Words have always been my best friends. For as long as I can remember, purging my feelings and turning them into poetry soothed and relieved me from anxiety and the effects of chronic illness. Sharing my poems on social media over the past few years has been cathartic. I immediately feel less alone because I know there is someone who can connect with my words.
After I was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma, I knew I needed to once again lean on my poetry to get me through the mental battle of cancer. I wrote every day about the pain, about feeling alone, about hair loss, about chemotherapy and radiation, about the fear of recurrence. It just spilled out of me, each poem like a therapy session, freeing me from mental and physical anguish. However, quickly into survivorship, I started to notice that my ability to write poetry was being stolen by a chemically induced writer’s block — what is often called “chemo brain.” I just couldn’t find the words anymore.
I couldn’t lose my best coping mechanism. I couldn’t just lay my creativity and love of poetry aside, knowing that it was the best way to protect my mental health. So I started writing blackout poetry. This is when you redact words from a piece of text, like a page from a book or a magazine article, and what’s left forms a micro poem. When I can’t write my own words, I borrow them from the pages of books. After I have chosen which words to leave on the page, I black out the rest of the text with artwork that captures the same emotion. Learning how to add illustrations to my blackout poems also helped me feel accomplished again.
My blackout poems usually discuss cancer, living with chronic pain and illness, mental health, or navigating my way through survivorship. I’ve been able to connect with so many other cancer survivors who feel seen in my work. We relate over the sentiment and artwork that each poem portrays, teaching me that creating is a way to bring people together. It has also taught me that we, as cancer patients, can do what we loved before; we might do it a little differently, but maybe with even better results in the end. While I may always struggle with writer’s block, I will never stop writing poetry; I bleed ink. My poetry just looks a little different now. Some may say it’s even better.