journaling

The Healing Journal

Posted on by Wendy Kennar

I recently finished working my way through Emily Suñez’s beautiful book The Healing Journal: Guided Prompts and Inspiration for Life with Illness.

If you read my blog on a regular basis, you might remember that twice before my blog posts were inspired by prompts in this lovely book. (You can read “I Am Alive With Creativity” by clicking here, and “My Illness Does Not Define Me” by clicking here.)

I finished reading the book and answering the writing prompts, but I haven’t finished healing. And that’s part of what makes life with a chronic illness so complicated. You never really completely heal from a chronic illness. 

There is no finish line. No specific treatment plan in place, that once you work through all the steps you’re “better.” It doesn’t work that way for me. It doesn’t work that way for a lot of people. There is no ideal world of “fully healed” to strive for. 

What I have found in the more than-a-decade that I have lived with my autoimmune disease, is that healing is a continuous process. Just as my symptoms go through periods of flares and remission, my feelings about my invisible disability ebb and flow as well.

My illness, and my healing, will forever be a part of me.

A Few Ideas to Get You Writing

Posted on by Wendy Kennar

I’m a writer. Yet during this coronavirus shut-down, I don’t find myself writing much about the immediate world around me.

Instead, I’m writing about my life with an invisible disability; writing that will eventually become my memoir-in-essays.

I’m writing in response to calls for submissions.

But the bottom line is, I’m writing.

And I’m also reading.

I recently finished Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir.

Whether you’re a writer, or someone like my dad who, during this unprecedented time has begun keeping a journal for the first time in his life (he jots down a couple of sentences about each day), here are a few writing prompts from Ms. Goldberg’s book I’d like to share with you this week:

“What have you waited a long time for?”

“What do you no longer have?”

“What I can’t live without – “

“Where did you always want to go but didn’t?”

“Memoir is taking personal experience and turning it inside out. We surrender our most precious understanding, so others can feel what we felt and be enlarged. What is it you love and are willing to give to the page? It’s why we write memoir, not to immortalize but to surrender ourselves.”