…memoir is the ultimate act of self-destruction… writes Dave Eggers.  That’s how he sees memoir writing — it should be something like the “shedding a skin.”

This Pulitzer nominee describes memoir as an act of self-destruction.  “Shedding of skin.”

This sounds familiar.

ECDYSIS:  the shedding of an outer lay or integument.  Molting.

It’s a sign, I think.  I’m on the right path.

I’m going to see Eggers speak tomorrow.  I don’t know why.  I have a quarter of a million things I need to be working on, but instead, I’m going to go see the author who sees memoir exactly as I do.

Memoir.

I’ve always written memoir.  Since I was, I don’t know, seven years old.  I thought there was rich potential in writing my life out at the end of the day and thinking about what I could share with others.  It never came a from self aggrandizing, quite the opposite.  My life was superbly ordinary in many ways.  I just happened to have a keen eye for detail, a heart created for writing.  But I was embarrassed by it, embarrassed by my desire to write about life, my observations, events that shaped my perspective.  To do so, in my opinion, was self aggrandizing.  And, I figured, someone probably said it before and said it much better than I ever could.

But I never met anyone who thought like me, or could say it like me, or write it in the exact same why I did.  It wasn’t that I thought my way was the best, but I never agreed with what I was reading.  Eventually, I grew listless for waiting for someone to write my thoughts.

Maybe someone has written it before, but no one has or ever will express something to the depths and character that you will express it.  Because no one is you, an old therapist told me when I confessed my desire to write but my fear surrounding the egotistical assumption that what I would write would be useful to the world.  No one is you.  No one can be.

The best way I describe things is through the filter of my life.  I explain through the ecdysis of my life, through the impact upon my mind, the shattering of my expectation, the displacement of my comfort, the movement of my borders.  I write to explain it to myself.  What comes out is what I offer the reader.

Which is the only way I can describe the experience I had at the A/PIA Movement Building conference in Ann Arbor this past weekend.  It breathed new ideas and vocabulary into my system.  It surprised me how easily my head shifted from Mommyhood to activist thinker and writing philosopher.  I took it as a good sign that the side of me that so loves to engage with the activist, academic, fighting, high fists in the air world is just quietly waiting inside me, ready whenever I am to immerse myself back into the trenches.

A/PIA.  Asian Pacific Island Americans.  Us, building a movement.  I had no idea what I was in for during this conference, but walked away with a pride and certainty that my skin is not a curse, not a gift, but an unfolding story in the history of country still unfamiliar with how to reconcile difference.  I learned how community activism is about a life of love, and joy! and that fighting for equality is not always about policy and infrastructure, but fighting for others to have the right to enjoy simple pleasures that are we all seek in our daily survival.  Bike rides, warm blankets, a clean water cup, decent education, an anti-colonial, anti-imperialistic existence.

At 32, I learned when I met Grace Lee Boggs at 96, I may have a long ride ahead of me.  And, I was excited.  I was excited to live long and envision myself talking to a 32 year old young Pinay mother when I am old and gray and still scribbling in my sketchpads because I still hate lined paper.

I envisioned myself at 96 years old, too young to give up, and surrounded by the energy of young hopeful activists determined to see a better world still in front of them.

I saw myself telling them that I lived through the election of the first black and black-identified president and how it was such a big deal back then.

I smiled at my dream – Isaiah wheeling me in to attend an movement building A/PIA conference, and Nick eating a sandwich in the front row with me.

My whole life, at that point, will be memoir-ed.  Ecdysis-ed.  It will all have been lived out, and written about, and processed.  Even at 96 years old, I’ll still be jotting down my ideas to radically love my community, how to improve as a person, and hopefully encourage the young people before me that 64 years ago I sat in their place, with hopeful eyes and restless hearts and the best thing I ever did was write about it.