Push the Line: Writing Personal Stories Without Losing Yourself
Writing from an Authentic Place
Welcome back to Writing Under the Palm Tree. We’re honored by your presence.
This week, we’re discussing the tension of writing from an authentic, deeply rooted place while avoiding causing undue harm to ourselves.
I’ve been asking myself, what does it mean for us to push the line? To be vulnerable enough to write something true, distill something universal, while not going too far with it.
At first, I didn’t know if I liked the answers because they were not answers but more questions.
I am working on a rewrite of a creative nonfiction story in which I tap into a moment that is still red hot in my mind. I told myself that I could come back to that pulpy moment where I, my relatives, and my father were almost robbed at gunpoint, with a calm mind.
However, the more I pressed into the moment to capture the fragmentation, the splintering of sense, the more viscous my insides felt.
So, I had to step back.
I was fourteen when I went back to Nigeria with my dad. I was in my mid-thirties as I wrote the essay, yet my heart still beats harder as the faces of terrified women with babies strapped to their backs swim up to meet me. I remember the red dust, the screaming, the rapid prayers, the rippling chaos of humanity in flight.
I needed to step back and ask myself several questions:
Why am I doing this?
Why am I skimming over my trauma before diving in? Don’t I have enough to deal with?
Why have I brought this story up again and again with family members? What human universality am I trying to get at?
What I learned through writing and re-writing the piece was that I was trying to pinpoint how that near-death moment, where bullets flew, changed me.
I knew it had. The moment had focused me.
Why am I skimming over my trauma before diving in? Don’t I have enough to deal with?
Before that moment, I had resigned myself to isolation, to being the “only” in most situations, and I saw life as something to endure—I was also navigating teenage-hood, so I am sure that didn’t help. I had a few friends, two real friends, but I was on the outskirts with them.
I was the one darker-skinned boy, the immigrant, the African, the target of watermelon jokes and stereotypes of Africans as “uncivilized,” the alien. What kind of life was this on the bottom rung? In other words, I was lonely, enraged, and dejected.
This was not the America I was promised by the movies and TV shows I watched back in Ife, Nigeria.
Now, at fourteen, I was back home, on the outskirts of Lagos, after the market day ended. And I was feeling like an outsider here too, an oyinbo. Which means either a white person or a foreigner, or both, if you’re trying to be slick. I was called that multiple times when I spoke wrongly accented Yoruba or responded to questions in Yoruba with American English.
My amalgamated accent (Yoruba and American) was mocked by my own people. I was brought to America and made to assimilate, and I did. My reward? Exiled by my relatives to a kind of no man’s land between America and Nigeria.
Why have I brought this story up again and again with family members? What human universality am I trying to get at?
What brought everything to a singular point for me were those same relatives. My aunt, uncle, and father revealed a deep reservoir of strength as our driver hopped a curb, turned us around, and swerved through stalled traffic.
They stayed calm, focused, and attentive, rolling up the windows, bracing themselves and me as we rocketed away to safety, the staccato pops of bullets behind us.
After, my aunt was the first to crack jokes in Yoruba, shattering the brittle silence that pressed down on us. Their example showed me how to exhale and release the tension that clamped around my whole body. I felt brought in, included, loved.
When we were well away, and it was just us and the cicadas, I rolled the window down to breathe in fresh air and remember the moment I continued to be alive. They followed my example, first my uncle, then my father, then the driver (a family friend), smiling to themselves.
In that car with all four windows rolled down, the chorus of cicadas going full bore, I have never felt more rooted to a place or a people before or since. And I had never been more grateful to be alive and breathing than I was in that space and time.
At the end of my re-write of the personal essay, I distilled for myself that the people you call home are not home because of what they say, but what they do, and how they draw closer to you (not away) in deeply uncertain times.
It also became clear to me the finite nature of life, how each minute, each second, is more valuable, and can be more glittering, than we will ever know. And only what we have in the now is promised, why not celebrate it? Rise above the things that want to squander our time, hate, discrimination, and small-mindedness, and live the way we want anyway.
And that is why I pushed the line with that story, why I dug deeper, past the pain and abject terror I felt, for the meaning, the lasting change it triggered in me.
What do you all think? Is it possible to go too far, when telling your story? Or is it all fair game if it was part of your experience? Feel free to share your thoughts below.
There is a Yoruba proverb that goes like this, "Àwọn àḷáàrin nínú ìtàn," which means "The true essence lies within the story."
I hope these words help you find the true essence of whatever story you are trying to tell.
In Solidarity,
Olu
Beautifully discussed. I often feel I don't go far enough when telling my own story. I hold back and have a note on my desk that says, "What else? What's true?" I have to really push to find the truth in how I feel about a situation and find the story within it.
Thankyou for sharing this story so beautifully. It's a very good question about going too far. The things I have already written here push the boundary of what I felt like should be written about my own story, however, I have seen that I am meant to go all the way, so I must keep on pushing through each step. A little further, and further, until all limitations drift away.