068: How Writing Your Story Can Bring Healing with Megan Febuary

After spiritual abuse, one of the first questions survivors ask is, "How did I end up here?"

If you have found yourself asking a similar question, writing can be an incredible way to discover that answer. In this episode, I speak with Megan Febuary, the author of Brave the Page. She shares how to go back to your earlier life scenes using a trauma-informed approach to fill in the missing pieces that may have drawn you to broken systems or relationships. Megan offers several tips to help you write your truth in a way that is honoring to your body and helpful in your search for healing.

Guest Spotlight ✨ 

Megan Febuary is a trauma-informed writing coach and the founder of the global storytelling platform and literary magazine For Women Who Roar. Called a leading expert in creative recovery, Megan received her MA from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, where she focused her research on the body as a storyteller.

Website | Instagram | Substack

Links & Resources 🔗

• Brave the Page by Megan Febuary | Amazon | Bookshop
• Picture This by Lynda Barry, cartoonist & educator | Amazon | Bookshop

Other Episodes You May Like

061: Healing After Spiritual Trauma with Dr. Hillary McBride

040: Making Sense of Your Story by Engaging Past Pain with Adam Young

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Episode Transcript 📄

Megan Febuary
So often the character we take on, it has great stakes, and we hold on to it because we think it's going to hurt people or offend people or wound people if we don't live by that role. So when we choose to step out of it or have an awareness to begin to, we're changing not only our narrative, like how we've understood ourselves in the world, we're changing others. Because if you dare to shift the role that you've played, if it's harmful for you, you You have to know that that's going to shift not only you but others, and that is uncomfortable.

Brian Lee
Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Broken to Beloved Podcast. If you're looking for practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Brian Lee. As an ordained pastor and fellow survivor, I know what it feels like navigating life after spiritual abuse. I also know what it's like to want to prevent anything from happening to the people you know and love. It's why Broken to Beloved exists. And, we can't do it alone. We need your help. Support our work by becoming a donor to make our podcast and programs possible. Just head to brokentobeloved.org/support or click the link to donate in the show notes.

Today, we're talking about the book, Brave the Page: How Writing Our Hard Stories Can Bring Healing and Wholeness. When I saw the book title, I knew it would be right up my alley and yours: trauma-informed story work, moving toward healing and wholeness, it checks all the boxes.

Megan February is a trauma-informed writing coach and the founder of the global storytelling platform and literary magazine for Women Who Roar. Called a leading expert in creative recovery, Megan received her MA from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, where she focused her research on the body as a storyteller.

Just so you know, we had a few technical difficulties, so audio quality may be a little bit different than you're used to, but hopefully you won't notice too much. And now, here's my conversation with our new friend, Megan.

So Megan, welcome to the podcast.

Megan Febuary
Thanks. It's nice to be here with you.

Brian Lee
It's fun to be chatting, right? I'm excited to talk about this. As soon as I saw the title, I knew I was in, especially the subtitle, because what we talk about all the time at Broken to Beloved is moving toward healing and wholeness. So when I saw that same phrase, I was like, OK, I need to talk to Megan and find out what she's doing to do this and to move people towards it. I love the way that you write in the intro that bodies are storytellers, holding the pages of our lives inside. And you write that the healing process is about uncovering displaced pages and then transforming those fragments into a cohesive hole. I love that metaphor. Obviously, we're going to be talking a lot about story, writing metaphor for throughout. How did you discover story work? What drew you to it? What was the impetus for writing the book about it?

Megan Febuary
Oh, man. I mean, there's so much, right? And I even feel like it's so funny. I've talked about this 20 million times. And as you asked that question, I felt really emotional thinking about it, which is so funny. I came to writing and creative expression at a really young age as a trauma survivor. And it was, nobody told me, this is how you find your voice. This is how you heal. There was no languaging around that.

Brian Lee
Yeah, there was none of that.

Megan Febuary
No, of course. But for me, there was just this understanding that I had with paper, with the page, with crayons with fate, that I could be really honest here, that I could make messes. I could just spill, spill it, spill everything, spill my questions, spill my fears, spill the unsayable, what I write about in the book, the unsayable things that I couldn't even name, identify. But through writing, through the work of metaphor, through creative expression, I just found myself. I found my truth. So I started doing that really young. I have Actually, I always keep it really close by, so I could show you. It's the first book that I put together when I was 12. It's 1997. It gives away my age.

