Post #21 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing and Healing – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Shannon Dodge is sharing her writing and healing experiences with you in this article. She describes how writing, including journaling and fiction, has helped in her spiritual journey.
As with all of our writing and healing blogs we hope this helps you look at ways that you can use writing to find healing in your life.
Have you found that writing is healing? If so, we invite you to send us your story of how writing has been a form of healing for you. Some find healing through journaling. Others find healing while writing memoir. Maybe you have found other forms of writing that created a sense of peace or insight that you’d like to share with us.
Just email between 200-600 words (or longer if you contact us first) to: Matilda (at) WomensMemoirs (dot) com. We are interested in publishing your thoughts on writing and healing on this website — either with your name or anonymously, your choice.
Finding Spiritual Healing through Writing
by Shannon Dodge
My journey towards healing is woven together with my spirituality. My faith is an important aspect of my life. However, there was a time when my walk of faith faltered. Life at times becomes a bumpy road and the farther you move off the path the more your faith is challenged. The Bible encourages you during these hard times to turn towards God to help you persevere. I, unfortunately, did not heed this advice.
At the age of 15, I became pregnant with my daughter. As a freshman in high school and honor student my life drastically changed. While my birth family embraced me, my church family pushed me away and I became alienated. With anger in my heart and embarrassment on my face, I ended my relationship not only with the church, but with God. I was upset, confused, and angry. Even though you knew the consequences, when you are 15 and facing a massive upheaval in your life, all you can do is ask questions.
Why me God? Why did you let this happen? What will I do? What about my dreams? I wanted to pay for journalism school not preschool! By turning my back on my faith I felt empty. I had no outlet. I had no mental support for my growing unease. The unease I was feeling grew into self-consciousness and bitterness. People treated me differently, judged me. I had to stand tall, look them in the face, and defy their judgment. I finished high school in 3 years and with the help of family raised my daughter.
Books and writing have always been my passion. Words are a safe haven for me to be someone else for a moment in time. My writing dwindled with the birth of my daughter, but my passion never died. When graduation loomed before me, my guidance counselor approached me about college. A local women’s group had decided to sponsor four young women from our graduating class with full ride scholarships. To qualify you had to be a student with good grades, no behavioral tarnishes, and be in a situation where college would not be an option to you without a scholarship. The determining factor was an essay that explained about yourself and how you stand apart as a unique individual. I wrote from the bottom of my heart and the depths of my soul. I love my daughter more than life itself and depicting that in a 1,000-word essay made me soar. To write how this little unexpected twist made my life complete was uplifting. I reconnected to writing that day; I remembered how my written words were more expressive than my spoken ones. I won a scholarship.
I chose to go for two years to a community college and then transfer to a university for my final two years. School was… wonderful. However as time progressed, balancing work, school, and home was becoming more complicated. I wanted to be on my own; I wanted to show the world I could do this on my own. My choice was to drop my scholarship and work full time. Looking back, this is one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. I die a little every time I remember just what I gave away, all for spite. I began working at a financial institution. I was dedicated and a fast learner, on the fast track, but in my personal life I was drowning.
Still not connected to my faith, working full time, raising a daughter, dating, and everything else in between was crashing down on me. I became promiscuous, I made bad decisions that caused me to sink into further dark corners of myself, and I entered into bad relationships. I had three serious, and seriously wrong, relationships. Each left me with different pieces of wreckage in my life. One controlled me, held the vise around my neck so tightly that I lost myself and allowed him to tell me what I was. Another broke my heart so severely that it shook me to the core; I still have lingering pain nine years later. The last was verbally abusive. With each word he spouted, I lost more of my own image, replacing it with his distorted view of who I was. I became a shell of my former strong-look-you-in-the-eye being. Left was a girl who felt worthless.
During this chaos, I began to feel intense pain. Testing found nothing wrong and the pain increased. Doctors were skeptical; worried I was in it for the narcotics. I had lost hope, lost all semblance of control over my life, and nearly lost my job. I turned to journaling to help my thoughts unwind. It helped to clear my mind as best as I could and focus on other things. Finally, in 2004, after two years of no diagnosis I got an answer. Fibromyalgia – a condition with no treatment, no medication to help, and most doctors didn’t believe existed. Just what I needed, more skepticism and judgment in my life. As luck would have it, my doctor was innovative and placed me on a drug not FDA approved for fibromyalgia. Over the course of the next two years, I played around with different medications, physical therapists, and treatments. I received a promotion into a high paying position in 2005; I got married in 2006 and had a son in 2009.
Things were falling into place, on the surface. Inwardly I was still that hollowed out, lost, and broken girl. One day in early 2010, I decided to return to the church since I had been thinking a lot lately about my faith. Something had clicked. Something was weighing heavy on my heart. A few weeks later, my brother asked me to attend a special service of prayer and worship. I said, “Yes. I want to go with you.” I shocked us both by my immediate response.
On this day, writing would begin to heal me and take me on a journey I never thought I would see. God compelled me to write my life story to speak to women who have been through pain, who feel worthless, and who have broken souls. I have faith that what I have written will help change lives. I know that as I penned my novel, God was bringing healing with each letter I chose, with each page I finished. I am still not whole; I still have pieces to pick up, mend, and reassemble. The closer I get to publication I know that the chasm in my heart is healing. One word at a time.
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