Endings are Beginnings

I remember sitting in front of a blinking curser roughly one year ago today. I was staring at an untitled document. Where do I begin? I thought.

I was about to start an investigation. I wanted to understand what had happened to my family the previous year (2019) and who I was before and after our Guillain-Barré Syndrome trauma. I felt unfamiliar to myself: weak, strong, hopeful, damaged, angry, hurt, and grateful. Even with my husband’s miraculous recovery, my conflicting feelings created internal pressure. I was fearful that I might crack if I didn’t relieve that pressure somehow.

My head was ready to move on—I wanted to write about the wonderful things we could do with a second chance—but my heart wasn’t quite ready.

I began my writing process by writing the piece entitled Little Did We Know. I wasn’t confident it would actually end up in my book, but it was the runway I needed to get my work off the ground. It tethered me to who my family was before the trauma: the normalcy of our life, our beliefs, our thought patterns, and even the little winks from the universe that I noticed when I paid attention. It was like pouring over a photo album and remembering how life had been.

Little Did We Know served as the introduction of my manuscript for months. It provided context to the story. It proved (to me) that we were a family, not just people in distress. But I often referred to it as “unfinished business” because it drew from material I had written during the fall of 2018—six months before my husband’s diagnosis. During the manuscript editing phase, I acknowledged that the story could stand on its own without this introduction. I removed Little Did We Know from the text.

Everything is connected, so there’s always more to the story. The “more” provides context to explain why we think and behave the way we do. It matters greatly because it sets the stage for the next act. But it is also periphery. As the teller of our stories, we have to decide where to start and where to end. That’s life.

You can access a copy of Little Did We Know by subscribing to mollyweisgram.com by clicking the “Follow Our Journey” button on the home page. It sets the scene for my upcoming book, The Other Side of Us.

Enjoy.