Brian Lee
I love that you have that.

Megan Febuary
That's so funny. It's all typed. It's horribly written. It's not the point. But it's just this collection of stories about my life, but also kids I was with in middle school that were struggling with all kinds of mental health struggles, abuse situations, and we just put it all together. I describe it as my first anthology. It's got a very snarky title that says, They Obviously Don't Understand Any of Our Ways. Very snarky.

Brian Lee
That is the perfect 12-year-old title.

Megan Febuary
Yeah. Oh, and And it says, This is all based on the truth.

Brian Lee
Of course it is.

Megan Febuary
Of course it is. It started very young. And as I grew older, I got involved in the church, was tossed to and fro in different church settings, and ended up landing in a Southern Baptist Church, and I was a goth kid before I got there. So I was like, I was like super... Everybody was super excited.

Brian Lee
So you fit right in, right?

Megan Febuary
Oh, man. Just like, the deacons' daughters were just so afraid of me. And no, it was truly like, I was like the prime project for everyone. It was very exciting for the church to get me there. But I went from that darker setting, that darker, I don't know, self, to this space that was so bright and bubbly, and there's answers for everything. And yay, saving the day. You're saved. Congratulations. Here's your meal ticket. Everything felt very prescribed, and it worked for me. I was a very sad kid and I needed some answers. I needed something to turn a switch for me. And so at that time it worked, but it also muffled and mast a lot of my pain, which again, worked for me because I didn't know how to address it. So it was this strange sugar coating experience that I lived with and worked with for a long time and took all the medicine until the medicine stopped working when I started really addressing pain through early abuse, but also later abuse. The story came back and back and back. I talk about the last chapter of the book is You Can't Outrun Your Story.

That pretty much is what happened. It just kept circling until I had to answer it. I came across Dan Allender's work, which is how I got involved in the Seattle School. And so I knew that once this, I don't know, invitation from my body, from my mind, from everything that was starting to shift out of the constructive faith that I had, that something needed to change and deconstruct so that I could really understand my life. So I started following that path and decided to go to Seattle and deepen that work and study in that narrative therapy type setting. And I always say, I I went there really just to learn about myself. I went to school and got educated and all that stuff and turned this into meaningful work for others, which I'm so grateful for. But it really was a way to heal my life and just deepen my understanding of my own story. Yeah, that's a really abbreviated version of how I got here. I love that.

Brian Lee
Thank you for sharing that. So now you're doing this work. You're writing stories, you're helping other people write their stories. What is that like?

Megan Febuary
Oh, my gosh. I mean, it's a dream come true. I was living in existential crisis situation where every week I was having this crisis of who am I? When I started, For Women Who Roar was a literary magazine that I started. When I started that and really helped folks begin to tell their stories and letting them be messy, letting them be honest and publishing them, I began to see how people started to fall in love with their voice and started to say, This matters. I matter. My voice and story matters here. And so then I extended that out to book coaching and writing coaching and all that stuff to really offer a more expansive way of entering. And it's been incredible. I view it as sacred work, really, to be able to hold the space for folks coming in and writing about their life. Even if they're writing fiction, it's still sacred because they are saying there's room for me to tell the story, to use my voice in a wild way in this creative I'm tapping into this. I'm allowed to go here. It's sacred. It's an honor. So I'm really grateful for it.

And it worked with tons of people now at this point, and every time it happens, I have to check myself and go, Oh, my God. I can't believe I get to do this. It's really fun.

Brian Lee
It's amazing. And I love that you identified as sacred work, because I'm not helping people write their stories, but I am helping in our cohorts to help people own them and share them in a safe space where it's going to be heard and believed. And it's what we say every single time. It's like, Hey, listen, this may be the first time you've told your story out loud to someone else. And it may be the first time it's going to be believed. And so we recognize that this is a really sacred space to be in.

Megan Febuary
And it's not so different than the writing, because I always describe writing as listening. It really starts with listening. So sometimes people are like, I'm not writers. I'm not writing. And I'm like, But are you listening? If you're listening, if you're paying attention to your life, if you're paying attention to what's going on, you're writing. It's just in a different phase of it, right? You're transcribing meaning. You're dialoging in your head about what's going on. You're there.

