This article is dedicated to the large number of my Followers who are writers. This one is for you:
At 5:00 a.m. this morning I was awakened by a conversation with The Spirit. I was taken on a journey down memory lane:
At age 6, my first recorded sentence was “Jerry is a prat”
This was written in very poor penmanship on the cover of one of my mother’s magazines. Looking at that sentence now tells me so much about who I was at that age.
– I was 6 years old and had the shaking handwriting of a child just learning to write
– We were living in Arlington, Virginia where my father was working at the Pentagon
– I was a little girl raised in the Air Force. By the time I was 6, we had lived in Colorado, the Panama Canal Zone, Montgomery, Alabama, and Virginia
– Because we moved so often, I had missed learning Phonics and was a terrible speller
– I may have had ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or a bit of Dyslexia because I reversed B’s and P’s
– I used my feeble writing to express, in a public way, my feelings about my older brother. I meant to say, “Jerry is a brat.”
– I was raised in a family that didn’t talk about our feelings. I wanted my mother to see how I felt about my brother.
– Deep within me, my spirit was driven to express my deepest feelings. And how did I do it? As a little writer.
We didn’t speak about our feelings, so I wrote them down, on a magazine, in the living room, for my parents to read. As I recall, there was no discussion, but the event was significant enough that my mother saved the magazine cover all those years ago and it rests today in my early life album.
When I was age 10, we were now living in Midwest City, Oklahoma and stationed at Tinker Air Force Base. I no longer have the physical evidence, but the memory of my second writing episode on the inside of my First Communion Bible is etched in my memory:
– I had written that I hated my mother
– I wrote a whole paragraph
– I wanted God to know my feelings
– I wanted my mother to find this writing
I am very fortunate that my mother did open my Bible and had the insight to sit me down on my bed and talk very gently with me. It turns out that I didn’t really hate my mother. I actually loved her very deeply but didn’t get enough personal time with her. She was very busy with my father’s career, social activities, and their adult friends. There was little time for a young 10-year-old girl who needed more time with her mommy.
She shared about herself as a lonely teenager who had used writing to express her anger at her father. She wrote a letter to her father’s best friend and said some terrible things that fractured her father’s relationship with his friend. That fracture was never repaired, and she deeply regretted it. She didn’t really hate her father, she admitted. She loved him deeply but was angry that she didn’t get enough time with him in his busy life as a cattle rancher and community leader.
It’s amazing to see how “generational patterns” of behavior can be passed from parent to child.
As a 17-year-old Senior in high school, I fell in love with Essay Questions in my Honors American Problems class. I had a very creative teacher who had been trained at Yale University but chose to return to teaching high school students in Tucson, Arizona.
He loved stimulating young minds and expanding their imaginations through writing. Most of our exams were essays. He asked us to write dialogues between historical figures that utilized the history of the political eras, national and international events, culture, personality traits.
I loved this teacher, loved writing essays, loved being given this opportunity to tap into my intelligence and creativity. This teacher changed the trajectory of my college career. Prior to this class I thought I wanted to be a nurse. After this course, I was led to get a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in Sociology and Psychology, a minor in French.
The Spirit brought so many more memories to the surface this morning:
– My intrigue with heavy emotional writers Anne Sexton and John Donne
– Falling in love with Case Histories of patients in Psychology classes
– Choosing to get my Master of Social Work degree, where clinicians were required to write “Clinical Notes” after a therapy session with clients
– Me being named “Head of Education” for the numerous Medical Social Workers at Maricopa County General Hospital. I introduced a “multi-media approach” using popular music, photos I shot of the indigent population’s poor neighborhoods that limited their connection to health care, literacy, resources, and my clinical assessment that new medical interns and residents needed to understand these complexities before discharging patients without adequate discharge planning.
– A long history of presenting Holistic Clinical Scientific papers at national and international conferences
– God’s use of writing in my journals and dream journals since 1976, to heal my childhood wounds, the trauma of divorce and being a single mother with 2 young kids to raise, preparing me to become a healthy adult and future wife, writing 2 multi-award-winning books, healing me on my current 4-year journey with Pancreatic cancer
– I designed, wrote all content, shot stills and videos for my 3 websites:
www.HolisticCancerRecoveryHub.com
Judith Anne Desjardins YouTube channel
Writing about my body, mind, emotions and spirit has been the throughline of my entire life:
– Writing is part of my essence
– Writing comes naturally to me
– Writing helps me breathe and connect with others, my Self, and God
– Writing is a gift
– Writing is my vehicle for expressing Love
– I love writing
#JudithAnneDesjardinsPancreaticWarriorMaiden #AnatomyofaWriter #TheLoveofBeingaWriter
#WritingasaSpirtualGift #EncouragementforWriters #ASweetGiftfromTheSpirit