Today I went to my first art therapy session, and I’m writing this now as I sit alone in my garden, reflecting on how it has made me feel. I’ve always loved art and I’ve recently been dabbling in a little home pottery, but it’s not something I’ve done a lot of in recent years. All the writing I’ve been doing since my cancer diagnosis has definitely felt like I have carved out a creative space for myself, and so I’ve not really felt the urge to draw or paint.
But when I found out that the wonderful cancer charity in the city where I live ran art therapy sessions, I was really keen to get involved. So, I was excited to start the course today, and I’ve come home feeling more relaxed than I have done in a while. The focus in today’s session was ‘here and now’ and I knew straight away what I wanted to create: something that reflected the two worlds I seem to be living in now my treatment has finished.
The first world is one of an ever-present fear that the cancer will return, that I have not really escaped, that it is simply hiding, waiting for my back to be turned before it reaches out to claim me. It is a world of anxious waiting for the results of blood tests and of scans. It is the anxiety of not knowing whether I will be able to cope with this life in limbo, whether I have the strength to face what might come next. And it is a world formed of the isolation that this brings, the difficulty in explaining to those around me that, for me, this journey is far from over. That despite outward appearances, I still feel broken inside.
The second world is one that holds a tentative hopefulness. It is the world of beginning to move on, to get back to the life I had to put on hold all those many months ago. It is also a world of connections: to my friends and family as my social calendar has begun to fill again, to my work colleagues as I begin my phased return to work. And, as I sat in the art therapy room listening to the stories of the other women around me, this world also became about the connections we had through our shared experiences.
Each of us was on our own individual journey, and so our stories and experiences were different in many ways. And yet, we understood each other in a way that others couldn’t. As one of the group members said, we were part of a club that no one wants to be in. And so, while we mixed paints and smoothed pastels, while we cut and we coloured, we found the threads that connected us, this group of strangers. The visceral experience of being faced with your own mortality, the physical and emotional pain of coping with treatment, the loneliness of travelling this particular path, and our understanding that the journey had fundamentally changed us, that we would never be the same person we were before our diagnosis.
It was a deeply moving experience, listening to the stories of these unbelievably brave and resilient women, brought together in this creative space. And I was struck, once again, by the power that such a space holds. In the act of crafting and making and doing, we found sort of a freedom, a sort of release. It was a space where guards could be let down, feelings could be felt and validated, anger and frustration could find a voice, and sadness could be expressed in words and colours and tears.
It was a space in which we could breathe, in which we could simply be. With ourselves, with our stories, with each other. This creative space seemed to give us the opportunity to put aside the outside world of expectations and demands and to really feel our feelings, to acknowledge them and in some small way to let them go, at least for a little while. It was a space where we were not defined by our cancer, but by the strength and compassion we brought to that space. As mothers and daughters, sisters and friends. As women reaching out for connection, in our pain and our fears, but also in our hope and our courage.
