Writing Through Cancer

My husband and I began the annual task of cleaning out our garage.  Despite our best efforts to minimize our accumulated possessions, we faced, yet again, stacks of used baby paraphernalia (purchased for grandchildren’s visits), old clothing, books and boxes filled with odd collections of items transferred from household shelves to the garage.  I have to admit that most of the boxes in question belonged to me:  keepsakes no longer with a reason for being kept, flower vases I might use again, old course materials, drafts of my books, and, since I’m a habitual journal keeper, dozens of notebooks, the pages filled with evidence of what my life has been this past year.  In them I’d written ideas for workshops, sketched cartoonish commentary, tried out rewrites for the novel I’m trying to finish, mused on past events in my life, and even written several “to do” lists.

What’s in My Journal

Odd things, like a button drawer.  Mean

things, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.

But marbles too.  A genius for being agreeable.

Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous

discards.  Space for knickknacks, and for

Alaska.  Evidence to hang me, or to beatify…

Pages you don’t know exist

but you can’t find them.  Someone’s terribly

inevitable life story, maybe mine.

(By William Stafford, in  Crossing Unmarked Snow)

I admit that I didn’t make much headway in our garage cleaning, perching myself on the stairs for a while and reading random passages from one notebook or another.  I remembered another box, stored on the shelves and containing my journals from the early eighties, when my life was defined by loss and grief following the drowning of my first husband.  I pulled a notebook from 1983 out of the box and read a few entries from it, comparing what I’d written then with the notebook entries of this past year. How different they were:  one written during trauma and loss, the other a hodge-podge of creative (and not so creative) notations.  Both, however different, are testimony to the life I have lived.

Why did I write it down?  In order to remember, of course.  But what exactly was it I wanted to remember? … the point of keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking…how it felt to me:  that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. (Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”)

How it felt to be me.  I’ve kept journals since I was a teenager.  They were called “diaries” then. Mine had a blue, faux leather cover, pages gilded with gold leaf, and a small lock and key, impossibly easy to break–something my kid brother did on more than one occasion.  I no longer remember what I wrote in that diary, but I still have a scar on my right leg from the summer I chased my brother as he ran through our campsite near Medicine Lake, California,  laughing and waving  my diary in the air.  He got away, because I sliced my leg on a steel tent stake and was rushed to the nearest town to have it stitched up.  I returned, limping in pain from my bandaged leg, to find my diary lying on my sleeping bag.  My brother was nowhere in sight, hiding behind my father’s pickup truck in tears.

Despite those invasions of privacy, I was undeterred in recording my most important thoughts, often hiking up the hill behind our house to sit under an old oak tree to write.  I suppose I dreamed of emulating Henry David Thoreau, but adolescence interests soon took over, and my attentions shifted from the meaning of life to which boy I “liked” and which boys “liked” me.  In college, my notebooks changed again, full of my musings on  poetry, politics, psychology and theology. When my first child was born, I noted  her every developmental achievement.  But during those tumultuous years after my husband’s drowning, my journals were my refuge, a port in the storm, and I filled the pages with emotional outpourings or questions I could not answer.  I gradually wrote my way out of  sorrow, and as I did, my writing changed once more.  I enrolled in doctoral studies, and my notebooks became my repositories for ideas and observations noted in my research.  They were  invaluable tools as I wrote  my dissertation, and I hung onto them long after I’d finished and earned my degree.  They were evidence I’d found my way out of grief and despair into a new and different life.  Writing, whether through pages of emotion, poetry or even research notes, had helped me find my way out of pain and sorrow.  I wanted to remember how far I had come.

“How it felt to be me.” I’ve  replayed Didion’s words so many times.  Isn’t that–to remember–part of the reason we write?  And isn’t that one of the most important reasons for keeping a journal or notebook?

Journals are … intended to be private: … they are the place where [the writer] is not performing, not showing off. In his or her journals, the writer is… unbuttoned, unguarded… (Mary Gordon, New York Times, October 6, 1991.)

Our journals offer the freedom to write without censoring ourselves.  We write about where we’ve been or what we’ve done; we try out new ideas, or we grieve, write an angry rant, even, sometimes, whine.  It doesn’t matter.  We’re writing for ourselves, and no matter what we write, we are witnessing our lives on the page,  remembering and creating testimony to what we have experienced, felt and endured at different times in our lives.   Writing helps us to make sense of our lives, to write, as author Patricia Hampl described, “ourselves into knowing.”

How has writing helped you write yourself into knowing–into insight and understanding?  Have you turned to a journal during painful and difficult times in your life? If you re-read earlier entries, what changes do you observe in your writing?   What do you learn about yourself?   Write about a time that writing helped you make sense of a difficult life chapter.  Or write about why you keep a journal.  Why do you write?

If  you’d like to refresh your journal habits or begin keeping a writer’s notebook?  Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• If you’re writing your way through a difficult or painful life experience, it’s important not to keep ruminating (as I did for several months after my husband died, making myself feel worse instead of better), but instead, after you’ve written for fifteen or twenty minutes, put the journal aside.  Come back to it later, maybe in a day or two and re-read your entry.   Underline words or phrases that stand out for you.  Start with a fresh page and one of those underlined phrases, using your own words as a prompt.  Chances are, it will take you someplace worth writing about.
• Get in the habit of writing for five to fifteen minutes a day, giving yourself the freedom to write anything.  May Sarton, who published two of her journals, advised, Remember to be alive to everything, not just what you’re feeling, but…your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading…what you are seeing every day.  Noticing the world around us sometimes helps us stumble into  insight or a specific memory, something timportant to what we are feeling.
• Use a journal to record or document important events—joyous as well as painful, for example,   surgeries, recovery, a grandchild’s birth, pregnancy, a marital breakup, or a child’s first words.  Journaling is about writing from your life—and our lives are not only made up of pain—although it might feel like it at the time.  Capture the happy moments, the celebrations and achievements too.
• Combine visual with verbal:  photographs, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, even quick sketches of places or people combined with writing about them.  I do this from time to time, and I admit that these are my favorite journals to return to and read.
• Use your journal to respond to writing prompts, using this site or others on the web or, if you prefer, some of the many published collections of writing prompts, like Judy Reeves’ A Writer’s Book of Days.