The Emotional Truth

I’m de-cluttering my binders, the ones that hold interesting articles I’ve ripped from magazines. I tackled the writing articles first. Re-reading those articles made me want to write again, really write, not just blog or e-mail. But I’m currently working on creating a book with old family photos, recipes, and anecdotes. The anecdotes will only require fluffing to make them more readable. With a few of the anecdotes, I’ve written down the story from two different people - two people who remember the event just slightly differently. My job has been to meld the two together to reveal the emotional truth, only I didn’t realize that’s what I had been doing.

I just read an article on writing the emotional truth of your own memories. We each remember things through our own filters so that none of us remembers any event in exactly the same way. One person will even remember snow while a friend remembers rain. When dealing with personal stories, the factual truth matters only a little. The emotional truth is the whole reason for revealing the story. If you weren’t emotionally affected by an event, then there would be no point in sharing it.

Realizing that emotional truth is the only truth I need to remember has freed me to start work on my own memoir. I don’t need to be bogged down with remembering if the weather had been hot or just warm, if the event had come before or after the 4th of July party, or even if some people had truly attended. It’s how my memory has processed my life that shapes who I am today, and who I am today is the real truth of my life.