The Healing Power of Telling Your Own Story
The Healing Power of Telling Your Own Story
by Susan E. Goff,
Author of The Desert Shall Rejoice: Psalms from the Wilderness of Breast Cancer
Storytelling is strong medicine for individuals and communities. Neuroscientists have been exploring and describing how telling our stories changes our brain chemistry and connects the storyteller and the listener in bonds of empathy and meaning. As I read about the research, I feel a thrill of recognition because, even though I don’t understand more than the simplest basics of how the brain works, I know that the research points to the truth. I know because I’ve experienced healing through telling my story and I’ve seen others find healing grace through telling their own.
The discovery began for me in the winter of 2020. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic started to unsettle almost everything in our lives, my life was further shaken by a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer. In the early days of testing, waiting for results, learning, and waiting some more, I experienced a wide range of contradictory emotions. My muscles and joints revealed that I was terrified, even as I clung to a real and authentic hope. I was offended and felt betrayed by my own body, even as I made an uncompromising commitment to take on cancer treatment as a project, one that I would ace. I was crabby and annoyed and complained that I just didn’t have time for cancer, all the while intuiting that the journey ahead had much to teach me (damnable journey!).
On the day I received notice that my routine screening mammogram showed something in my breast, I began to write every day, without exception. Though I’d kept a journal through most of my adult life, this writing was more fiercely intense than almost anything that came before. I recorded details about every appointment, every procedure, and every conversation with every medical provider. I wrote as if the very act of writing would heal me, trusting that it would help me make sense of a perplexing new world. In the long months of pandemic restrictions when no one could come to appointments with me, my journals gave me a place to name what I was seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, fearing, and hoping.
Daily writing forced me to keep it real. I couldn’t stay in denial for very long when I was paying close attention to my unfolding story. I found comfort in putting my fear under the magnifying glass of a writer’s scrutiny, grateful that the examination offered a small and temporary distance from my fear. Because I was writing daily, I noticed not only the challenges but also little gifts and simple wonders along the way, like the kindness of a stranger or an encouraging word from someone a bit ahead of me her own journey. Through daily writing, I couldn’t miss one damned thing, which meant that I couldn’t miss one blessed thing, either.
As I walked the path through surgeries, chemo and radiation, I began to read and reread journal entries from weeks before, even as I continued writing new ones. In my own story, I recognized tiny delights sprouting in the darkness of worry, like blossoms in the desert. I realized that I was living not in shades of dull and dismal gray, but in full color. I also noticed that many entries read like poetry, full of alliteration and assonance, word play and visual images. With that recognition, I began to transform many entries into poems and psalms, and soon began writing new entries as psalms.
I shared some of these psalms and poems in a blog and on social media, sorting carefully what I made public from what I tucked away for myself. Responses were poignant and achingly real. “Me, too,” I heard from others who were traveling through the wilderness of a cancer diagnosis and treatment. “This reminds me of parts of my story that I’d forgotten,” I heard more than once. For some, the reminder was welcome: “As I read your words, I cried for the first time since I was diagnosed,” one woman wrote. “Your story is so different from mine,” another told me, “and so much the same.” For a few, the reminder was painful. “I can’t read this now, but am saving it for when I can,” a stranger wrote to me. Words of thanks for pointing to hope and for enjoying laughter along the way were common themes. Although I wrote the psalms for my own healing, they took on a life of their own as they intersected with the healing journeys of others. Sharing vignettes from my own story, I discovered, invited others to share parts of their own. Some readers of my poems began to entrust me with their tender stories of cancer or other illness. Telling our stories bound together us in mutual compassion and courageous hope.
By the time I reached out to Bold Story Press, a woman-owned hybrid publisher that works to elevate the voices of women, I had a manuscript. A content editor asked me good questions that helped me refine the manuscript and make my story accessible to a wider audience. She helped me to tighten my writing in some places, expand it a bit in others, cut away extraneous lines, and keep the focus clear, even when my experiences of cancer were anything but clear. The entire process, from first contact with Bold Story Press to approving the final copy edits, was a gift of clarifying and claiming my own story more fully than ever, all so that my story might inspire others to tell their stories.
Since the book was published in October of 2024, I have done many readings, workshops, or retreats on finding hope in the frightening wilderness places into which life events suddenly thrusts us. In every event, my focus has been on telling just enough of my own story to prime the pump for others to tell theirs. At book signings, I set up a chair across the table from me and invite each person to sit and tell me a little about their wilderness journey. Signings have become occasions for tears, for laughter, for prayers, and for hope as we release together the healing power of story telling. I imagine I’d sell a whole lot more books at these events if I simply signed books and moved the line along, but having experienced the healing power of telling my story, I want to share that power with others.
This year I celebrate five years cancer free. While I will continue with testing and monitoring for the rest of my life and while the threat of recurrence will always linger at the edges of my consciousness, my oncologist has said this cancer is cured. I’ll never know to what extent storytelling contributed to that cure, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was a force for healing. Telling my story helped to heal my fear so that it could not cripple me. Telling my story helped to heal my sense of isolation during my most immunocompromised days. Telling with graphic detail my stories of unwelcome side effects gave me some control over them and helped me to laugh at their absurdity. Storytelling expanded my world at the very time that cancer threatened to shrink it. It kept me connected in life-giving ways with each person I met along the way. Cancer will always be a part of my story. The healing, the connections, and the compassion that have grown in me on my wilderness journey will always be an even bigger part of that story.
I urge you not to be afraid to recount the wonders and terrors of your journey. In the words of the last psalm of my book, I invite you to tell your story because, even if your ears are the only ones that hear it, there is healing in the telling.
A Psalm for Telling Your Story
You’ve read these words,
a few of them anyway.
You’ve dipped into my story,
maybe just ankle deep, maybe all in.
You’ve witnessed my terrors, my hope,
my journey through the wilderness
and out, at last, on the other side.
We are sisters in this club
that we never wanted to join,
sisters and some brothers, too,
in all the wretchedness and wonder
of human beings in human bodies.
You have a story to tell, too.
You have terror and trust,
worry and hope
as you journey along a path
that others have traveled before,
and that many more will follow.
Tell your story.
Sing out your hope.
Cry out your fear.
Laugh and weep and dance.
Try not to miss a damned thing
so that you won’t miss
a blessed thing, either.
Use whatever words you have.
As long as they are yours,
as long as they are true,
they hold healing power.
Because you are precious,
you are beloved,
you are beautiful.
You are the only you there is
and your unique and tender story
is the only one that can fill a space
that has stood empty and waiting
for far too long.