Discover yourself: write your autobiography

1727Why autobio/850 words

10/4/15

                                          Why Write Your Autobiography?

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

Some say the past is history, the future a mystery, and the present a present. The fact is, most of us live in the present, this moment, and lose sight of the broad sweep of our lives, who we are now, how we got to be what we are, where we came from, and what molded us. We lose sight of ourselves. All the more reason to embark on the adventure of writing your own biography.

An autobiography may be an author’s version of a selfie, except a selfie catches only the moment while a biography encompasses a whole life. That’s where the adventure lies.

I have just completed my autobiography. It fills three hefty volumes and I don’t even have a photographic memory, as some rare people do.  I didn’t begin with the cliché “I was born on…” but with my immigrant grandparents, where they came from and how they got to the United States. I could have started with my DNA report which goes back about 300 years , but that is expressed only in percentages of a geographical area. I may be 0.28% Neanderthal, but that doesn’t identify any individuals. More important were specific people and what we can learn, for instance, from old family photographs. It’s what authors call the back story.

If you want to get a grip on your life and who you are, write down those moments like in Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” At what points did you make a life changing decision? What decisisons did you make that had a life long impact? Did you pick the wrong school? The wrong job? Choose the wrong country to live in? Marry the wrong spouse?

What mistakes did you make? For me it was not to accept social security when I was a contract agent, for I did not then know when or whether I would return to the United States. I was living in the present and not taking the long view.

There are other milestones in life. I once published a column on milestone, memorable meals. We remember the worst meals and the best. The column may have been interesting to read, but except for revealing my tastes in food, it was not that defining of me as a person.  Or was it? They say we are what we eat, and maybe what we eat does say a lot about us.

What struck me when I worked on my autobiography was the role of coincidence and accident that changed my life. We think we have control of our lives. We pick the school where we want to study. We choose carefully who to marry. But who we marry may be the result of a chance encounter. I had been accepted for graduate study at Innsbruck University in Austria, but a chance encounter sent me to Sweden instead where I learned another language, started teaching, and met my future wife—all because of a chance encounter. It was also by chance that I played bridge with someone who turned out to be a CIA spotter which got me to the Soviet Union. Accident? Certainly not by my design. And it was solely by chance that my job teaching the Stockholm police found me an apartment in the building where I met my future wife. Accident.

When you starting digging into your past and finding those moments you begin to feel like a pin ball bouncing from pin to pin at random, hardly in control at all. Fate?

When you sit down to write that autobiography, that adventure in self-discovery, it helps to have kept a journal or a diary. I began keeping a diary when I was fourteen and those diaries have been vital when I wrote several memoirs of my travels and adventures.

Where would Oregon be without the diaries of the women who traveled the Oregon Trail? Now it’s our turn. The past is history, but when you get to a certain age, you are yourself history. You are a walking around store of historical moments, of those peace marches, those political rallies. I was in Portland when Mt. St. Helens blew up. I was here. Those things I carry around in my memory, but unless I write them down, when I die they are gone forever.

My autobiography is not for sale. It is for only the eyes of my children so they will know their father. If it were published, that is, made public, Too many feathers would be ruffled. Some secrets shall be kept in the family. I haven’t written the last chapter, That’s the one about my funeral and someone else has to do that.

Still, the exercise of writing that autobiography has brought an epiphany of self-realization. So that’s who I am! Wow! What fun!

Harley L. Sachs is the author of several memoirs: “From Tent to Castle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon,” “The 1957 Sachs Arctic Expedition” and “Chilly-Chilly-BANG! How we Freelanced Through Europe’s Coldest Winter in a VW with a Kid.”