A dancer and a writer Renee K Nicholson reflects on the experience of writing her memoir – Fierce and Delicate – Essays on dance and illness.
“Anytime you’re writing a memoir, you’re excavating your past and there are things in our past that are always painful. But there was also something wonderfully cathartic about it. It wasn’t just, ‘ Oh, I have to relive a lot of things that were painful for me,’
It was, ‘ I can make more sense of what happened to me in this kind of hindsight. I can understand my own experience, because I’m working it out on the page. And I’m discovering things about it now that I wouldn’t have been able to see in the moment. And I can also understand that these things change us.’ It’s not necessarily what life throws at us but what we do with what life throws at us, .that is meaning making, that, can give shape and voice to our experiences.”
“Anytime you’re writing a memoir, you’re excavating your past and there are things in our past that are always painful. But there was also something wonderfully cathartic about it. It wasn’t just, ‘ Oh, I have to relive a lot of things that were painful for me,’
It was, ‘ I can make more sense of what happened to me in this kind of hindsight. I can understand my own experience, because I’m working it out on the page. And I’m discovering things about it now that I wouldn’t have been able to see in the moment. And I can also understand that these things change us.’ It’s not necessarily what life throws at us but what we do with what life throws at us, .that is meaning making, that, can give shape and voice to our experiences.”
I would encourage anyone, whether you’re gonna publish it or whether it’s just for yourself; if you’re going through something, try writing about it. Because you might discover things in doing that, that help you deal with it, That makes sense out of s situation that doesn’t always feel like it make sense.
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back. No manuscripts to store away. No paintings to show on walls. No poems to be printed, Nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
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