Healing Stories
All of Us Have a Story to Tell
These personal accounts provide a source of inspiration and hope to others. If you would like to share your own healing story, please submit to Healing Hamlet.
Pushing the Piano Home
Jennifer Valentine Once we get it to the street I said, Its all pretty much downhill from here. And we looked toward home together, surveying the potholes, dips and little inclines. I came across a small, chapel sized upright piano on its side last Monday in someone’s yard, two hours before you had to leave …
A Boat Trip Gone Beautifully Wrong
Angie Miller If arguments broke out, we’d just be an ugly family caught in a real-life Survivor episode. It was better to stay silent. My husband and I were guiding our packed canoe which must have weighed 500 pounds into the worst boat launch in the world–a 13 step stairway …
An Interesting Woman
Stef Thompson I am an interesting woman because I am a woman of story. I have been created from stories; the stories told to me by others and the stories I tell myself. Sometimes I am told the story of how I am brave and independent, living a life of …
No Fear Here
Wheelchair Dancer I’d like to paint my life in brush strokes large and strong. In colours loud and fierce. So that wherever I go, all of me goes. A life without fear. I‘ve been thinking about what you have to give up to get wherever you are. Yes, I’ve been …
It’s Better to Receive
Jackie Hugh People are naturally altruistic creatures and have an innate need to be needed. A feeling I once thought was mine and mine alone. Everyone just go away and leave me alone, I wanted to scream. As these words bubbled up in the back of my throat, friends hovered over …
Small Victories
Angella Lister I reached to help her out of the bath. “No,” she said. “I have to do this. You won’t always be around so I have to keep doing for myself, or I’ll lose the ability.” Yesterday morning, while my 86-almost 87-year-old mother was bathing, I went into the bathroom …
The Stairs
Ashley Larkin These oak stairs lead down to the snarls of dress-up clothes, all toulle and apron strings on the floor, to the computer where I write and where we try to make sense of money, and to the couch where we play board games and watch movies on the boxy TV. The stairs carry …
Art and Love and Healing
Julia Fehrenbacher Here’s the truth. When I say “no” to what feeds and fills me, when I decide something else matters more than doing what lights me up- I become empty. And when I’m empty, I miss the beauty of Here. This morning before I exercised or cleared the breakfast dishes off …
Walk with a Friend after a Suicide
For Dave “So you never know,” I would have told you. “If when you get up in the morning, it’s going be that day when you meet someone new and ride a jet ski for the first time.” We were supposed to go walking on a Wednesday, but that Monday you were …
The Book War
Wang Ping I discovered “The Little Mermaid” in 1969. That morning, when I opened the door to light the stove to make breakfast, I found my neighbor reading under a streetlight. The red plastic wrap indicated it was Mao’s collected work. She must have been there all night long, for her hair and shoulders were …