My whole life changed when, at the age of 27, I was suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer.  At a time when my husband and I should have been focusing on our future, we filled our days with managing the side effects of my chemotherapy. Instead of starting a family we had to concentrate on my recovery from surgeries.  I needed a way to cope, clear my mind, and document my journey.

I turned to writing.

At first, I started a blog to keep my family and friends informed of my medical appointments. The more I wrote, the more my writing became a source of support and inspiration for me. As I sat alone in cold clinic rooms for scans and procedures, I would envision the comments left by others on my blog. I could feel the love and positive energy surrounding me like beacons twinkling in the night. I knew whatever happened, we would all be okay, because we had each other.

When I couldn’t sleep, I’d take out my computer and start typing.  At times, tears rolled down my face as my fingers typed faster than my emotions could keep up. I wrote things that I hadn’t yet taken the time to slow down and process. Often I would seek out little, sometimes humorous, moments in my life to write about to relieve the heaviness of the dark days.

Five years after that diagnosis we were blessed with our beautiful daughter through the help of a gestational surrogate.  I thought our story was ending with “happily ever after,” but less than four months later I learned my cancer had metastasized.

My cancer was no longer about pink ribbons.

This time it meant I was fighting for my life.  I would never again hear the words, “You are cancer free.”  I was left wondering how long I would have to see my baby grow up.  At the young age of 33, I had already been to too many funerals for my friends that had passed away from metastatic breast cancer.  This second diagnosis left me facing a new plot that could have an entirely different resolution.

One day, while at the cancer center for treatment, I met a four-year-old girl and her family. She wore a princess shirt and her family of three lit up with excitement as they told me about their recent vacation to Disney World.  Our baby was about to turn one year old so, naturally, I saw in them my own little family. It was then that I decided I wasn’t going to wait for my baby to grow up to make all sorts of memories with her. Months later, I learned that cancer took that mother away from her family forever.  Though my interaction with that young woman was short, she became a shooting star in my life and made more of an impact on me than she was ever able to realize. Being inspired by her example, I’ve been lucky enough to have written about my daughter’s first time taking off in an airplane, and her first time experiencing the power and beauty of the ocean.

My little girl is now three and I continue to document as much of my life as I can.  I jot down ordinary moments that touch my heart.  Whether it be song lyrics, a simple interaction with my daughter, or a memory of my own childhood.  I seek out the tiny daily miracles and interactions in life that can be easily overlooked. I find these moments can be as magical as a blazing comet in the evening sky.

When you take the time to look, you’ll find amongst all the darkness, your life story is sprinkled with many stars. Parts of our life storylines are laid out for us.  All of us face our own struggles.  The thing is that we can strengthen and inspire others by sharing bits about our experiences.  We each have the power to light the way for others who may be in their own dark of night.

Being part of a writing community has changed so much for me. I have been a writer my entire life, but I have almost always navigated the ocean of words on my own. Only in the last year have I come to realize what it means to my journey to have other oarsmen in the boat with me, fellow travelers reaching as I reach, all of us gaining momentum from the knowledge that we are moving through the same storms en route to our individual ports. Surely the salt on our brows is the same; truly the wind filling our sails blown from islands of inspiration.

Alright. That’s enough of that ship.

It is precisely in avoidance of such a collapse into cliché that I can turn to my writing community. They are there to help me keep my grammar in check, and to encourage me to delve deeper into my characters or setting. They commiserate over growing piles of rejection letters. For all the obvious reasons, I am grateful for those trusted individuals I have finally learned to recognize as an integral part of my writing process, but there is more to it than that. There was a learning curve, as I slowly acquainted myself with what it means to engage with other writers, and its particular sweep revealed a plethora of subtle advantages.

1. I was able to practice sharing my story, not simply through edited selections of writing, but also through comments and discussion. This process has helped me to become clearer on what I want to share as I write my book, to experiment with exposition versus scene, and to better appreciate what others find engaging and valuable.

2. In those first tentative shares of my writing, I opened myself up to feedback, even if it was initially on the saccharine side (most writers, I find, are blessed with the instinct to gingerly handle such fledgling offers). Practice at dealing with critique is necessary, and learning to do so gradually allowed me to build my way up to a place where I became eager for the feedback, knowing that it will improve my work and make me a more critical thinker.

3. Joining online forums, workshops, and meet-up groups introduced me to a wider array of people who provided me with the opportunity to think beyond the confines of personal perspective, and to make some thoughtful assumptions about what others might read in a particular passage. I can look at my writing with an eye for what others might take from it now, whereas before I could only see it subjectively. One of the best scholastic exercises I ever undertook was having another person read something I had written out loud. I was fortunate in that the person I was paired with was the one in the class furthest from my own experiences. The difference in literal voice – the timbre, the pauses, the emphases – was astounding, and it made me realize how what we hear in our own heads as we write may not be close to how it is interpreted by our readers.

4. Simply listening proved invaluable. In witnessing the stories of others, I became grounded in the knowledge that while my own tale is unique and needs to be told, that it is also just one amid those of everyday people, living lives of joy, tragedy, confusion, suspicion, and resolution. There is great comfort in knowing how relatable each of our individual threads can be.

5. I became connected to the hard work that I need to be doing. Occasionally, this happened because I could sense the hallow excuses of others and began to more easily recognize them when they came tumbling out of my own mouth. But mostly, it was because as I listened to the members of my writing community comment on what they were giving up to write, I found myself moved to push through the inspirational droughts.

6. It gave me cause to celebrate their wins – collaborations, shortlists, awards, personal word count bests, filling in longstanding plot holes – and to know that each step is in itself a victory. It helped me view firsthand the reality that successes are possible.

7. I realized that when I stay connected to my writing community that I stay connected to my writing.

That last point was probably the most important one for me. I know now that finding my community is one of the biggest things that I changed to move from writing being a hobby to it being what I do every day. Somehow, in all the years that I dabbled in what I claimed as a passion, it never occurred to me that surrounding myself with similarly focused people could help me to make my craft a priority.  Knowing others have some sort of expectation of me as a writer – whether to compose a poem, dig into research or an outline, or deliver a finished chapter for feedback – makes me take myself more seriously. And it manifests as a driving force that keeps my pen moving across the page and my fingers dancing across the keys.