One of the most inspiring courses I took during my MAIS journey was MAIS-616: Writing to Heal. My professor for this course was Dr. Reineke Lengelle, who has extensive qualifications regarding how people can use writing as a form of therapy to heal from sickness, disease, trauma, and compromised mental health. From this course, in my ePortfolio, I included my paper titled “An Autoethnographic Analysis of My Mother’s Writing Practice.” This paper was the first time I used my own life as a qualitative research component. I wanted to use my family’s experience dealing with my mother’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death as a way to help understand why some people benefit from writing while others, like my mother, don’t appear to experience the potential benefits.

               My mother and I both used a daily writing practice throughout our lives. My mother wrote in a diary every day, filling up boxes of diaries throughout her lifetime. I ended up finding these diaries underneath her bed after she passed away in hospice at only sixty years old. However, through all of her writing, my mother was never able to heal her emotions and struggled mentally, physically, and emotionally throughout her lifetime. When I eventually read her diaries and wrote out her life journey as a novel, I found her diaries filled with rage, resentment, frustration, and hatred.  As I read over fifty years of her words, I noticed how she was never able to shift these debilitating emotions into healthier emotions, like empathy, compassion, understanding, or love. The thesis for my paper became clear to me quite quickly as I uncovered research on precisely what it takes to successfully use writing as a form of healing.

               As I read through the applicable articles on how writing can be used as therapy, I discovered that our professor, Dr. Reineke Lengelle, provided some of the most comprehensive qualitative and quantitative research I could find. One of Lengelle’s main arguments is that people must move from their first and most limiting story to their second and breakthrough story. Our first story is where we often blame other people, feel sorry for ourselves, and express a lot of the more negative emotions like hate and anger. Our second story occurs after we let go of our blame and rage and write a whole new story, focusing on self-love, forgiveness, understanding, and positivity. Lengelle’s words acutely portrayed my mother’s life journey: she was never able to move into her second story. She stayed stuck and continued to lash out at those around her, never able to calm her frazzled mind, emotions, and spirit. For those of us wanting to heal through writing, it is imperative that we make a clear and resounding choice to heal, grow, and let go of our pain.

               Writing this autoethnographic paper was a novel experience for me. It felt so powerful to use my family’s experience as qualitative research for one of my master’s most important papers. It was a time for me to develop a greater understanding of my mother and her journey, my family and our dynamics, and myself as the daughter of a mother full of rage and bitterness. I also developed a strong desire to use writing as a form of healing in my own tutoring practices. For example, I can encourage my students to use their life experiences more often in their writing, let go of any negative emotions they might be carrying, and develop greater empathy for those around them. This paper was also deeply interdisciplinary as I studied themes of mental health, writing practices, medicine, hospice care, family dynamics, child, sexual, and mental abuse, trauma, disease, and relationships. Writing to heal was a new topic for me, and I finished the course feeling like I had become a better person for having taken it and worked with Dr. Lengelle so extensively.