Writing Headaches

This memoir writing is hard. I'm not even sure what I'm writing even makes any sense. I'm trying to unravel our decision to move to San Francisco in 2007, but that year is so fraught with emotion. I'm trying to write about the day I truly understood what we were trying to do, that it wasn't just about selling the house for a good price, but about changing our lives. I'm trying to write about why we wanted to change our lives and what we were missing in Michigan that we hoped to find in San Francisco.

But it's hard. I don't think we really understood what we wanted, and didn't want to see the obstacles. I thought that if we just worked hard and made to-do lists and found a way to clean the dining room's Roman blinds, everything would be fine. But it didn't work out that way.

So now I have a splitting headache and I'm pretty angry at myself for being so blind and shortsighted. We weren't living the life we wanted in Michigan, we were living the life we thought we should want. And even when we decided to sell the house and leave, we still acted the way we thought we should act; I ended up trying to sell the house the way its former owner sold it to us in 2003. But it wasn't 2003 and I wasn't a Mad Professor with an EverQuest addiction. It was 2007 and nobody was going to buy a 50-year old Sears home at a premium price, even if I did polish all those $5 brass cabinet knobs that the Mad Professor had installed.

When I look back at that summer, what I remember best is the fear — thick and tangled with shame and loneliness. I don't really want to revisit those feelings and I'd like to think that I'm in a better place now. But am I really? Have I really grown, or am I the same self-absorbed, magical-thinking person, just with a better apartment and a fatter bank account?

The chapter I'm writing opened with me sitting on the redwood deck of our Michigan house, with soft breezes blowing the spring leaves and the big camouflage draperies our neighbors hung on their trees. (Our neighbor didn't like people looking at her when she sat in her garden.) It was quite idyllic. Now I sit in my sunny apartment in our pretty San Francisco neighborhood and I can see the Bay through the narrow crack between two houses across the street. Have I changed at all? Have I learned anything?

I guess the only way to find out is to write this memoir. Let's hope the answer is yes.