I’m Writing My Memoir (Even When I Think I’m Not)

What have you been putting off doing? Why?

I have a very serious project that I have the feeling I have been putting off but, everytime I think or talk about it, I realize I have been working on it, on and off, for the last 10 to 13 years! A memoir!

First of all, I have to say: I wrote a book about my high altitude mountaineering expeditions in my late 20’s, early 30’s. I never published it. When I read it, I find it a bit childish, and I tried to paint the cultural aspects of the places I visited to climb high mountains. I have over 15 expeditions to remote places on earth, including four of the seven summits – a project to climb the highest mountains in every continent (I climbed North and South America, Africa and Europe).

Fast forward ten years or so and I found myself as the primary caregiver of my dying husband. This experience was one of the most powerful of my life – even more than birthing my son through a C-section. I couldn’t help but write a book about it, this time in English. I had someone read it and give me some notes to re-write with more explanations for passages that were hard to understand. There were so many that I was convinced I needed to start from scratch.

I started it again. This time in Portuguese. I didn’t go far…

A good part of this project developed in my mind, reading memoirs and thinking about what I wanted to say. I did some important exercises in writing workshops and with a writing coach and got to the conclusion that I wanted to write a memoir, not a biography, and that I would touch on three main subjects: being an immigrant, my husband’s cancer and passing, and my son’s ski accident and the result of it: a serious concussion that put him in the hospital for two months.

Even more important, I restarted the book writing in a notebook. Pen and paper. This was December 2024. Then I let it sit until recently, when I picked it up and read what I wrote. It was better than I was expecting. But I was not able to keep writing. Yet.

I keep thinking that I have not been writing, but then I realize that I did my first New Year’s resolution in 2025: write a blog post a week. It’s November and I am keeping my promise so far. Once a week, I have a blog posted. And then I realized that I have been writing this whole year! It’s not my book, but it’s writing… 🙂