My Story To Tell

So I've been reading Richard Selzer's Letters to a Young Physician. One of the essays spoke to me. It got me thinking about a particular challenge in my life and my career, and I started writing about it last night.

That piece isn't finished yet, but that's not why it's not making an appearance in this blog. I won't post that piece here because it deals with aspects of my personal history that I don't want to put into the ether of the internet, from which, I must assume, everyone that I ever meet could discover them. I'm not talking about secrets per say. Nobody that knows me well would be surprised by the foundations of my essay. The challenge here is surrounding the personal details of our lives that our friends know but that that we don't necessarily want potential future employers to discover at the speed of google.

But I'm also proud of this piece, even just in the first draft. This makes me want to put it somewhere that will allow readers to get their hands on it. Otherwise all the effort seems a little wasted. Second draft? Third? Instead of sleep? Studying? Writing something else?

I've been a journal writer all my life, and I am certainly not claiming that writing without an audience other than yourself serves no purpose. Writing for myself and the page that I write on has been essential to my sanity for long periods of my life. But that writing has not had the polish of the things that I've been working on lately. That writing was about processing emotions as opposed to being a writer. As a journaler I want to be left to myself, but as I writer, I am not satisfied with this audience of one.

And perhaps that long history of journal-writing is why I am struggling with this issue now... not just in this case, but more broadly. I turn to words when I am emotionally raw and ethically challenged. The ideas and events that have moved me to actually put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard in the last couple months have been powerful ones, but ones that I'm either not free or not willing to give to the world. The intimate challenging moments involving my friends and family, personal ethical questions, and stories of patients that would make no sense without details that blow HIPPA to oblivion can't pass freely from my hands.

And so I've been asking myself the question: which of these things are my stories to tell? It's obvious (I hope) that I would never post or publish something that violated the privacy and confidentiality of my relationship with a patient or research subject. But what about the privacy and confidentiality of one of my siblings? My husband? My friends? I am not alone in the emotional moments of my life, there are other players. Is it for me to paint the saddest moments in the history of my family and then give them to the world? They are part of my story, but they are not mine alone, and they can't be separated in narrative or emotion from the people I love. When I write a poem about my life, do I give everyone involved veto power before I try to publish? Do I even ask? Surely there needs to be a line.

Because the writing is mine. The work is mine. The moments and the emotions are mine as well. But not just mine. These things are shared, and belong as much to my loved ones as to me. Who am I that I can give away another person's story for the sake of telling my own?

So lately I find myself unsure about what to do with that second draft. Whether to push through a third one at all. How do you tell your story when so little of your story is yours alone to tell?