Why Write?

For all the Bev's.

The second section of my breast cancer story rolls out this month and tells of my first trip to a doctor to examine some concerning lumps. It doesn’t go well and only after writing and re-writing, editing and performing the scene did I start to understand why. The posts this month will elaborate on the trauma, fears, assumptions and expectations that coloured the experience and could have been handled very differently - by both of us. 

And herein lies the power of writing. We discover the story under the facts.

As you write, edit, possibly read out loud to an empty room, to a friend or to an audience, you keep returning to that place in you that was feeling something else under the coping and the strength. You listen in a different way with the distance of time, and you hear the yearnings, the silent screams hidden in the margins, the nuance of phrases that attempt to contain all of the emotions - or cover them up.

At times I would be performing the script on stage and a sentence would hit me in the heart with understanding that had previously eluded me. It seemed as if a wiser version of myself was shifting the vocal inflection and emphasis, thus exposing a carefully masked truth.

This is why we write and share, to find community in acknowledging that there may be more to our lives than what we say there is. Than what we acknowledge even to ourselves.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” - Joan Didion

There were times that I found it very hard to bring the opening “Personal Declaration” to an audience because I could remember the terror and pain, but was reading only intimation and my veiled anger of the time. That’s all I could manage back then, but in the ensuing time there has been much to unpack, unravel and knit into something that makes an unmistakeable pattern. And hopefully a picture that others can locate themselves in, or avoid as best they can. 

The themes in that first section will recur and be revealed throughout the piece, so for now I will leave undisturbed the foreshadowing of the felt danger of living in a woman’s body. The confusion and, in that era at least, the unmentionable fact of reaching puberty and noticing (or ignoring) all the changes in my body as I started to get habituated to the all-pervasive and intrusive male gaze; literal and cultural.

And I will leave for later an elaboration on the fear and denial of death and dying. Then the generalized insistence on toughing things out, turned into the specific language of “Fighting Cancer”. That’s a lot and I am only an expert in my own story. 

Like all of us, at times I question the wisdom and value of sharing what I write, especially when feeling the raw vulnerability of what it contains. So when I notice myself faltering, I draw on the promise I made to my coaching client, Bev. 

Bev told me, after hearing Breastless, that I needed to continue to tell this story and to share my full experience, “For all the women who don’t have your voice, Emma. For those of us who don’t write like you do.” 

What Bev chose not to tell me during that last conversation between us was that she too had just recently been given a breast cancer diagnosis. She, in fact, had chosen not to tell anyone nor undergo treatment. 

Having nursed her sister through breast cancer treatment, end of life care and eventual death, I was told that Bev had wanted nothing of that route and was very clear in her acceptance of following her own body’s path.

Bev died unexpectedly quickly in February 2020 (we wonder now whether her persistent, dry cough during my performance in January of that year was Covid), leaving me with no opportunity to thank her for her encouragement nor with a chance to support her in her process. So, with sadness and with gratitude for her belief in this project, I continue to write. I respect the strength in her decision, while also wishing we could have talked at length in the ways we used to.

This one’s for you, Bev.