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On Trying to Write a Memoir
I have a grand plan to write a book that will explore the ins and outs of my addiction, and the ins and outs of my failed marriage. I have a lot of “grand” plans. But many, many friends (and the many fellow writers among them) have strongly encouraged me to write about my life.
It has been an eventful one; it has been (I suspect) an unusual one. I am not sure it is one I would want to give someone else (were such a thing possible)–as eventful and sometimes exciting as this life of mine has felt, I don’t think it is one anyone would perceive as a gift. The feedback re: my writing is usually: write about your marriage, write about you, write about him, write about your sister, Maude, write about your mother, write about your father, write about the farm, write about growing up in rural southern Illinois, write about your scoliosis, write about your acromegaly, write about your addiction, write about treatment, write about recovery, write about what has happened….. an insanely tall order.
I’m not sure I can fill it, but one has to do something (or else one goes insane), so I am trying.
I am nervous to write too much about my failed marriage, but I am (at times) venturing there…because, well, because things happened that shouldn’t happen to anyone.
My husband changed the locks on the house after he filed for divorce—long before I had had a chance to even absorb that I was getting divorced. Long before I came to terms with my addiction.
The night he changed them the police told me that if I could find a way in, then I could go in, as it was still the marital home and I was still living there. My husband pranced around inside taunting me (essentially), and explaining that my attempts to get in were useless. I have no idea what he hoped to gain from these theatrics, what he expected to “get” from keeping me out. Eventually, he would taunt me enough that I finally grabbed a stool and busted a window to get in. All I wanted was to crawl into what had been my bed for over a decade. But the sad all of that is a story for another time.
I liked to think he was a good man, I liked to think he was a kind man, but what kind, good man changes the locks on his wife? He is a paradox to me. In my worst moments of fear, this paradox, my confusion about who and what he was would surface in peculiar, now heartbreaking to me, ways. I would think he was a serial killer, and I was his next victim; I would think he was holding me hostage and I had to escape. I would think he deliberately broke my things.
Some of these things might even be true. I don’t know. What I know is I was terrified. I was addicted to prescription meds–and desperately wanting to stop them. There was no sympathy or empathy from him. Instead there was anger and rage. I no longer knew this man.
Even now, I am confused by these terrors of mine. Even now I am understanding that I was grappling with who my husband was. But now, after lots of counseling, I understand I will never know who or what he was—and trying is both futile and pointless.
I so wanted our marriage to be a normal marriage. I so wanted our life to be a normal life. After years of washed out, unfulfilling relationships, I thought I finally had a shot at a normal one. I thought he was my ticket to normalcy, to happiness. He had friends, family, he worked out, he had a garden, he liked to hike, he liked the outdoors, he had a house, he was funny, he was patient, he was kind, he was cute, he was calm.
Or so I thought.
In reality, all of the things I thought he was became the things he was very much not.
In the years our marriage started to fall apart or in the years I started to fall apart—for really, I cannot always differentiate between the two—I kept coming back to one key question: was the demise of the marriage all because of me? Did my addiction ruin everything?
That’s a lot of guilt and blame to put on a person. I hope there is more to the answer than a simple resounding yes. I am pretty sure there is. I am pretty sure a husband isn’t supposed to be as hurtful, vengeful and unforgiving as he was, and still is.
One of the lessons of recovery is that you make amends, and one of the best living amends one can make is to not live the way they once did. In other words, if I truly was a terrible destructive force (as he has claimed again and again), then one of the best things I can do when I start to feel remorse over the marriage, and my possible contribution to its end, is to never make those mistakes again.
If I live a good and healthy life, if I am of service to this universe, if I can help others, then I can begin to put whatever happened behind me. For me, being a writer since I can remember learning to write, processing the trauma, processing the horror (of the marriage, of the addiction, of the probable abuse), processing the messy all of “it” will be a key tool for learning how to live again, and for wanting to live again.
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Rest Days/It’s Not a Competition
My father recently completed the River to River Trail–averaging 8-10 miles a day, and often walking two consecutive days. He is 84 years old. He’s posted about this on his Facebook page, and I’m ever so proud of him. But, it can be kind of daunting to have your 80+ father be able to so hugely out walk you.
