Life can evolve much differently than we expect.

I often fall back on the old adage to explain life’s twists and turns: “(Wo)Man proposes. God disposes.”

I started writing this blog over a year ago to grease my writing wheels. One day – I told myself – I would write the “great North American memoir.” Admittedly a grandiose ambition, but if you are dreaming anyway, dream big say I.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to learn by writing a daily blog for a year. What I eventually learned surprised me. In terms of writing my own memoir, my lust and ambition had subsided.

I realized I had already written a memoir, in fact, but not in a conventional way. My memoir was written down in a thousand daily journal entries in dozens of journals.

In plaintive emails to friends and supporters. In counseling sessions. Family not so much. Family was more often the subject of painful emails than the recipients.

When the time came for me to set out on a blog writing journey, my intention was certain. I would eventually gather all the words I wrote after that pivotal year and compile those musings in a book that was sure to become a New York Times bestseller.

That bestseller would put me on par with revered writers Mitch Albom and Anne Lamott and dozens of other insightful spiritual and psychological authors whose wisdom I’d ingested over the years.

As you can tell, writers must have considerable hubris and ego to believe sharing their words and insight might have any universal appeal.

I had an unstable and violence-riddled childhood. My parents were unstable and troubled. So they passed on what they knew to me and my two sisters. In logical order, those qualities carried on in me through adolescence and young adulthood and beyond.

Underneath all of the emotional muck that had built up inside me over years, I held onto a single belief: I was worth something and would one day make a contribution to the world that would justify all the pain and upheaval I had lived through and caused.

That once seemed like a noble, if presumptuous, ambition. I now realize that it was an acquired survival strategy. A decades long “Hang in there” mantra that kept me moving forward when I all I wanted on many days was for the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

For the life of me, I could not figure out how a seemingly bright and well-meaning sort, such as myself, could go through daily life and repeatedly make so many dumb and incomprehensible life choices.

I couldn’t figure any of it out until I learned about the impact trauma and neglect can have on a child’s delicate and emerging psyche. I couldn’t figure any of it out until I learned there such a thing as “personal boundaries.”

More pointedly was the learning that it was up to me to set those boundaries for myself and my life and that those boundaries were supposed to be inviolable. And if they were to be preserved and strengthened, it would be my job to do so.

Duh.

How odd these revelations must seem to “normal” readers. Those who grew up with “good enough” parents who provided the necessaries of life and a safe home environment without fanfare or expectation of laud.

Only much later in life did I come to realize my narcissistic mother had an addictive and almost pathological need to hear what a great job she was doing and had done for her children. It was her survival strategy and often tenuous attachment to sanity.

My life today is 180 degrees from the life I lived as a child. I have everything I need and much of what I want. I have a strong and loving relationship with an equally flawed and delightful human being in my husband.

I chuckle a little when I realize my assertion about enjoying a happy marriage would have had as much currency in my family as claiming the moon is made of green cheese. Incredulous and ridiculous my mother would surely say. Yet, here we are.

I am not old enough to have arrived at the rigorous stock-taking phase in old age about what my life was, the part I played in it and how I feel about it all. In truth, some chapters and paragraphs are too painful to revisit. But not all by a long shot.

I had an interesting balance of experiences, adventures and learning opportunities that balanced out the tragedies. There are many stories from those positive experiences that are worth sharing.

Trips to Europe, Egypt, India, Nepal in my youth. Argentina, the Arctic, China, Korea and Hong Kong in mid-life. And now the biggest trip of my life by marrying, pulling up stakes in my home and native land and immigrating South. Who knew it could be even more educational (if by times utterly perplexing) than any of my earlier travel adventures?

Writing and publishing “the” memoir has receded in importance. I have internalized the lessons learned by wrestling with the myriad of issues my childhood forced me to confront and deal with.

That I did more or less successfully is infinitely more gratifying than seeing my name and image plastered on a book cover in bookstores across North America. (Remind me, by the way. Are there still bookstores out there? I’ve been out of touch.)

I now know that all published works are a compilation of applied intellect, imagination and creativity. Even and perhaps especially, memoir. I now write when Spirit moves me to write. Like today.

As for my childish dreams of fame, fortune and global admiration by millions of strangers? That ambition has been traded for the hundred daily satisfactions and frustrations of a happy and peaceful daily life filled with loving friends and family of choice.

For me, that is a more than satisfactory trade-off for the bright lights and big city.

Been there, done that.