What my Red Journal Revealed

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When I first learned I had cancer I headed to Changing Hands Bookstore where I found a bright red journal. I named it “The Cancer Journal” and kept it the year I struggled with breast cancer. It holds a time of my life that was difficult to live and difficult to understand. When I was writing those pages, I did not have any wisdom to offer. Instead, I had fears and questions—and I needed somewhere to put them.

Looking back through those pages, I can see more than I could while I was living that story. The fear was real and I acknowledged it. The questions were hard, and I searched for  answers. But the care I found on those pages was even more powerful.  My friend Billie insisted on going to every doctor appointment with me. After surgery my friend Marcie showed up in my kitchen to make unforgettable vegetable lasagna.  Jan sent photos of her Michigan garden while Sarah planted and hung daisies in my garden. I loved these moments.  They helped me put a new frame around a hard time.

I can see now I was learning something about resilience on those journal pages.  I was changing how I perceived cancer and how I talked about it. I began to see possibilities beyond the diagnosis and to make decisions about my care. On the page, I could see my fear beginning to ease.

I was also working through struggles that reached beyond cancer. I had moved from a teaching job I loved to a college management job that was not a good fit. As I wrote, I began to imagine a different future, one in which writing could help heal me and change my life.

If you think it possible to have a research crush, James Pennebaker became mine. I dug into his work because it helped me understand what was happening on my pages. In a reanalysis of several expressive writing studies, Pennebaker and his colleagues found that increasing use of words expressing cause and understanding, words like “because” and “think,” were associated with greater health improvements (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010). I can see this search In my journal. I was not simply recording what happened. I was exploring what it meant to to me and how I could move forward.

This October, I have been searching those red journal pages again. Fourteen years later, what have they taught me?

They taught me that I could pour out the truth without being afraid. I could write my questions, my fears, and my hopes. Even though I did not know where it all would end, I had place to begin.

They taught me how much it mattered to have friends beside me. Every note, every meal, text, and every visit helped me face my next scan or surgery. None of these acts were small.

And they taught me the value of turning to my words with some distance and curiosity.  I could begin to ask what I could understand and how I wanted to change. I came to see that I needed to to leave a college job. I learned I needed to write a book.

For a time, I called cancer a gift. Friends and people living with cancer helped me understand why that did not fit. The cancer was not the gift. The care, the insights, the new possibilities I began to see were the gifts.

I do not have to be grateful for cancer, but I am grateful for what helped me through it.

 

A Journaling Practice for Reflecting on the Past

If it feels right, pull out a journal that covered a hard season in your life.  Read a few entries with curiosity. What do you notice that you might not have seen before?

You might underline phrases such as “because,” “I realize, or “I understand.” Read the sentences around them. What were you trying to understand?  Did you learn something, or did a possible next step emerge?

See what surfaces but don’t feel the need to find a lesson. It may just be a nice pause to visit your past with kindness. And if today is not a good day for this exploration, it’s okay to to put your journal away.

Kindness as a Survival Skill

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The school doors have opened. The last of my grandchildren to return to school was Harper. Last week we decided to celebrate this transition by heading north to practice her soccer drills, write stories, and watch movies. Her favorite movie was the new live-action Moana. Mine was The Wild Robot — an animated film based on Peter Brown’s best-selling children’s book about a robot who washes ashore on a wild island, filled with animals who think she is a monster. I would not have guessed a robot could move me, but this one did.

Roz was built to complete tasks for others. But when she arrives on that island there was no assigned job. She keeps searching for something to do that matches her programming., and when nothing surfaces, she does what we might do—she moves beyond her programming and improvises. She watches. She learns the language of the animals.

When an orphaned gosling hatches in front of her, she says the line I cannot forget–“I do not have the programming to be a mother.” And then she becomes one anyway.

We all carry programming we did not write. It can come from school, from parents, from a doctor’s office, from marriage. One of the lines I carried was this: I am a strong, independent woman. I will go to college and work.

And like Roz, I felt wholly unprepared to be a mother. At my first son’s birth I remember asking a friend, “How do you change a diaper?” I had worked so hard at being independent that I had failed to learn the skills of caring for someone else. Soon there were stacks of parenting books beside my bed. On Fridays, when I gathered with friends, I plied them with questions. What calms a crying baby? How soon can he eat solid food? Am I supposed to know this already?

I, too, had to improvise and change.

Peter Brown, who wrote the book behind the film, said the thought on his mind while writing was simply that kindness could be a survival skill. That moved me for I could see how Roz braids kindness into her strange new life. At first she was treated badly by the animals, but when the gosling becomes hers, she does her best—she names him Brightbill, she raises him, and she builds a shelter to keep them both safe. She befriends Fink, a sly and selfish fox, who learns to care about her.

