_00: those themes kept coming up for me over and over and over again.
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SPEAKER_00: I began to see it as an inability to connect with my own body,
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SPEAKER_00: my own wants and needs,
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SPEAKER_00: and to be able to safely express them.
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SPEAKER_00: And that caused a lot of friction in my formative years.
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SPEAKER_00: So I found them more relevant in terms of my
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my relationships with boys and with men so that's pretty common
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a lot of women have
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that however where i see my story differs is that i feel i had
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a surprising number
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SPEAKER_00: of positive relationships with young men
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SPEAKER_00: That's not a story that most women have to tell.
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So that's where things started flowing for me is when I saw
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that there was an
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SPEAKER_00: untold story somewhere in these patterns,
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SPEAKER_00: in this pattern of behavior.
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We tend to focus on traumatic experiences,
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you know,
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with the opposite gender.
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SPEAKER_00: But we all do our fair share of screwing up as teenagers.
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I tend to cast myself a little bit as the villain in most of
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these stories,
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SPEAKER_00: but there's a good reason for that.
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I'm getting a little too in the weeds into describing the story
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as opposed to
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SPEAKER_00: talking about process.
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SPEAKER_00: Now, I started this project not understanding what I was writing.
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SPEAKER_00: I just felt compelled to write
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And really the only way I could find a shape to the story was
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to have a full
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exorcism of experience and to be able to look at it from the
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perspective of someone
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SPEAKER_00: who is actively trying to understand how I got from A to B.
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SPEAKER_00: Not everyone is going to have that process.
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SPEAKER_00: Some people already know their story.
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They know A la de B la de C la de D and they don't need to do
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this long exploratory
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SPEAKER_00: process like I did.
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SPEAKER_00: But in my instance,
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I have found great value in this memoir writing process because
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it has allowed me
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SPEAKER_00: to grow and understand
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lot about my own behavior and a lot about things that still are
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hanging with me
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today that I could do better at so for me this was a long
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process and I'm still in
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in in the middle of it because I still have about whittled it
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down to about 150 175
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SPEAKER_00: pages that's kind of where I think it's gonna land
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and I'm in the editing process there are still a few pieces
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that connective tissue
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that I haven't quite figured out yet and I'd hoped to be done
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by this fall but
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that's clearly not what's going to happen but that's neither
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here nor there because
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there's you know I don't have anyone breathing down my neck
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about it I can do
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SPEAKER_00: I can set my own pace.
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So I have found this so useful that I think a lot of people who
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are hoping to find
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SPEAKER_00: clarity in their own lives can use this same exploratory process
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SPEAKER_00: to, one, sort of get the story out and discover some clarity.
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SPEAKER_00: And now I'm going to pause for a second because this is important.
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SPEAKER_00: In the process of writing and rewriting these stories,
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SPEAKER_00: I could tell where I was bullshitting myself.
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I could tell where I was trying to tilt the narrative to a more
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positive spin.
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SPEAKER_00: And I challenged myself to be more honest with myself,
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SPEAKER_00: to not lie to myself or my eventual audience.
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SPEAKER_00: And that was hard.
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SPEAKER_00: It was very,
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very difficult because I had to own up to some things I'm not
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particularly proud
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SPEAKER_00: of.
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SPEAKER_00: However, what I am proud of is that I was able
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SPEAKER_00: to challenge myself and find a narrative that felt true.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's scary, but it's very positive and cleansing.
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So I think that that is one of the benefits of this work is
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once you put it down on
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SPEAKER_00: paper and you read it as if you're a stranger meeting this person,
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SPEAKER_00: and you see where your alarm bells go off and go,
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SPEAKER_00: this person is a lion sack of shit,
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then you know you have to go back and really re-examine that
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moment for yourself.
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SPEAKER_00: And I laugh because in the process,
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you would think it would be really terrifying to confront
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yourself in that way.
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SPEAKER_00: But in a lot of ways,
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where I saw myself hiding or trying to obfuscate the truth or
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trying to make myself
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SPEAKER_00: look better or reframe it so that I felt less guilty.
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SPEAKER_00: When I saw that stuff,
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I was able to look at it with some empathy for my former self
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and realize that I
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SPEAKER_00: was just doing the best that I could
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SPEAKER_00: And trying to be kind to my former self.
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I could see this scared little girl who was playing poker
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without a full dick.
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SPEAKER_00: And I could give her some comfort by owning up to my own shit.
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SPEAKER_00: I think makes for compelling reading.
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SPEAKER_00: I hope.
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Because a lot of people will find themselves in that kind of
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radical honesty.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll see.
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SPEAKER_00: If I ever finish editing this thing,
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we will see how people feel about reading it and how people
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feel about me.
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SPEAKER_00: And the truth is,
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SPEAKER_00: now that I have gone through this process,
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SPEAKER_00: I sort of care less about what people think about me.
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SPEAKER_00: Isn't that fun?
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Now not everybody is going to tackle memoir writing to publish
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or to share in some public forum.
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SPEAKER_00: Some might be trying to pass things on to,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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down in the family or maybe to just have that sort of
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self-examination and I think
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SPEAKER_00: it's a powerful tool.
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SPEAKER_00: It certainly is
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SPEAKER_00: shifted my perception on my behavior and,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: where I've come from and how I ended up here.
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I've been doing these Intro to Memoir one-night workshops over
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the last year off
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SPEAKER_00: and on,
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SPEAKER_00: and they've been really
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SPEAKER_00: wonderful groups.
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I'm so excited to have had this chance to share an overview of
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the process and how
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SPEAKER_00: this has worked for me.
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SPEAKER_00: I am bringing this work into a different realm now.
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I'm still going to be offering these four-hour intros because I
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think dipping your
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SPEAKER_00: toe into the work is a good way to find out if the work is right for you.
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I'm also going to be offering longer workshops for the
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development of a memoir
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piece so that you can explore like one moment and develop it
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into a finished
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SPEAKER_00: product over the course of several weeks.
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SPEAKER_00: For those who are interested,
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I will be offering the opportunity to publish those works on
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Unreliable Narrator.
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SPEAKER_00: I don't often sell well anything.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm not a salesperson.
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SPEAKER_00: But I do believe in this work.
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SPEAKER_00: And if you're interested in upcoming workshops, email me.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty easy to find.
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SPEAKER_00: You can send me a message on the Imperfect Impulse's Substack platform.
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SPEAKER_00: You can subscribe to Unreliable Narrator, which houses some of my
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SPEAKER_00: my memoir work, as well as other things, because I am a constant writer.
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SPEAKER_00: Or you can email me at artisticdirector at playfulsubstance.com.
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SPEAKER_00: You can also check out our website, playfulsubstance.com.
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SPEAKER_00: Hopefully by the time this airs,
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SPEAKER_00: I will have updated the website so that you can find the most up-to-date
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SPEAKER_00: information.
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I am excited about this and I really hope that people will join
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in and look for
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SPEAKER_00: those patterns for themselves.
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And even if you are a person who already has a timeline and
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knows I need to hit A
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SPEAKER_00: story,
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SPEAKER_00: B story,
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SPEAKER_00: C story,
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SPEAKER_00: this process is still relevant.
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SPEAKER_00: Even if you do already have a good outline,
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it means you just skip the first exploratory step and move
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toward the rest of the
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SPEAKER_00: process,
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which I do detail in my intro to memoir workshop called Writing
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from Memory.
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SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll consider joining me in one of these upcoming workshops.
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SPEAKER_00: That's it for me on the Imperfect Impulse this week.
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SPEAKER_00: And we'll be back next time.