Essay as a genre.

While reading this work i stumbled across the line ""The mixture of elements in the essay--the unsorted 'wholeness' of experience it represents-- can only be held together by the concept of self. The selection and order of the ideas and objects can have no other basis. The order is 'as it occurred to me,' not 'as it usually occurs.'" I have been toying with order a lot in my recent essays. I wish my memory were chronological. It would make telling stories a whole heck of a lot easier; however, my memory is like one jumbled pit of twenty years in which nothing has a certain order. I can look back to when i was 7 and get memories of opening flowery wrapped presents that my mother assures me i "got when i was 4." The past is warped but even more disconcerting is that last weekend is warped.
I find myself writing a piece how i usually do. Sitting at my laptop with the intention of keying in some moments and suddenly it's 2:40 AM and i am looking at 5 pages of word vomit. Then i take the paragraphs and jumble them up. Tell about meeting someone before i had actually met them or place waking up before i actually went to sleep. It's confusing to me because i have lived it. It is probably not even something anyone else notices. I like to warp order, though. I mean, nonfiction is a very relative term. (Whoa! dangerous waters, i know.) I think i like to play with chronological details simply because it happened to me and i want it to appear more interesting than it actually was. I feel the need to entice a reader more than by straight-forward experience alone. But, by doing it on purpose am i discombobulating the notion of truth in the above quote? Or is it more true because it allows me to introduce a reader to someone and tell how i feel about them before i show my actual reaction to them? Which, raises an even bigger question for me--are good non-fiction writers good simply because really cool things have happened to them, or because they can show even the banal things in life in a relatable way?
I really hope it's the second. I am not a cool kid. :)