What are The Words to the Story You Are Telling Yourself?
What are the words of the story you are telling yourself? What words do you speak when you look in the mirror in the morning? When you open your calendar and plan your day? When you decompress at bedtime?
I think you will agree that the words we whisper -- or shout -- inside our own heads have the biggest effect on us.
Words like loser. Failure. Broken. Stupid. Has-Been. Shattered.
I want to share a story about how one word made a difference.
A slight woman came up to my book table at a cancer survivor’s event, her face pale, and her thinning hair covered by a baseball cap. For some reason, she lingered, chatting with me about my book, Under a Desert Sky, while her husband waiting patiently next to her. She fingered the bracelets on her wrist while she told me of her recent double mastectomy and second round of chemo.
"When do you become a survivor?" she asked me, her eyes shadowed and unsure, as she gazed beyond me to the tables decorated at the Cancer Survivor breakfast.
"Here's my opinion," I answered. "If you don't keel over dead from a heart attack after hearing the words, 'You have cancer' then you are a survivor from day one."
"I like that," she said, with a quiet smile.
"You are a survivor," I said. “It’s not just my opinion. The American Cancer Society calls people survivors from day one.”
"I am a survivor," she repeated, tentatively at first, but then with more confidence, "I am a survivor."
Her fingers returned to the stretchy bracelets at her wrists, one purple, the other pink. She turned each bracelet around, to the words printed on the other side. "Survivor" the purple bracelet proclaimed. "Survivor" echoed the pink.
She looked at the words printed on her wrist and then at me. "I no longer feel like a fraud to call myself one," she said. She turned to her husband and smiled, "I am a survivor."
I heard the truth in her words.
What Are The Words You Tell Yourself?
The words we tell ourselves about our stories have power. The most powerful—of course—are the words spoken inside our own heads. We are the holder, and keeper, of those words, of our own stories.
This Friday – April 5 – a new session of brave storytellers will begin with the online course that I teach entitled, Reclaim Your Scattered Story. It is a 6-week course for those touched by cancer – whether as a patient, spouse, family member, friend, or caregiver.
With 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women hearing the words “You have cancer” in their lifetimes, we all know that cancer has touched many people.
I would love to help you get your story out of your head and onto paper.
In the book, Your Life as Story, author Tristine Rainer writes that a story is a meaningful pattern of events. Of course, we know that is true in fiction. But could that also be true of our own lives?
Cancer has interrupted the pattern. Figuring out meaning and moving forward can be difficult. I have discovered – and many others would agree—that writing is a great way to make sense of the pieces.
Maybe you say – but I don’t’ have time. The lessons are broken down into ten-minute writing exercises. You have ten minutes. I know you do.
Even if you are not a writer, you are a storyteller, if not on paper, then in your own mind or in the way you communicate with others.
When that story is disrupted or untold, it can play havoc with our lives.
Please join me and a group of brave storytellers. Sign up on my website at www.lynnehartke.com. I would be happy to answer any questions in the comments. Remember the class begins this Friday, April 5.
In the meantime, listen to the words of your story that you are telling yourself.You are a survivor.
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ABOUT LYNNE HARTKE
Lynne Hartke shares stories of courage, beauty, and belonging--belonging to family, to community, and to a loving God. Lynne is the author of
Under a Desert Sky: Redefining Hope, Beauty, and Faith in the Hardest Places.
Lynne is the creator and teacher of the online writing workshop,
Reclaim Your Scattered Story: a 6-week Online Writing Workshop for Those Touched by Cancer.
She also teaches in-person at
Ironwood Cancer and Research Center
in Chandler, AZ. Lynne is a 2018 Voice of Hope with the American Cancer Society.When not out on desert trails avoiding rattlesnakes, Lynne and her husband, Chandler Mayor and Pastor Kevin Hartke, attempt to keep up with their four grown children and four grandchildren.