Brian Lee
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Your 12-year-old story story. I love the bottom that this is all based on the truth. You say, To heal our stories, tell our truth, and write from the hard places, we must be willing to confront the past. And obviously, story work is about diving deep into our past. You talk about being a truth teller, that it's painful work, but it's also being a healer, a rebel, a disruptor, a catalyst for change. How in the world do we recognize the truth enough to tell it?

Megan Febuary
Oh, man, that's a great question. I think that is such a unique question for each person to begin to ask themselves. And one of the things I'd say about this discovery of being a truth teller is we have to really unwrap all these layers of ways that we've had to hide our truth and mask it to be able to get to that place. I'd say it starts with unraveling, taking off these layers. I think you just begin to go through your life just age by age, looking at it and saying, What is the most honest thing I can say here for this age? What is the most honest thing that I can share? If that's too complicated, even what was my body's experience here? Everyone has that. Because people always say, where do I start? You'll start with your body, you start with your childhood. I think the reason I'm saying that in regard to truth is that's really where it begins. There is no more honest place than in our body to discover the truth. It is holding all of our memory, all our experience, our secrets. It holds it and even manifest it at times in various ways, whether it's through physical pain or mental pain.

So when we begin to really listen to that, we can discover a truth. But it does take a lot of beginning to shed those various layers that have kept us from that. So for me, some of those layers were within the Christian fundamentals church and needing to really shed not all of it, but many of the parts of it that felt like it was dangerous for me to be me or to be sad or to be angry or to be loud as a woman. Well, at that time, a girl, whatever it was. But I had to really take off the layers and then look at myself honestly and go, who am I here? And is it okay to be here? Is it safe to be me here? And so I think truth really starts with that discovery and that layering, and looking at the body, and beginning to really listen to your life and what it wants to say.

Brian Lee
Yeah, that's helpful. I think, especially for me, as someone, we were talking earlier about being so black and white, right and wrong, that we want truth to be objective, that we think that there is only one truth. And when we look at it, it's like, well, I'm pretty sure that everything I believed when I was 12 is not the same thing I believe now. And it would be so easy to go backwards and read that book and just shame that poor child. It's like, oh, poor thing. My poor sweet summer child, you didn't know anything. But this is absolutely what we believed to be true at that age and stage in life.

Megan Febuary
Yes.

Brian Lee
And so I think approaching that The work of noticing and paying attention to our bodies, to our different ages, to all these different things, is also the work of compassion and grace for all these old versions of Goth, Megan, and Southern Baptist, Megan, and going to school, Megan, and getting away, right? And all these different things. And I love the idea that truth doesn't have to be... That truth can actually change.

Megan Febuary
Yes, it can. And I think a really important thing to remember is that we all hold our own versions of truth, right? So if you were to tell a story about eight-year-old Brian, I don't know, in class one day, having this experience with bullying, I don't know, I'm just making something up.

Brian Lee
Nailed it. All right, sorry.

Megan Febuary
But you tell that story, you write it down or however you do it. But then you would ask your friend who is in that class or the bully to tell the same story. What would their version of that be? Then you ask the teacher or your parent who you went and told, or your brother, whoever it might be, ask them all the variations of the story, and each truth begins to shift and change because of the holder of it. I think it's really important because a lot of times when folks work with me around the writing, especially if they're writing a memoir or a personal story, they're very afraid of what people are going to think. What's my mom going to think? What's my dad going to think? What's the pastor going to think? All these things. I'm like, Well, everyone's projecting their own story onto your page. We're all doing it. Even as we read someone else's work, you read this, and you're projecting your own life on it because you're coming from your own experience, your own truth around something. We're all doing this. I think when we recognize that each person holds their aversion of a truth, and that's valid for them in their experience of that, whether they're telling it honestly from our perspective or not, it's not really up to us.

