The Dangers of Writing a Memoir

Now, as I mentioned in the teaser to this episode, this issue of being really afraid of the dangers of memoir is something that I have seen a lot over the years.

But the other piece of this is that I also learned recently that the search term dangers of writing a memoir is actually quite common.

So I know that this is actually an even bigger issue than I have personally seen.

And I suspect that I know the reason.

One thing that I do see and I do notice a lot is that oftentimes when we are really wanting to do something that truly could be vulnerable, there are a lot of ways that we will try to talk ourselves out of doing that just because staying where we are is always going to feel safer to our nervous system.

Now, as I mentioned, I am going to go through the top five dangers that you might encounter if you decide to write your memoir.

But I wanted to start with just a little grain of salt here, maybe a block of salt, a salt lick, because what I often find is that the fear that comes along with the idea of writing a memoir is two things.

first of all it often feels like fear when it actually is just anticipation when we write a memoir we know we're taking a big step forward not only digging into our own experiences our own philosophy our own wisdom but also writing a book and most of the people that i work with have never even tried to do that before so that is of course always going to feel a little bit off, feel a little bit different to us.

And I do often find that that sense of anticipation is very, very easy to confuse with something like anxiety or fear.

So that is the first way that fear can show up in this conversation.

But the second way I think is even more to the point.

Oftentimes, when we are thinking about doing something that is going to push ourselves out of our comfort zone, we will look for excuses to not do that thing.

Now this, of course, makes sense with our entire human psychology and actually physiology as well.

We are all conditioned to stay in stasis because it's what our bodies and brains know is the safest.

Now, unfortunately, our bodies and brains are not always right about that.

And very, very often the discomfort of moving through something like fear or anxiety actually can end up being the very thing that ends up making us feel safer, more stable, more secure, which spoiler alert, we are going to get into that a little bit in this video.

But what I find is when we are in that state where we are looking for, let's just say what they are, excuses to not move forward with something we really want to do, we will often really dial in on the excuses that are actual excuses, the excuses that actually could put us in danger.

And this is why I think this search term, dangers of writing a memoir, is so popular.

Because I think very, very often we are trying to talk ourselves out of doing this thing that could actually put us in such a better position in so many ways by pointing to the concrete, real fears that someone might have.

Now, is this the right move? No.

I will tell you, as someone who has worked with dozens of authors, maybe hundreds at this point, to write their first memoirs, all of these dangers are things that happen.

But most of them, with the exception of number five, are not ones that I see happen very often or at all.