Fifty-nine and a half
Based on the 73 notebooks, I have a condensed timeline of almost every month. It's an important memoir-writing tool. Today I'm describing how I compiled this timeline, and looking back on my fifties.
I remember four decades ago saying, "I can't wait to be old, so that I can remember tons of stuff." I loved the memories old people had. Now I'm about six months from turning 60, and it's true. I feel wealthy with memories. (I'll share! Ask me anything! Ha.)
My journals (the literal 73 notebooks, going on 74) aid my memory so much that it's hard to imagine not having them. Who would I even be, if most of what's in my journals had gone forgotten by not being written down? For certain, I wouldn't understand my life as well as I do, so some of my behaviors and beliefs would be different. I would lack perspective also on other people and relationships.
Of course, I have lots of memories -- some of the acutely painful ones as well as lots of happy ones -- that I didn't write down. As I started writing my memoir, of finding my way to a good life when I was a motherless only child, I often found myself confused over sequences of events. Very early in the process I developed the timeline that has been my most fundamental memoir tool. For every month of my life from about age eight through my mid-30s (and still working my way forward), I have a paragraph-length list of my life's events from that month.
I was able to establish approximate dates for many un-journaled events by using the context that is in the journals. For example, I didn't write down when my dad started confiding how worried he was about my mom -- which frightened me -- but I knew it was at a school assembly and it was after my grandmother, Granny, had started living with us. And those events are in my journal, so I can triangulate.
I'm grateful to my eleven-year-old self who was obsessed with the coming of Christmas. "Seven weeks and three days!!!!", etc, allowed me to pinpoint events at the end of that year, which turned out to be the final weeks of my mother's life. I knew that was approaching. I was hiding, and focusing on the normal.
Putting events in order in a separate timeline document, month by month, helped me understand how certain events were triggered by others. I located vague memories and found out what else was happening at the same time. Memories no longer float as blobs in a void, but are tied to each other in a chain. Besides being helpful, this makes me appreciate the finite nature of life.
To make sure the timeline is as searchable as possible, I inserted as specific names and words as possible once I'd assigned dates to events. So now, instead of searching my timeline for "play," I can search for "Evita" or "Sherlock Holmes" or "Lily Tomlin" and go straight to what I need. All of my journals are also typed and searchable: It's 1.6 million words, almost three thousand pages in six or seven dozen Google docs. (I typed them starting in late 2017, soon after closing my gym business.)
I'm thinking a lot about what it means to be 60. I loved my fifties. I was running a CrossFit gym that we owned when I had my fiftieth birthday party, and loads of my gym-customer friends came. A few years later when I shut down the business, I was fortunately able to keep the goodwill of the same people and morph into a garage-based weight lifting trainer/teacher. Working at home lets me stay in shape and eat healthy food, and with that plus luck, my health through this decade has been excellent.
In my fifties I've gotten better at not judging my appearance, body, or face. I haven't colored my hair in years and am not considering any cosmetic procedures. If I didn't read people's surprisingly frequent and thorough thoughts about it in blog posts or on social media, face-altering wouldn't even be on my radar.
But to each her own. In my fifties I worked on getting comfortable with the fact that I no longer have the body of a 40ish CrossFitter, and it has paid off. The mirror reminds me that I'm undeniably 59 but also undeniably strong. Good enough.
But boy did my fifties go fast. I hope to live another 40 years and fill my brain with memories I can dig through... and yes I expect other people to be interested. We all tell our stories as we get older, and I intend to be good at it.
Did you say you have a million words on a computer??? Kudos to you! I was recently on a podcast where the person asked how I remembered so much, and I wish I would've thought of the word triangulate. Though my process was a bit different than yours, that's exactly what I had to do, including asking others to fill in blanks for me.
Looking forward to reading this memoir, Fran!
I am so glad you are telling your story. This is an excellent article demonstrating how useful a journal is, and I love how you have made them searchable. What software do your use - MS Word?
It would also be great to help identify photos. Have you ever thought to have a reference in your journal to your photos?