I wish I could stop asking the question: why do I still care?

Over the next six months, that question will be the final hurdle between me, a finished Part Three, and (hopefully) the right agent who might help carry this book into the world.

Why am I still here, inside this story, sorting through the receipts of a dead man who wouldn’t show up for me in life? A man who left behind silence and shame, and too many unanswered messages.

I’ve written about his death; about the first time he left. I’ve mapped his bank accounts. I basically know what happened now. But I’m still trying to understand it in a way that lets me move forward. Some days I think I’m done with it, like I’ve finally healed. Then I open a Part Three chapter and my hand starts to shake.

Right now, the memoir includes just about everything. My writer brain knows that’s not going to make for a good story. It’s repetitive, too sad, pathetic in places, frustrating in others. I know what to do, how to fix it, but this is my life and it feels so wrong to cut things out. The problem isn’t craft. It’s permission. It feels wrong to cut the pleas, the calls, the unanswered texts, because part of me still wants the record to count as proof.

It’s because I’m still trying to prove myself to one person, the one who said I didn’t do enough to protect him.

And there’s more than one woman in that scenario, several women Dad knew have all told me that. Not Libby Drew—me. But there’s only one person who’s ever said it that mattered to me, because nobody else knew him well enough to say it with their chest. But she did. She knew him, knew us. And I feel like if I could just prove to her that I did try hard enough, that maybe I could start really believing it myself.

There’s no headline betrayal in my story. No final fight. Just erosion. That’s what makes Part Three so hard to edit. Each small act of disregard or selfishness looks survivable in the moment, but stacked over years, it becomes an avalanche. That slow kind of loss that keeps promising you more time.

I think I cared longer than I should’ve. Stayed emotionally available long after he’d gone off the deep end. I wanted him to be better. I needed him to come back. To what? I don’t know. He’d been “different” for so long that I’d almost forgotten Dad had ever been any other way.

Some people get to move forward like that. A snap of the fingers. Those other people got clean exits. I didn’t. But this is about me, and the weight of a story I haven’t yet been able to set down. Not fully.

I’m not stuck, though it feels that way. I’m just metabolizing. So fucking slowly.

I think I cared because I inherited his sensitivity and tried to use it to save him. I stayed conscious when it would’ve been easier to go numb. I still care because I haven’t finished loving the version of him I imagined. Because I haven’t forgiven myself for believing he could be different. Because caring was how I survived him. And now the memoir is how I survive the caring.

I keep thinking there should be a finish line, some final page where I set the whole thing down and walk away lighter. But that’s the fairytale. I don’t need closure to write this. I need to grant myself permission. Permission to stop writing like I’m on trial. Permission to stop turning every text and receipt into a defense. Permission to tell the truth without trying to prove it. And the strength to let that truth be enough, even when it doesn’t add up to a verdict.

If I can grant myself that permission, six months from now I’ll have a clean, publishable manuscript—maybe even an email that says, “Let’s talk representation.”

First step: I need to start believing me.

Daily writing prompt

What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

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inspo: editing as a form of letting go // setting down the evidence & keeping the truth // the weirdness of watching a long obsession turn into a finished manuscript // trying to finish something that once felt impossible to put down // silence instead of closure // scraping meaning from what others have already moved on from // mostly, watching others move forward while I’m still stuck translating the past

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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