Guest Blogger Susan Hagen: Birthdays, cupcakes, and healing through writing

  • Guest Blogger Susan Hagen: Birthdays, cupcakes, and healing through writing

    Note from Marlene: Guest Blogger Susan Hagen encourages us to have fun. And shows us how we can heal through writing . . . one of my strong beliefs, also.

    I hope you enjoy Susan’s post:

    To celebrate our 62nd birthdays, my best friend and I recently spent the weekend in Disneyland. Despite creaky knees and stiff backs, we were ready to party like … well, like eight-year-olds.

    We had great fun on the (not-too-wild) rides and enjoyed being playful and somewhat silly. But in that space of awareness about our childhoods, what arose in both of us were memories of disappointing birthdays of the past.

    It’s never too late to have that birthday cupcake.

    For me, it was 1963, the year I turned eight. My mother was supposed to bring chocolate cupcakes to my third-grade class at the end of the school day.

    But a few days before my birthday, President John F. Kennedy was shot. Guess what day his funeral was? That’s right. My birthday. No school, no cupcakes, no party. I was too young to understand why everything shut down that day. All I knew was that my birthday was ruined, and I was devastated.

    Disneyland was my cupcake.

    So at age 62, I made Disneyland my cupcake. I screamed like an eight-year-old on the roller coaster. I ate the ears off more than one Mickey Mouse confection. I even climbed aboard a few kiddie rides with my BFF, who found a way to heal her own birthday traumas, too.

    When the weekend was over, we declared it all complete. We’d both had the best birthday EVER in the Happiest Place on Earth.

    You can heal that stuff through writing, too.

    Sometimes it takes putting your story down on paper to see how you can heal things from the past. Writing helps us bring ourselves current. We write a story about some part of our lives, and then we see how we’ve grown—not only since that time, but maybe even because of it. Writing helps us illuminate the dark places. It helps us bloom into greater self-awareness and self-acceptance. And it helps us make sense of our lives: how we got to here from there.

    So go ahead. Have that birthday cupcake, even if it is 54 years old! 

    Susan Hagen’s writing career began in the 1970s as a newspaper reporter in Northern California. She later served as editor of employee publications. She has since worked as a freelance writer for more than 100 corporations and nonprofit agencies across the country.

    In 1994, Susan became a firefighter and emergency medical technician in rural Sonoma County, California, where half the members of her firehouse were women. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she and her colleagues were acutely aware of the absence of women in media portrayals of rescue workers at Ground Zero.

    Susan combined her knowledge of the fire service with her experience as a writer to conceive of the idea for the book, Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and Compassion, with co-author, Mary Carouba.  She and Mary traveled to New York City to find and interview female first responders for their award-winning book, which was published by Penguin Putnam in 2002.

    Since the publication of Women at Ground Zero, Susan has seen firsthand the power of sharing one’s story. Many of the women featured in her book believe that telling their stories was the first step in healing from the tragedy of 9/11. Susan draws on these experiences, along with those from her own life-changing journey, to help others give voice to the stories of their lives.

    Note from Marlene: Women at Ground Zero is one of my favorite books. A fascinating story of remarkable courage . . . the courage that took Hagen and Carouba from their comfortable home in Northern California to New York City to learn more about the first responders for the attack on New York City. They interviewed 30 women whose stories are told in detail in this riveting book that reads like a novel.

    Marlene C

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  • Rewrite your past.  Prompt #327

    Today’s writing prompt is inspired by something Susan Hagen wrote.

    “A seminal moment in my life occurred when I was barely three years old. I remember sitting on the kitchen counter, pouring chocolate chips into Mom’s cookie dough. In a nod to our teamwork, my very pregnant mother said, ‘Two heads are better than one.’

    A few months later, she gave birth to twins. All I could see was that they had two heads, and she had told me that ‘two heads are better than one.’ So instead of being happy that I’d gotten a baby sister AND a baby brother, I set myself on a lifelong mission to prove that my one head was as good as their two. That showed up as a double major in college, having two jobs throughout most of my life, and constantly battling an inner voice that said ‘you’re not good enough’ (because I only had one head).

