Including the bad with the good

So I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the past...again.

If I'm going to write about it, growing up where I did, the adventures I had, the people I knew, I'd have to include as much as information as possible, right? Right.

But here's my dilemma...I have a few dark things from my youth...extremely dark...that no one but my husband knows about. (Well, maybe one or two others know about them.)

These are not things that I did, or that any of my loved ones did, but events that just happened to happen in the course of my childhood. One of them scarred me for life. The other I had actually blocked out completely until it suddenly jumped up at me one day from somewhere deep in my subconcious, giving me several nights of sleeplessness and anxiety since.

I want to include them in the story. I don't want to paint a ridiculous picture of some fictitious and skewed childhood where the bad is not included with good. There was good. I liked where I grew up at the time. But there was bad as well. I saw it. I experienced it. I want to write about it.

And I think I will.