Determined to somehow, some way log something approaching his 8-12 miles. I strolled down to Westwood Cemetery, an absolutely beautiful cemetery down the road from us. And then I went round and round and round, until I couldn’t feel my feet and my legs were shaking. The return home from this walk includes a rather steep (to me) hill that just goes up and up and up. Lying down and waiting for someone to stop, ask if I needed help occurred to me going back up that hill–frequently. Back at my studio apartment, I noticed colors were beginning to blur. And I was so lightheaded. I looked at my step counter–6 miles. Oh yay, the stupid Apple fitness only showed 5.5. Sooo, this wasn’t good enough. I had to be able to walk closer to his low number at least!
I started walking round the circular driveway in front of the house, then up and down the pasture road. I was on a death march. I finally gave out around 8 miles–there were a lot of rest breaks. Shoot myself in the foot so I could stop thoughts.
It occurred to me I might die. It had taken most of a day. There was a chance my father might be sad if I died.
The next day my legs & feet throbbed. I could barely walk. I read up on rest days. There: new concept! But not everyday can be a rest day. Maybe in a few months, or sooner, I’ll do this again. Maybe after a rest week, a rest month.
I am proud of myself. I am getting in better shape. And I keep reminding myself, it’s not a competition, ummm, well—when you are not the one winning;)
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Writing About Loss
One of the tools I use to help with processing trauma (especially when one is in that dark place where one does not wish “to go on”) is writing, often this writing takes the shape of a poem. Here is an example of a poem I wrote where I try to articulate the pain and confusion I had over losing my younger (and only) sister to cancer.
Vow Vigilance
I know the going, not the staying–
I like to take my leaving quick.
I live for unpaid rent, dented friendships,
boredom, lust, lost bills, misplaced keys.
Time to pack my plaques, my books,
my sack of family photos. Goodbyes jar—
sad ritual of hugs, kisses, see you soon.
So I go: cat out window, snake under door,
ghost, whisper, flee. Motion masters me.
One minute I’m there, the next—breeze,
face in mirror, brief memory. I know
the roads of loaded car, midnight drives.
Asphalt gives to corn. I go to find
myself, I go to leave myself. I go
before some lover, friend, or boss
finds the path that splits my brain–
packed dirt lined with weeping willows.
My sister hikes ahead. Some going
times I see her near a bend. I race,
but she runs faster, toward our mother.
I must bargain a return. Vow vigilance.
Swear to find the bio markers, scan all
systems, terrorize the answer holders,
gain admittance to working trials.
Break the code, find the first lump,
smaller than a pea. Then, I’d see
the Signs before they started signing.
Before their crosshairs sighted me.
Before mutation, before my going.
Before departure equals gone.
—-Lucy M. Logsdon
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Why Write?
Why Write?
Fury, grief and a stubborn insistence on being heard. When you grow up in the country, in a remote rural area, you grow up tough, easy with solitude, curious to articulate your thoughts, ideas, and the stories happening to and around you. You don’t realize how different you are from others, you don’t realize you are tough (hard, cold, some would later say) because that is one’s world.
I lived at the end of a long gravel road; our beautiful, refurbished, drafty, loving house was really the road’s end. Apparently there used to be a way through, but Dad had plowed that up years ago. Every year, I could count on one drunk, or lost, or running stranger to knock on our screen door: where is the road through? there used to be a road through?
Used to be. So many things used to be. I recognized, even then, the desperate note, the sorrow and confusion in the lost person’s persistent refusal to believe me. They’d argue: there’s a road on through to the blacktop, the highway, the next town.
Not anymore. Used to be always arrives too soon.
I used to run free on the family acreage: woods were less than 30 feet away, creek about the same. I either worked, read, or wandered off.
Wandering off required movement, and I required movement. Down old timber roads, along cow paths by the creek, through pastures thick with clover, down to my favorite field, Big Field. A dirt road ran all the way around the field, you could run round and round it, watch the corn grow, kick up dust until there was barely any difference between the dust and yourself. If I wanted a shortcut, I’d go straight up the wood’s hill, steep (but not to me, as I had no comparison yet for steep.)
I’d bushwhack my way through; hang onto trees when I needed to, avoid the poison ivy. Of course, I looked for snakes, and all the other critters people ask me about now. I didn’t worry about them, though. Just maintained a respectful distance. Respect was essential in nature. Screw that up, miscalculate, approach too fast, too loud, you could wind up dead. This went for the farm’s machinery, the weather. For everything I knew.
I had lots of family, aunts, uncles, cousins, the men who worked on the farm. Townies intrigued me. I liked them ok. But they were different. I couldn’t get to town all the time, so I read, and read, and read. So much curiosity.