They need that truth. They needed that, and we need ours. When we can be able to say that, I think it gives us a lot of permission and freedom to really own it, own ours, and they can own theirs. So just something to say there about that truth thing, and it's why it's destructive, why it shakes us up, because when we own it and stand in it, it confronts something often in another, the more honest we are.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Well, and you say, after all, the root meaning of memory is to commemorate, mourn, and visit a memorial to reflect on our lives. And we were saying this earlier that remembering is a sacred act. And in talking about the truth changing based on where and when we are, depending on who's telling the story, I love that you also point out that it's not talking about accuracy, but gathering scattered pieces and then putting them together. Because I realized I did that exact same thing in one of my last story sessions that I was doing, that it was I remember I turned in the assignment, and I'm apologizing up, and I was like, It's not a story. It's just a whole bunch of little tiny scenes that I'm patching together to turn in the assignment. And he says, No, no, no, no, no, It is just right because we're going to find the narrative, the thread that connects all of these things. And boy, did he, because 45 minutes later, I'm just like, I don't know what happened. So I love that you write that even memory gaps serve us for a reason. So as we're remembering, as we're paying attention to a body, there are going to be times that we just completely blank out on entire periods of our life on a specific moment.

Tell us about that work and how those memory gaps can serve us.

Megan Febuary
Yeah. I mean, this is a painful part of the work, right? A lot of times people, either when they're doing this writing or reflecting on their story, this is where often they halt because they get to a place where they're It's like a gap in the road or construction in the road, you can't move on. I think one of the ways when we begin to do this is to acknowledge that these gaps are there for a reason. They serve us for a reason. If there's blank spots, if there's missing puzzle pieces, then they exist in that way. Their absence exists to keep us safe from the knowing of the season. I think we have to start there because if we start from the sense of, Well, I should know. I should remember what's wrong with me, la, la, la, la, then we're working from the shame space rather than the space of like, I'm okay. This is okay. My body is doing what it needs to do. My mind's doing what it needs to do to to do well. I think we start there. Then as we're working through and gathering the pieces, it really is that.

We're gathering the pieces. This is a great trick for your perfectionism because it really is like puzzle work. We gather the piece of the story and we're putting this puzzle together and there's going to be holes in it, just like there's holes in a quilt. How do we bless those spaces that are missing? One of the things I just encourage us all to do is just bless the missing places and say, I see you. I see you there. I don't know what you are, but I know you exist. And I'm here and I'm listening. If you ever want to show yourself. Bless you. Bless you for being. And then there's also just work we can do of uncovering those. I have this timeline at the very end of that chapter in the first chapter about collecting memories, and it's called this timeline. And you just go through it and you write down every age from zero to the current age you even if you're 102, great, awesome. It'll be a long list, but you got this. You go through and you write down every age. Then next to it, you go through and you write down the fastest thing that comes to mind when you think of that age.

It could be a color, it could be a memory straight up. It could be a word, it could be a person. You just go through and you let your subconscious just shoot it out. Then once you do that, you go back through and then you select whichever one is resonating. You can go through one by one, even if you want. It's going to take a really long time. And you just start writing based on that. It could be a story, it could be a poem. But letting yourself have the permission to be messy about it, don't focus on the accuracy of it, but just take the journey of that. And it's a really powerful way to enter into those gaps. You might be surprised that some things that show up that you've forgotten about, you might see threads through each page as you go through one by one. It's a really powerful way to uncover those gaps, too. But just a reminder that they're there, and we all have them to some degree or another. Some of us have more, some of us have less, and it's okay. And they really are there for a reason.

And when we can love them and bless them, it's a really healing space to be in our story healing, for sure.

Brian Lee
Yeah. I appreciate that you have such a trauma-informed approach, because like you're saying, it can be very powerful work, and it can also be really scary work. And so paying attention to those gaps, and we're talking about puzzle pieces, it makes me think of your reference to finding the edges. Oh, yeah. And I appreciate the guardrails that you provide for people who might end up getting lost in their own stories, right? And so we talk about this work of containment and regulating when we find ourselves dissociating in one way or another. You talk about the advice from your therapist to find your edges, which I thought was just great. Tell us more about finding the edges. Because I think about for the puzzle piece, that's usually the first thing people do is what are the boundaries of this thing and what am I going to fill in?

Megan Febuary
That's a really great... I love that. I didn't make that.

Brian Lee
That's what I thought of when you were talking about it.