    Then I began to rewrite my childhood.

    The first thing I did was rewrite that memory with one simple change: as I poured the chocolate chips into the cookie dough, my mother said, ‘I love doing things with you. You are so smart and helpful. You will make a great big sister.’ And when I wrote it, I felt it. When I read it out loud to my writing circle, it became my truth. And since then, I’ve been remembering more and more of my childhood as being happy.

    Your mind doesn’t know the difference between what actually happened and what you imagine.

    That’s why this works. Rewriting your story from a different perspective lays down new memories in your brain. When you read that story aloud in a safe, supportive circle of listeners, and we witness it and mirror it back to you, the new story gets installed in your memory and felt in your body as a different, more pleasant experience. You also get to see (and feel) things you couldn’t before. I promise you, there are a lot of surprises. Like compassion. Gratitude. And love.”

    — Susan Hagen

    Suggested Writing Prompt From Marlene

    Did a scene from your childhood pop into your head as you read Susan Hagen’s story? If yes, write about what happened as you remember it. Then, write the same story with whatever changes suit you.

    If a childhood vision didn’t emerge, recall a time when you felt put down, frowned upon, scowled at, belittled. . . remember a time when you felt bad because of something someone did or said. Write what happened as you remember it. Then rewrite with tweaks that suit you.

    Susan Hagen is a past contributor to The Write Spot Blog: “What I Want To Tell You.”

    She is co-author of Woman At Ground Zero: Stories of Compassion and Courage

    Marlene C

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  • Guest Blogger Susan Hagen: What I want to tell you…

    Guest Blogger Susan Hagen wants to tell you something…

    After a long weekend together, I wrote this to honor the courage and heart of the students at my fall writing retreat. I offer it again here to all of you:

    What I want to tell you is that you are not like most people.

    Most people would not be awakened at dawn by the beating of a drum and feel happy about it. Most people would not hurry through their yogurt and bacon to climb a hill and sit all day on a threadbare couch. Most people would not spend four days putting words in a notebook or listening deeply to the words other people spent four days putting in a notebook – and pay for the privilege.

    They would not weep in front of strangers, or talk about their sex lives, or say truth be told, I’m glad my parents are dead. They would not slow down enough to imagine rivers running beneath their skin, or their outbreath a ribbon of air that gives lift to the raven, or their bones redwood trees, or their heartbeats the container for love.

    Who would say I dropped acid and galloped around the neighborhood as a horse spirit?  Who would say I asked the ocean to make love to me and she did? Who thinks about collagen as peach juice, or allows talkback from a spider, or cares about a certain tree only because it’s important to an owl? Who loves water so much it falls from her eyes when she speaks of it?

    Most people would not cry because they feel sorry for a character they’ve just made up. They would not care so much about a pretend Indian on a pretend horse that they cannot move them forward for fear of what might befall them.

    Who loves like that over what most would perceive as nothing? Who loves over nothing so much it hurts?

    Writers do. Writers love like that.

    So this is what I want to tell you. You are not like most people. No one speaks the ceremony of life the way you do. It’s the way you see things, the way you turn them over in your hand, that one silky line that comes with the afternoon rain: “A drop falls, and I am born.”

    I know you are no stranger to this. The stories are in your bones and your blood and your breath. This is who you are. It’s the gift you have been given and the gift you give away. You are not like most people. You are the living story coming through.

    Susan Hagen is an award-winning nonfiction writer, writing teacher, and co-author of Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and Compassion. Her writing programs are inspired by the vision quest, an annual journey into the wilderness that informs her life and work. As a writing guide, Susan combines meditation and nature-based practices to help clear a path to the deeper writing life. She offers writing retreats for women twice a year, and Saturday writing circles at her cottage in Occidental. Upcoming dates are January 18, February 22, March 15, and April 26. Contact Susan at suzhagen@sonic.net or 707-874-9223

    Marlene C

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