Delightful, powerful ripple effects: Samantha’s memoir

“The Samantha White book arrived this afternoon,” my friend wrote in an email, “and I'm about 30 pages into it already. Boy, can I relate! Thank you so much for suggesting it.”

I had mentioned to my friend—let’s call her Erin—that she might enjoy Samantha’s memoir, Someone to Talk To:  Finding Peace, Purpose, and Joy After Tragedy and Loss, and Erin ordered Samantha’s book that very day!

About 24 hours after Erin started reading Samantha’s memoir, she sent another email: “What a gift…! Samantha’s path, experiences and emotions are so very similar to mine that it is uncanny.… It is such a relief to hear others felt or feel the same way I do.”

Before long, Erin wrote again:  “On page 177 in Samantha's book she states for the first time she has fibromyalgia. OMG! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! Both in our 70s, she and I have walked parallel lives on opposite coasts. No wonder her words so resonated with me.…

“Other than the Bible, her book is probably the most impacting and significant book I have ever read! Honestly. Our paths and feelings are so very similar. On almost every page I could say ‘That's me! That's exactly me!’ Only someone who has been there can have even an inkling of the pain we suppress and try not to self acknowledge. 

“Thank you again, Linda, for mentioning Samantha's book to me. No longer feeling so alone, it is a comfort to read about someone who has lived this and survived and, more importantly, thrived! Telling her story helped heal her and it is a significant step in helping with my healing.”

Some of you—perhaps many of you—

fear your story is not worth telling.

You worry no one would want to read your memoir.

I hope you will reconsider and write your story.

You lived your story

so that,

like Samantha,

you can bless others with and through it.

Think how exciting and rewarding that would be.

Think of how moving it would be to learn

your story could help answer someone’s prayers.

Think of the way God could use your memoir

to bring healing and hope.

Put yourself in Samantha’s place: What would you feel if you received messages like Erin’s?

Samantha emailed: “Passing Erin’s words on to me, the message that my book is helping and inspiring her, was a blessing. It is what I prayed for, all the time I was writing it. ‘Please let this book fly on wings to those who might derive some comfort, courage and inspiration from it.’ Please thank Erin for me, for her words, which are an answer to my prayers.”

Did you catch that? Samantha prayed while she wrote her memoir. She asked God to give others comfort, courage, and inspiration from her experience and her memoir. How exciting is that?!

You, too, can pray while you write.

Who knows what God might do through your story?

In her earlier guest post here at SM 101, Samantha said writing her memoir was “among the toughest, most draining, most rewarding things I have ever done” but her painful past and the tough job of writing her memoir brought about blessing and healing for her and others like Erin.

But there’s more to Samantha’s story. Personal Life Coach, memoirist, and retired psychotherapist, she wrote:

“When I moved to another state I had to leave my private practice of psychotherapy behind, and discovered that I missed doing my life’s work and needed to develop a new practice, with a new emphasis. And so my life coaching practice was born!”

Check out Samantha’s new website at http://LifeCoachSamantha.com and sign up for her newsletter, Recipe for Healing, a once-a-month short message of encouragement for surviving and thriving after tragedy and loss.

Be sure to click on Samantha’s earlier post about writing and publishing her memoir.  Take a few minutes to read it. You’ll be inspired.

Samantha’s memoir: “among the toughest, most draining, most rewarding things I have ever done”

Today we welcome Samantha White, psychotherapist, Positive Aging Coach, and memoirist. If her name sounds familiar, it’s because she shared a story with us last December. Today she tells us about writing and publishing her memoir, Someone to Talk To. Be sure to check out her blog, too, Peace, Purpose, and Joy.

Welcome, Samantha!

I’m honored to be a guest here. Linda invited me to write about my memoir, Someone to Talk To: Finding Peace, Purpose and Joy After Tragedy and Loss; A Recipe for Healing from Trauma and Grief, and about the inspiration I received from the Book of Job. Obviously, I don’t keep my sentences or my book titles short, but I’ll do my best to say a lot in a small space.

One of the ingredients in my book’s Recipe for Healing is a spiritual belief system, a sense of some kind of meaning in life. When tragedy and loss—my  husband’s mental illness, the end of our marriage, betrayal by the next man I loved, the violent death of my daughter—piled up and left me flattened, unable to function and wanting to die, I had no spirituality to support me. How to move from a complete lack of faith to finding something I could believe in?

Ironically, Spirit—or God, the Great Invisible, the Force—found me instead, and planted Itself right in front of me. I heard someone say, “God works through people,” and a light went on somewhere in my head. I realized that even if I didn’t believe in a Heavenly Creator, I could believe in the loving acts of people. A gift from a friend, a subscription to a gentle, non-dogmatic magazine of daily spiritual devotions, offered me an entrance to a spiritual belief I could accept. I became more aware of the acts of love bestowed upon me every day by caring people.

Then there was the Book of Job. All I knew about it was that it was a long, tedious read about suffering. But when I was looking for something to listen to in the car, I came across a recording of the play J.B., a modern retelling of the story read by the author, Archibald MacLeish. I started listening to it in snatches. It gripped me, pulled me in, held me to its great surprise finish. I had never known that Job’s suffering ended, that his life became filled with joy and riches, his pleasure in life restored, all because he persisted in his faith!

