Fight Like a Mother

When I was first diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, I knew nothing about what treatment I was to have, what to expect or what would happen next. I knew I had cancer in an advanced stage with metastasis to my bones, lymph nodes and brain. I had to make a number of decisions about treatments as well as hassle with the insurance company and organize life for my preschool daughter.

What to do? I started energetically writing. I just wrote. I wrote prayers. I wrote curses. I wrote anger. I wrote thanks. I wrote fears. I wrote defiance. I wrote to my daughter, my husband, my family, my friends. In my shock, severe stress and sleepless nights I wrote about what was keeping me awake. I wrote on a computer. I wrote on a caring site.  I wrote in the “notes” section of my phone. I wrote on scraps of paper.

I needed to write reality now that I didn’t understand reality any more. I was making it up and re-forming it.  I was leaving something behind in case I wasn’t here anymore.

What I was doing, I came to find out later, was healing. By pouring the words out I was getting them out of my head and onto the paper. I was, in a frantic and latent way, recreating myself. As I see it now, I was also defying death and oblivion by writing and putting my essence down for posterity. “I count,” I was saying to cancer, “You can’t take me from me.”

Others have found this path, in fact it is well-trodden. Healing through the arts is well established and many integrative oncology practices have art, drama and writing therapies as complementary healing practices.

Sharon Bray, Ed.D is an author and educator who has led many years of classes helping people to write through the cancer experience. She has a blog with weekly prompts that can start anyone writing called Writing Through Cancer. She has also written two books to help with the writing process A Healing Journey:  Writing through Breast Cancer (2004) and When Words Heal: Writing Through Cancer (2006). Sharon shared the following with me:

JM: What are the benefits of writing when one has cancer?

SB: Writing can be therapeutic for anyone, but during cancer, it offers a way to make sense out of the chaos of emotions a cancer diagnosis creates.  A journal or notebook is a little refuge, a sanctuary, a place to spill out all we feel, and then, as we re-read, to begin to make sense of it.  In a writing group, such as those I lead, the raw, emotional writing quickly becomes stories or poems, and as the group members share their writing aloud, an extraordinary community is forged.  We are joined by cancer–and we realize, as we hear the words of our colleagues, that we are not alone in what we feel.

JM: In your last blog post you chose fear as a theme to write about. Most of us live and deal with that emotion daily. Are there other common themes that writers seem to share, when writing the cancer experience? How does this help to write about a theme?

SB: Shock, fear, anger, remorse, regret–all of these surface at one time or another during the cancer experience.  Writing helps release those emotions, getting them “outside” the mind and body and onto the page.  Keeping negative emotions locked inside is unhealthy–writing gives voice to all we feel, and as we write, we discover that there are insights, other emotions, like hope, love, concern for others that also will be expressed.

JM: If someone wants to write, but thinks “I don’t have anything to say,” what advice do you give to help them start writing? 

SB: I offer prompts–writing suggestions–from just about every corner of life and the cancer experience.  I also say that if a prompt doesn’t “do anything” for you, then just write about anything.  Keep the pen (or your fingers on the keyboard) moving.  Don’t stop to edit or read it over.  Even if you begin with “I don’t have anything to say…” and keep writing that line over and over, something WILL open up–and you’ll have a “door in” to something that wants to be expressed.

JM: Some people may hesitate to start writing because they think they don’t write well, that they are not good at writing. Do you need perfect grammar to write through cancer? 

SB: Oh my goodness, no!  In my groups, I never see what is written–there’s no red ink, no corrections.  What is written is the writer’s — maybe it gets refined and polished sometime later, far down the road, into a poem or story that needs an editor’s eye, but never in the healing process.  Just write.  Push that internal critic aside.

JM: Is there a writing experience that got you through a particularly difficult time? How did it help you?

SB: I’ve always written, even as a child–but there was a particularly difficult period of my life when my husband drowned in an accident, and I became a single mother and a widow overnight.  I filled dozens of notebooks with my questions and the roller coaster of emotions.  It helped–in those dark, lonely nights, I found solace by writing all I was feeling.  Gradually those emotional entries began to change–and I found poetry among my feelings and words.  It was tremendously important time — and it also influenced the writing groups I lead today. 

A special thank you to Sharon for sharing her wisdom and for doing this project that we can all benefit from. I have been using Sharon’s prompts from her site and I find them extremely useful to prompt me to heal in places I may tend to avoid on my own. Have  you had a healing experience through writing? Please share with us!