I just celebrated some recent freelancing success by buying eight memoirs, because I swear to goddess I WILL do this [100 memoirs project](https://steemit.com/writing/@shapeshifter43/100-memoirs-project). I will do it because I love reading memoirs, but also because I'm writing one and I don't want it to suck.

Part of the process of writing a memoir, I'm learning, is to own some things about my life that are hard to speak. The things I'm a little afraid to admit.

![girl-2619465_1280.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmPw7EWvHqjSdRECpnSMjTTCNScF4p83Ffy4iZhXCnJXWi/girl-2619465_1280.jpg)

Oh did you click on this thinking I was going to go all confessional? You get ONE confession. I will share ONE piece of this that I've been grappling with, and that's my relationships with other men before the man who abused me. My MO was to stay too long in a relationship that had stopped working or giving me what I needed, but becoming interested in someone else before getting myself fully disentangled. I did it twice. I was with a guy on and off for four years and just as it was ending, I got interested in someone else, someone I thought was perfect for me. I remember telling my friends, *if it doesn't work with this guy, I give up...* After five years, it didn't work. Before the absolute and very end, though, I had the feelings for someone else. I was re-entangled before I was disentangled.

Maybe that doesn't sound so bad to you, or maybe it does, I don't know. For me, especially in hindsight, it sounds terrible because I do not want to be a woman who defines herself by who she's dating. I think I was just starting to figure out my MO, to better value my independence, when I fell for the abuser. I told myself, *this one is different, I'll jump in too fast just one more time...*

He was different all right.

Writing truthfully about my serial monogamy days will, I hope, deepen my readers' understanding of my particular vulnerability to a man who is a textbook charmer-narcissist capable of psychotic violence. But I'm afraid to write it because slut-shaming, because accusations that I'm "one of those women who need a man," because I'm a fairly private person when it comes to relationships with men and writing about this area of my life makes me feel like I'm treading shark-infested water.

![animal-1867523_1920.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmQRpYfVd5NvknYtZqzJo2czqDR4bzw33U8kTP5gX6R1ch/animal-1867523_1920.jpg)

That doesn't mean I won't write it.

I think part of the power of memoir is the bond that occurs between the author who is exposing her most vulnerable self and the reader who knows she is witnessing that vulnerability.

Is there something you're afraid to write about, to own, or to share with others? You don't have to share it with me, but you could tell me how you are dealing with it and/or your thoughts on writing our deepest-rooted insecurities and fears.