So I opted to believe that there was a Divine force that would manifest through the people in my life and carry me to a state of healing. The climb was hard and long, and throughout it all the story of my journey was forming. The words and sentences gathered in me for many years, until I felt driven to express and share them with others who might find hope and courage in my eventual healing and joy, as I had found in Job’s.

I wrote feverishly, driven from within, compelled not to waste all the pain from which there was so much to learn. I was overtaken by an urgency to get it published, dogged by the fear that I might die before completing the project, and repeatedly told my husband how to treat the manuscript if I didn’t live to finish it. To avoid losing time writing book proposals and seeking an agent or a publisher, I opted to self-publish.

When it was finally completed, a great weight lifted from me. I had learned and grown from tragedy and loss, captured my experience in words, and offered them up to share with others. To my utter surprise, the book received a 2012 Nautilus Book Award in the category of Grieving/Death & Dying.

To me it is not as much about Grief and Death as it is about Healing—mine, and that of its readers. People tell me that they find it hard to put down, satisfying to read, and inspirational. I like to think it has wings taking it wherever it needs to go, recommended and given as gifts by those who find something in the story that speaks to them, that feels worth passing along.

Writing it was among the toughest, most draining, most rewarding things I have ever done. The only thing greater in all those aspects was the actual experience it relates. Taken in totality, it justifies and honors the pain that motivated all of it.

Do you have questions for Samantha? If so, leave them in the comments section below, or send an e-mail to grandmaletters [at] aol [dot] com (replace [at] with @ and replace [dot] with a period) and please write “Question for Samantha” in the subject line (so I’ll know it’s not spam). Thanks.

Samantha’s Christmas story

In mid-November* I invited you to send your Christmas vignettes by December 10 and promised I’d select one to publish here the week before Christmas.

Your responses were fun, and I send a big thanks to everyone who sent a story.

I’ve decided to publish four vignettes, not one, and today you get to read Samantha White’s story. It will give you a big smile. I wish I could have known her mother. You’ll see why when you read this story.

My family was Orthodox Jewish, but my mother, bless her, knew that Christmas was about more than the birth of Jesus, it was also about light breaking through the darkness, bringing peace and love and joy, and she was determined that her children would not be "passed over" when light, joy, and love were being dispensed to all the other children in our overwhelmingly Gentile neighborhood.

So, amidst the observance of Hanukkah and all the other business of December, every Christmas Eve Dad brought two wooden orange crates up from the cellar and nailed a plywood plank across the top, joining them into something resembling a fireplace.

My little brother and I watched while Mom covered it with crepe paper printed with a design of bricks, marveling as the boxes took on the realistic look of a fireplace. We tacked a couple of socks to the "mantel" and Dad carried the "fireplace" into the living room. Then my brother and I went to bed to await Santa Claus's visit to our house.

Now, we absolutely knew that the fireplace was made of orange crates and that we didn't have a chimney. But we also knew that this was Christmas Eve, and Santa did not discriminate among good little children on the basis of the religion their families practiced.

So on Christmas morning we bounded to the living room to find our proof that goodness was rewarded: gifts of toys and books, with tags reading, "From Santa Claus" were piled in front of the fireplace, and soon the living room was strewn with torn red and green gift wrapping paper and ribbons, and we were happily at play.

Since Christmas Day was also a secular holiday, Dad stayed home from work and my grandparents came to visit. Before they arrived, however, we all bustled to clear away the traces of Santa's visit—the tell-tale debris cleaned up, the "fireplace" dismantled, the crepe paper folded and put away, and the orange crates returned to the cellar, until the following year. When my grandparents arrived for dinner, no traces of our revelry remained.

My brother and I never left the faith of our ancestors, nor forgot our religion, because of Santa's visits to our house. If anything, it helped us understand how much it means to share joy at the darkest, coldest time of year, and to be with family, and to believe in rewards for being good. As we grew older, we learned that we could give as well as receive, and that in giving lay the even greater joy.

Now, don’t you, too, wish you could have known Samantha’s mother? What a spunky gal she must have been!

I recall my sweet grandmother making a makeshift fireplace with crepe paper printed to look like bricks—what a hoot!

Samantha, author of Someone To Talk To: Finding Peace, Purpose, and Joy After Tragedy and Loss, is a psychotherapist and Positive Aging Coach.* Click here to see her brand new blog, Peace, Purpose, and Joy.

Wednesday I’ll share another story with you. Will it be Diana’s? Or Kathy’s? Or Nancy’s? I’m not telling. You’ll have to come back!

*Links and references:

Send me your Christmas vignettes,

http://spiritualmemoirs101.blogspot.com/2011/11/send-me-your-christmas-vignettes.html

Samantha M. White, MSW, LICSW
http://www.someonetotalktothebook.com/
http://www.samanthawhite.com/

Samantha’s blog, Peace, Purpose, and Joy, http://www.peacepurposeandjoy.blogspot.com