So much sensing there was a world out there different than this, different than me. I sensed a need for preparation. So I read, questioned, and wrote—to work my ideas out. If this, then that. To ground myself.
Early on, I noticed men had more power, more authority than women. My mother refused to be branded, she did what she wanted. When she wanted. She asserted herself, and still sometimes she didn’t get respected. I wasn’t going to let this happen to me. Respect was an essential key to living in the country when the power could go out for days with one bad storm, when machinery could flicker, flame, turn ugly, when the river could rise, rise, keep on rising, and all we could do, I learned, carefully studying my parents was to acknowledge the power of uncontrollable fate. We could bear it, stand witness, steward the land. We could respect forces greater than us. Stewarding is how my father described farming. Our duty to the future. To see the dirt, the land parcels we “owned” taken care of through our lifespan, to keep them safe for future generations.
I sometimes like to think that my writing is a type of stewarding. Perhaps I am protecting knowledge, documenting a way of living, explaining (as best I can) how it was once upon a time. Perhaps I am doing this for many or one readers out there, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in 400 years.
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My Place in Line
(First published in Talking Writing, Feb. 2017)
My Place in Line
Our seasons change swiftly.
Sudden silence of insects.
Cattle bedding before sundown.
Finches, cardinals, sparrows fatten;
start hanging by my window for seed.
The hummingbirds leave all at once.
There on Monday, Tuesday gone.
No bird gets left behind. My sister
starts falling apart first, mother follows
close. I know the signs; I see
the shortened breaths, longer naps.
Their eyes hurt me most: each time,
there’s a fatigue like departure. A hand
waving good-bye from a car, an airplane,
life’s bus.
Through winter, I scramble, try to hold
their bodies together. Chemo. Mouth balms. IVs.
Tamoxifen, Hep-era, ports, steroids, narcotics.
I scour the Internet. Bible of doom and gloom.
The message clear: lie down now; it’s over;
we’re sorry; give up. I don’t.Of course, I am left behind.
What we do doesn’t save us.
Or anyone else. Departure’s
already occurring. Listen:
diminishment. The dying
have more important things
to attend to: like dying.
Grief is their nation,
I’ll have my chance later.
When the hummingbirds return,
I greet them by myself.
Put food in their feeder.
Line-cutting not allowed here.
Gravestones set up chronologically.
I have my marker, position.
The one unfinished headstone.
Death date: Incomplete. -
To Bring or To Not Bring Your Phone
Off to the woods, I go.
Do I bring my phone?
When first diagnosed—
the intimations of severe
pain, reduced life quality,
seemed distant as Mongolia.
I walked frequently,
often off mapped forest trails,
held my phone lightly, a minor toy.
I snapped the requisite selfie,
smiled the perfunctory smile.
When you bring your phone,
you imagine you’ve brought
the world. You feel you are
not alone. It thrums, trills.
At any moment, you can assess
your current state. You can
provide evidence you live.
You can see how long
before you die.
Without your phone, you might
find yourself in a tenuous
position. You might not hold
all the world’s knowledge.
You would be stuck with your
own skills and tricks. Your
own reading of the sun.
You might hear your breath,
It’s steady rise and fall.
A sound you have forgotten
how to listen for.
You will decide, eventually,
to leave the phone at home.
You will decide when you’ve
had enough of everything
the portal has to give.
Then you will walk as you
haven’t walked before. Death
will be closer than Mongolia.
Death will be a destination
a year or two ahead.
You will do this, or
you won’t. You are still
unsure. Sometimes a trail
takes an unexpected turn,
and you are stranded
in the midst of leaves.
At the day’s end, your phone
doesn’t matter; how long
you lived, irrelevant.
Only one thing is going
to count: that you
have a home to go to, that
somewhere there is a bed,
pillow, sheets. You will
tuck yourself in, or if you’re
really lucky, someone
will do that for you.
You will forget what a phone
was. You will remember
your mother, you will
remember your long dead
sister. You will close
your eyes, and you will
sleep, you will sleep.
—Lucy M Logsdon
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Broken Things (A Flash Fiction Piece)
Broken Things
It had been a long time since she had been outside. Everything was different. Crumpled metal that had once been a tool she couldn’t identify, one her husband had held skillfully in his hands, the gleaming tool throwing dirt everywhere, now was twisted, broken, almost beyond recognition. She’d never asked its name. There were many things she had never asked. He loved to talk, or had, and she loved to listen. Two steps took her to the bottom of a shovel, its wooden handle snapped neatly in two. Under the porch, she saw what she could only make out as shapes of things—objects scrambled together.
