I used to think writing a memoir was all about memory. I was wrong.

For a long time, I believed that writing my life meant remembering it correctly. I thought the work was about accuracy—getting the timeline right, recalling conversations as they actually happened, and making sure the details lined up in a way that could withstand scrutiny. I assumed that if I couldn’t remember something clearly, I wasn’t ready to write it yet.

That belief kept me stuck for years.

Memory is far less reliable than we like to admit, and that’s especially true when, like me, you’ve lived through something that required you to disconnect from yourself in order to survive. In situations involving trauma or mind control, memory doesn’t behave in neat, linear ways. It fragments. It blurs. Sometimes it vanishes entirely. Not because you’re avoiding the truth, but because your mind did exactly what it needed to do at the time.

For a long time, I treated those gaps as a personal failure. If I couldn’t remember clearly, I questioned my right to tell the story at all. I worried about being challenged, corrected, or dismissed. I told myself I needed more clarity, more distance, more certainty before I could begin.

Eventually, I realized that I was holding writing to the wrong standard.

Writing isn’t a deposition. It isn’t a transcript. And it isn’t a test of credibility. Writing is about meaning. It’s about interpretation. It’s about understanding how something shaped you, not proving that it happened in a particular way.

Most of us don’t remember our lives as clean narratives. We remember moments, impressions, and emotions. We remember how something felt in our bodies—fear, confusion, relief, longing—even when the facts are fuzzy. And when it comes to experiences that were disorienting or controlling, that fuzziness is expected.

Anyone who has lived through something that disrupted their sense of self will have gaps in their memory. That doesn’t make the story less true. It makes it human.

What matters more than precision is honesty. Honesty about what you remember. Honesty about what you don’t. And honesty about the impact something had on you, even if you can’t fully explain how or why.

When I stopped trying to reconstruct my life like a case file and started writing from sensation and emotion instead, something shifted. The story didn’t become weaker; it became truer. It felt more grounded, more authentic, and strangely, easier to write. I no longer felt the need to defend my own memory or explain every uncertainty before I allowed myself to speak.

You don’t have to fill in every gap for your story to matter. You don’t have to justify why certain details are missing. And you don’t have to wait for perfect recall before you begin. Most people understand this more than we think they will—especially those who have lived through their own versions of loss, control, or confusion.

Writing isn’t about proving what happened. It’s about reclaiming the authority to say, This is how it was for me.

And that is enough.

If you’ve been waiting to write because your memory feels incomplete, consider this permission to start anyway. Begin with what you do know—the feeling, the impact, the truth that remains even when the details don’t. That’s often where the real story lives.