Megan Febuary
That's so good. Yeah, you always start typically with the edge and go, Okay, how do we work in? That's really beautiful. Maybe I was subconsciously thinking about that, and I didn't know, but I love that you made that connection. But yeah, the edges, when I was in that therapy session, I was going through a lot of dissociative reactions or responses and really floating out of my body, and it was really hard to stay. The same thing started happening when I was working through a lot of my writing, especially as I was writing about trauma. I didn't have any understanding. That's why I wrote this book. I didn't have any understanding of how do I take care of myself by doing this. I just wanted to go as deep and as hard as I could and see how deep can I go here and how far it will take me? And I didn't think about the fact that I could drown in my story. I almost did multiple times because I didn't have any safety mechanisms for myself. So when she said, Check out your edges, feel your edges, a lot of that was referring to my body at the time just to come back to the presence of myself.

So even just touching the borders of my head, my cheeks, my chin, my shoulders, my thighs. There was a place where my body stopped. It was here. I could feel it versus the sense of when I was out of body, it was just all around me. And I could look at a clock and see what time it was, or I could look at a calendar on the wall. Even though I was talking about 1989, I look on the calendar and it's 2017, right? And I was like, Oh, okay, wait. I'm here. And I look at my hands and they're big hands. They're not small like the age I'm talking about.

Brian Lee
I love that you wrote that in there.

Megan Febuary
Yeah. I mean, they're all edges, even the recognitions of that. So the same thing happens as we're writing. And I really, really encourage people to have some edges routine for themselves before they start writing so that when they dive in, and this could be the case with any story work you're doing, even if it wasn't writing, that you have some trauma-informed writing routine in place for yourself so that when you get in, you don't fall out so easily out of the edges. You can stay in. You can stay in your body. You can stay within what they call the window of tolerance, right? So you don't fly out of the window when a story gets really rough. So if you have that in place, then you can check yourself. So for instance, having a routine as simple as taking a few deep breaths before you start and blessing your body and blessing your story, and then maybe having a Timer that goes off in your writing session, 10 minutes, 20 minutes in, whatever it might be, as a reminder to check back in again, and then doing the same thing at the very end. This is just a very, very simple way, but it would be a way to have this reminder of grounding and being here, being present with yourself and noticing, Okay, I'm here.

I'm safe in this moment, versus you start writing and then you're just sinking into this abyss of story. Yeah, coming up for air. It's really important to have. It is.

Brian Lee
That's helpful. I'm being reminded of, for people who've seen the movie Inception, that idea that everyone would have a totem that you keep with you. It always reminds you and grounds you. It's like, Oh, no, I'm in reality right now. This is not a dream space. I'm not being lost in my own story, but just having those grounding exercise. For some reason, that image stuck with me of looking down and you saying, I looked at my hands and these were adult hands, not child hands in my story. And that was such a vivid thing to me. An image is like, Oh, yeah, that would pull me right back to the present. It's like, Oh, you know what? These hands have experienced things. We're looking at the calendar. It's like, Okay, it's today's date. I'm not stuck back in this year or wherever we're exploring in the story.

Megan Febuary
Yeah. And not only I have these hands experience things, but these hands can hold me now. These hands can hold this little girl or this little boy. These hands are adult hands. They have wrinkles. They've gone through things. They're wise. These are wise hands, and they can hold this young story. In these ages, it's really critical.

Brian Lee
I love it. So stories obviously have characters. There are the classic archetypes of victim, villain, hero, guide. You went to Seattle School, like Allender. I love the way he talks about the orphan, widow, and the stranger, or the priest, prophet, queen. We are all playing some role in our own story. You also talk about family systems with Golden Child, the scapegoat, the mascot, the lost child, the caretaker. Tell us how identifying the role or the character we play in our own story helps us to put perspective on it.

Megan Febuary
Yeah. Well, a lot of times we're playing out role that was handed to us. We just adopt that role like we're adopted. We're adopting a character that's convenient for others or convenient for ourselves when we're younger. So for me, it was being a good kid, it was being a happy kid, being a showboat, entertaining. All of these were identities that I could take on that I knew would appease anger in a conflict would appease sadness if there was depression in the home or distance or remoteness. I would put on the experience of bringing everyone together and let's come together. But all for the sake of I lost my own experience by trying to take care of everyone else. That's just an example. But all these roles that we can try on, we can have more than one. They typically are because No one says, Hey, here you go, Brian. I'd like you to be this character or something. But you learn. There's an ushering into it based on what's convenient in environments. We take these on and we wear them. Comfortable or baggy clothes until one day they don't fit us anymore, and we start to take them off.

