Unapologetically Human
Unapologetically Human
Takeaways from memoir writing
I took a crash course in marriage. In 2008 I graduated from college. In 2009 I married. Nine weeks after marrying I deployed to Iraq for a year. It’s not the best way to start a marriage but that was back when I believed willpower was fingertips, legs, and bones. Back then I was made of a two-part solution of optimism and blindness.
I’m three years old. Crying. My parents are fighting. Dad leaves and mom shouts. I’m left in the void created by their combustion. I always found it interesting how the same room could feel small during a fight and spacious after. Like the entire universe had receded.
To this day neither of my parents remarried or seriously dated. You might think this says something about their love. You’d be wrong. It says more about how angry a person can be. And how tired. I will never know the reasons, to their minds, for never trying again but I don’t blame them.
I do know it took a toll. Some children grow up seeing a partnership that’s less than ideal or abusive. Some people have a benchmark for what a relationship should be, even if it’s bad. Something they observed as a child. In eighteen years of growing up I never once observed a live-in partnership.
They live on. The details. Just because you’ve pushed them to the margins doesn’t mean they leave the book. Eclectic and diverse the way it comes back. And I’m no good at marriage. But it was worse then. Like a horse bite. My mother kept consuming. It took time for her to catch up but she did.
At some point we have to take responsibility for our lives. That’s true. But there was another person inside me. I was supposed to make peace with him. But you can’t make peace unless you know it needs making.
I overestimated the simplicity of marriage. You live together, share household chores, move around, make some smart investments, build portfolios, and age. What an idiot.
What could I possibly know without an example? My mother’s hysterically religious views espoused a perfect traditional life, but she never lived it. Like telling a person to become Warren Buffet. Ideas are just helium balloons floating out of reach.
I had good intentions but good intentions don’t make marriages work. I built a house with the tools I was given: cardboard and tape.
In 2010 I came home from Iraq thinking I was fine. I began a relationship with a woman seventeen years older. Had no idea why. Didn’t understand I was looking for something I’d never received. I didn’t want a wife. Didn’t want sex. I wanted maternal validation but had no awareness to know it back then.
I went to Fort Benning, Georgia for school. Flooded Columbus with guilt, self-loathing, and shame. I hated myself. Old voices returned to greet me. What kind of disgusting person was I?
I lost my friends, her family, my dog. My family stayed what it had always been: nonexistent.
At that time I began playing around with different ideas. Chasing suicidal ideations with liquid courage, but never enough to get it there. I came home from work, boozed up, and played pistol. Smack the clip. Rack it. Drop the clip. Eject the round. Catch it. Disassemble. Reassemble. Functions check. Clear. The military demanded emotional immunity. Pure mechanical efficiency. Thinking in terms of mission and acceptable losses. It made sense.
I didn’t cry because I felt loss. I cried because I felt her. I hated her pain and never considered my own. What I really wanted was to feel love, her love, any love. To feel her going away or me losing her or me leaving her. Something. Instead, there were hollow knocks and empty echoes.
Why was it so easy to cheat? Why was it so easy to walk and throw it all away? Thinking the next woman would solve it. But the next woman never solved anything. People hurt you I said. That’s life. Where had I learned that? I didn’t even know I could be that callous.
In June of 2012 I moved to Fort Lewis. Still married. Still not together. I moved into a hotel on base and began writing something. About myself, how I felt about who I was. About guilt and shame. A memoir. Entitled Unapologetically Human. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I would get out of it. Just knew I had to put it down. As it was happening. My feelings about the separation, war, and all life’s boiled emotions.
The woman seventeen years older. She taught me to write again. She was the reason I picked up the pen after a long time away. The poetry was awful but she listened and adored it. She listened rapt with bright eyes while I read. Took me to small bookstores to perform readings. Looked at me like I was magic. No one had ever looked at me like I was magic. I had experienced love before, but she was the first time I felt it.
The manuscript grew as I worked through the following weeks. My unit was already downrange in Afghanistan. I was preparing to join them in-country. I spent my spare time with words and a bottle of scotch until I approached a point where I could go no further. To continue writing about the present without exploring the past would have been a lie. I had to start from the beginning. So I did. And for the first time I wrote about my childhood.
When she saw me she saw only me. Like I was it. Maybe, I thought, that’s what it’s like to be loved by your mother.
Pain poured out. I took that manuscript to Afghanistan and wrote through the war. Wrote through the loss of soldiers and the dissonance of living. Wrote about boyhood and failing at marriage. When I arrived home I knew I had to leave her. Let go. It was the most decent thing to do. I filed divorce and moved into a small house on a dead end.
I completed that manuscript a month later. In the summer of 2013 I moved to Wisconsin to start a new life. I left a lot behind but made sure to bring my writing. A gift from a woman I once knew.
I believe the process of writing brings us face-to-face with who we are. Then we give it to the world. In giving it to the world we say I accept myself. I no longer have to hide my story. Which, I think, is why it’s so powerful.
Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.
So much heartbreak. I’m sorry you had so much loss, grief, shame, and self hatred. Please be careful with a barrel, bc us readers need writers like you who speak from the heart and peer into the infinite abyss of the human soul. Agree that creating and sharing writing/art is an act of love; all creative endeavors are a testament to what humans tend to seek when they look for a meaning amid chaos of living life: what is beautiful, true, and good? Truth may be subjective or illusive at times, but the act of searching for truth and creating art amid our search has inherent value in itself. Creating is an affirmation that our unanswered questions are worth asking, even if we can’t find a definitive answer (and wouldn’t it be kind of boring if people knew all of the answers?) By sharing your stories to us readers, please know you are loved as a fellow person who makes beautiful stories. In spite of everything you’ve suffered through, your writing speaks of the universal love makes life worth the pain and the struggle. Stay the course, good writer friend.
Relationships can be so challenging and the really bad ones have a remarkable way of making our hearts recede much like the walls of those rooms. It feels less risky to protect ourselves then to ever love and break in that way again.