What WOn’t She Say JACKIE

ZIMMERMAN

I’ve been wanting to tell my whole story for what seems like eons now. In the beginning, I was convinced I’d write a memoir because that seemed like the most effective way of getting life experience into the hands of other people. It also seemed really cool to be able to say that I wrote a memoir, but I’m not a writer. Not really. I’m a blogger which means I’m really good at putting whole stories, years of time and complex emotions into about 500-1200 words and then I’m done with it. Everytime I sat down to write this elusive memoir, I struggled because I could finish a whole would-be chapter in about two paragraphs. Clearly long form writing wasn’t going to work, so I let the project die, time and time again, while I also let myself feel like a bit of a failure for not being able to do it the way I thought it should be done.

In reality, I started telling parts of my story in short blog posts in 2006, with my multiple sclerosis diagnosis. I’d started blogging back then as a way to process what was going on in my body and was gobsmacked that other people read it and it resonated with them. After my ulcerative colitis diagnosis in 2009, I started another blog and A LOT of people read that one. In those early days, I was sharing everything in detail and in ways that most people weren’t. I was brutally honest and sometimes that was gross or painful or scary. But it was real. After a few years of blogging like that, I started to get offers to write for media sites and those offers turned into speaking gigs. I was actually getting paid to share my story and that felt really good at the time; especially because it meant that I had editors who helped my candid ramblings look a bit more polished. Over time, the polishing took off the swear words, and typos, and grammatical errors, and then eventually it took away my personality, the honesty and the real human parts of what had formerly been my story. Writing for those sites had polished me right out of my own work.

I stopped writing for media sites a few years ago because I felt like I didn’t have anything left to say. I’d been sharing these vanilla versions of my story for over a decade and not only was I bored of repeating the same types of listicle articles (there’s only so many times I can rewrite my advice for the newly diagnosed), but I didn’t feel like it mattered anymore. I still get the opportunity to share my experiences here and there with speaking gigs, or panelist seats but my real, true story has been buried for a while.

Recently, I’ve had this deep rooted desire to get back to the honest parts of what I’d been doing. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it’s just something I have to do. Consider it a compulsion that won’t go away. I started thinking about a book again, and I LOLed myself right out of that possibility. I was talking to a friend of mine, Sonya, about this little conundrum. Sonya, who hosts a podcast called What Won’t She Say, suggested that I do a podcast instead of a book. The more we talked about what a podcast series would look like, and how we’d use the medium to share exactly what I wanted and how I wanted, the more I liked the idea. Not to mention, Sonya is a great podcast host and I knew she would do the whole thing in a meaningful, respectful way.

So we got to planning what a podcast would look like. I started outlining my whole story, going back and reading those early blogs, reliving those years of the unknown and all the trauma. I pulled out the small, short stories that only exist in my memory and the bigger ones that are full of lessons for everyone. It all started to feel very big and as Sonya and I met to discuss the purpose of the show, I just kept saying it felt like my legacy. And since I’ve seen Hamilton the musical, every time I hear the word legacy, I always think of this quote:

“Legacy.

What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”

- Lin-Manuel Miranda

Through those planning sessions with Sonya, and ruminating on that quote, I realized that I wasn’t actually trying to share my legacy because a legacy isn’t really shared by its owner. You’re not supposed to see the garden, you know? I want to see the garden. I want to hear people’s reactions. I want to know that my experience, my life, my story can impact other people. And it was truly Sonya who helped me to see that I’m not trying to preserve my story as an oral history for the ages. I’m trying to use it as a catalyst to make change, to support other people, and to showcase a path that is messy, traumatic, and scary, but ultimately one that matters because all of our stories matter.

In the end, I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted and needed. I’ve returned to my original blogging roots but this time in an audio format. It’s honest. It’s painful. There are so many swear words and the equivalent of verbal typos. It’s unpolished, unedited, it’s the truth of what I remember and experienced. It’s delightfully perfect in its imperfection.

After back-to-back chronic illness diagnoses in her 20s, Jackie Zimmerman turned to the internet to find a way to cope and build a support system. Blogging became the outlet she found and she quickly realized that she wasn’t the only one benefiting from her stories. Jackie became a professional blogger and public speaker and later formed a nonprofit to uplift women living with Inflammatory Bowel disease. You can find her advocacy work here: Jackiezimmerman.co and her professional work here: Queenofgsd.com