When a blizzard arrives, Roz goes out into the storm and brings every animal on the island into her shelter—including the ones who called her a monster. Packed inside, the animals begin to fight and she implores them to care for one another in order to survive. Roz becomes kind not by design but because life on the island teaches her that actions of kindness work. In turn the animals take care of her.

What moved me is that Roz never stops being a robot. There is no scene where her machinery falls away and she turns human. She simply does more than she was built to do — and the doing changes her. In truth, it is in the doing that we are all changed.

Each morning I come to the café and write my way forward. Often I am asked when I will finish the book I am working on. It took me a while to understand that I have no answer for them. I am engaged in the writing because it is in the writing that I grow and change. The words on my pages are creating who I am and who I hope to become. The pages hold my answers.

The Wild Robot is not a robot story. It is a universal story. That is your story and mine. Carol Dweck spent decades showing that the beliefs we hold about our own fixedness are themselves changeable, that abilities we treat as issued to us at birth turn out to be built. Identity is not stamped on us. It is created slowly, out of what we pay attention to and who we decide to care for and become.

Kindness is a profound survival skill. I thank Roz for reminding me.

Finding Pockets of Calm in a Season of Fire

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On June 19, I drove north to Sedona to escape the Phoenix heat and tend to a book that needed my full attention. That same day, the Pocket Fire sparked seven miles north of my home and began burning through the Coconino National Forest, wrapping its flames around juniper and ponderosa pine.

By the time I arrived, the smell of smoke greeted me. Trails I love were closed, and a drive down Dry Creek Road past Chimney Rock showed a towering plume near Bear Sign Canyon. In that moment, I saw how fire moves in ways that feel both mesmerizing and terrifying—an orange edge on the horizon, a smear of smoke thickening into a sky of gray and flame. I could not forget the image or the thought of this magical forest being recast in fire.

To calm myself, I found my journal and headed to the Wildflower Café. The café felt different. The usual buzz of tourists had faded into a low drone of worried voices. I let my pen steady me, wrote a few pages about the fire, and then turned to a chapter in my book. I was finding a small rhythm amid the storm when Milo walked in.

Milo is a slight, gentle man and a fixture at the Wildflower. A displaced Viet Nam veteran, he found a home in the forest years ago and even helped film a documentary about the trees and canyons he loves. Most days he sits with coffee and a journal, writing quietly in his corner.

Today is different. Milo’s hair stands up in disarray. His black shirt and pants are crumpled, as if he has been sleeping in them. He doesn’t get his coffee. Instead, he moves quickly from one side of the café to the other, peering out each window as if searching for the fire or a miracle. He takes deep breaths, as though breath alone might hold the forest together. Then, as abruptly as he arrived, he leaves.

I think about him as I sit with my journal. I picture the trees and canyons he calls home, the “special place” beyond the day‑hikers’ trails that he has described as his true shelter. I fear that place is burning. Yes, he has a white van that brings him to the café, but he belongs to the forest, and much of it is now a fire map.

The next morning I choose my word for this piece: calm. Calm is what I will practice as I face this fire. Thousands of acres have burned, but containment is slowly increasing. My home is not currently threatened, yet I breathe the presence of the fire all the time—its taste at the back of my throat, its quiet tug on my nervous system. I remind myself–I need to be calm. I need to share my calm with those who are more exposed than I am—with people like Milo.

Milo returns to the café the next day, less rattled. His hair is combed. His clothes are clean. He pauses at my booth to chat. He tells me things are falling apart and that he will have to go back to “the services,” which he hates to do, but he needs help. For a moment he speaks quietly about his health. “I think I have a hole in my stomach. Maybe cancer,” he says. I nod with concern, sensing that the fire inside his body may be echoing the blaze that has consumed his home.

I tell him my word for the day is “calm,” and I hope it can hold him. He beams, and we have a brief conversation about what holds us during hard times—music, meditation and prayer, deep breathing, kid’s drawings, walks. Then he notices my open journal. “I am a writer, and I need to write in my journal. I know that will help.” We talk about our writing for a bit until we are laughing about how words can make the world feel simpler—even when it is not. Afterwards I sit there, realizing that our conversation has lifted me up. When the world seems hard, we need each other, too.

In seasons of fire or earthquakes or even war, we need each other, but we also need our own personal pockets of calm—small practices that can steady us. It can be conscious deep breathing, music, meditation or prayers, exercise, or perhaps opening a journal and naming what we are facing and what we can do.

If you are reading this in your own season of fire—literal or metaphorical—may you find a pocket of calm inside your day. May you discover one simple practice that steadies you, and may you remember that your story is not only about this crisis. It is about the ways you keep choosing to face it, and the ways you keep choosing to live.