There is a sliver of ice that shoots through the veins when one realizes things are not what they seemed. She loved her husband, trusted her husband, placed a kind of faith in him. It made no sense–what she was seeing. Her feet felt very light as if she were drifting off, then a moment later: leaden. She continued walking. A trail of black and red feathers led to the corpses of seven chickens, their throats all neatly, cleanly slit. The blood upon their necks had dried, but how long ago, she did not know. She looked to her right: red clay flower pot shards littered the ground. What was once a garden had been destroyed, roots up where they shouldn’t be. Their concrete sidewalk had been busted open. Several trees were down.
In the pit of her stomach, a small ball of regret formed; there was evidence of a voluminous anger everywhere. How long since she had been outside? Days, weeks, months? Her nightgown swayed around her ankles. This might not be a safe place to be. She felt to see if she had ropes around her wrists. She did not. But she could see red, raw marks.
In the distance was the outline of a man. His shoulders were broad, like her husband’s. He rhythmically swung an axe, down, then up, then down. There was a fury in his movements. She should not be out here. But still she watched the rise and fall of the axe. He was, and wasn’t her husband. She was, and wasn’t herself. She was sorry she had failed; she was so sorry she angered him so. She should go back, before he saw her.
A wind whipped up as she turned. Her nightgown swirled, billowed; the blue cloth wrapped around her ankles, suddenly tight. So much betrayal everywhere, she thought–even in the silk of her sleepwear. She tried to fall as quietly as possible, she tried to lean away from his direction. She tried to meet the ground gently. Everything would end at some point. Perhaps the sooner, the better. When her head hit, it hit solidly, and a blessed black blankness filled her mind.
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Rest Days/It’s Not a Competition
Rest Days/It’s Not a Competition
— Read on lucy-logsdon.com/2022/04/30/rest-days-its-not-a-competition/
addiction, cemetery, cemetery walking, competition, coping, death, difference, difficult, disease, encouragement, exercise, father, fitness, Getting in Shape, grief, headstones, healing, life, living with illness, lucy logsdon, miles, other, peace, processing, recovery, rest days, river to river, survival, time, trauma, walking, weight loss, Worry, writing -
Getting in Shape
Today’s post will be brief. I’m winded from walking 3 miles, and taking a “break” to catch my breath. Why on earth is getting back into shape so difficult seeming at times. All the research I do says the average moderately fit American walks 5 miles a day. Five miles?!?! Where are all these moderately fit Americans? And will I ever be able to get to 5 miles? I imagine they rise at 4/5am, and virtuously knock off their requisite 5 before the day truly starts. That’s why I never see them. I did not enjoy much of today’s walk–the wind seemed cold and brisk. It felt more or less like a death march. I imagine myself speeding across a frozen tundra. In reality, it was about 45-50 degrees (F), and according to the both encouraging and depressing health app on my iPhone, I was walking at a moderate rate of just under 3 miles an hour. I know some days will be more encouraging. I know, rather I do, dimly feel as though I’ve accomplished something. But the desire to do much else drifts off. I tell myself I will feel better in a hour. I suspect I will. I bet I sleep like a rock. And, it has to, I mean it HAS to get better. And I did it–I actually did it. Which is not something I could have said some months back.
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Addiction & Recovery
Today I am switching it up a bit and posting a draft of a poem (it may still go through revisions, but I wanted to share) about some of my experiences with addiction, treatment & recovery–and also the loss & damage that addiction can create.
In Reseda
The sky is ugly today,
dead gray. The ocean smells
of trash, and fish. In Reseda,
in the unfamiliar foreign
waters of LA, a young woman
I knew from treatment
has died. I’m more angry
than anger can do. I’m so tired
of this. The sudden loss,
the overdose, then the gone.
This world’s an ugly place,
and it seems its young are dying
sordid deaths. The allure
of coming back from death’s
edge, the glorious feel,
the lure of Fentanyl. I am caught
between being and not. I am
caught on a barbed hook
baited with the shame
of I am not dead. The times
I have woken, thought this,
seem too many to count.
The relief that instantly
floats in my chest,
the not me inhale,
then the grief and guilt.
This becomes a way
of living, this becomes
California for me. Everyone
I learn to love in treatment
carries within them both
death and hope. Two sides
to a west coast coin.
Fate flips like
a caught fish,
followed by a reeling
in, and then either
the throwing back
to live again,
or not.
Lucy M Logsdon
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Surviving 