But yeah, it's a really wild thing. We tend to take on these characterizations, and it's a lot of work to begin really look in the mirror and go, Wait, who am I? I remember the first time I really began to take off the good girl character in me, and I thought I might die. I really thought, not only me, but people around me because it felt like it was holding up the stakes for everyone. I think so often the character we take on, it has great stakes, and we hold on to it because we think it's going to hurt people or offend people or wound people if we don't live by that role. So when we choose to step out of it or have an awareness to begin to, we're changing not only our narrative, like how we've understood ourselves in the world, we're changing others. And that can be really disruptive for people. So that's one thing why I call the truth teller the disruptor, the catalyst for change, because if you dare to shift the role that you've played, if it's harmful for you, you have to know that that's going to shift not only you, but others.

And that's uncomfortable, and there's no way around it. It is going to be uncomfortable, and it's going to shift something in your dynamics, in your relationships in your past, relations, present, relationships, in your past relationship, present relationship, future. But it's for the sake of you being seen as you, and you taking care of you, and stepping out of a role that maybe isn't one that you need to. I call it reauthoring, authoring your life. Being the gatekeeper of your own story. So you're not letting other people stand at the gates of your own story and say, This is how you should be, or this is the role you should play. You start to go, Oh, wait, what if I chose what role I played now or what narrative? But it's disrupting. A lot of times we halt at that because we go, Wow, this is going to shake things up. But it's for the best and for our healing.

Brian Lee
And there's so much agency an empowerment in that of naming the roles that we've adopted that were maybe handed to us. And you talk about playing the role of the caretaker in your family for so long. And I love that you pointed out that when you finally found yourself enough to draw a boundary and say no, when you were so busy people-pleasing or fawning or doing whatever, being the good girl, that you confessed to us that it wasn't easy. And you say, I want to tell you that I felt so empowered right after that moment of saying no, but instead I felt traumatized by my own boldness. And I love the quote that you share from Holly Whitaker that, Saying no to people who want you to say yes and upholding your boundaries with people who were used to you having none, will at first feel terrible like death. And it is a death of sorts, the death of the part of you that thinks you have to violate yourself to make it in life or be valued. For people-pleasers, which is so rampant in evangelical spaces, holding a boundary does feel like death, and it feels like a terrible thing instead of the right thing.

Megan Febuary
Yeah. And so how... I mean, thinking of this religious space, and for Christians, I can't help but go to the place of Jesus with that, and think about his invitation to step into our truth and step into the deep, not the suffering for the sake of suffering, but the suffering for the sake of awakeness, to being alive. And I feel like so much of this trading out this character in these roles and this fawning, and for folks that aren't familiar with that, it's a trauma response, like freeze and fight and flight and all those. Fawn is the people-pleasing response in trauma. When we begin to change out that role, we really are choosing a suffering, but it's not a masochistic suffering. It's a suffering to be alive, to become awake, not only for yourself, but for others when they witness you choosing to step into your light and your truth, your realist you. Yeah.

Brian Lee
Let's talk about vocabulary, because obviously, words are important when we're writing. And you share in your own story how discovering words or terms or a diagnosis can become so transformative and freeing for you. Learning the word scleroderma, or about the fawn response, or dissociating, and all these things. Are there other ways that you've learned how to expand your vocabulary to find the word or term that you're looking for as you're writing?

Megan Febuary
That's a great question. Well, I love the dictionary and the source. I can not say the source. When I was little, oh my gosh, it would truly... I think I've always just been in love with language. It was like my favorite book. I would literally just sit and just go through it and look for words, and then I would try to plug them in because I just like the way they sounded into poems I was writing, and they made no sense at all, but I thought they sounded pretty.

Brian Lee
But you're experimenting. I was experimenting.

Megan Febuary
I was playing. I think that's really what language is about, and what writing reading is about as a playground. I love that. Yeah, when we deepen our search for language, new terminology, that's why study is so important. Even if you're like, I hate study. Maybe it's just looking at a different way. But thinking about what would be fun to discover. Maybe it's discovery, right? And discovering new language, terminology, expressions, gives us a lot of insight into our story, into others' experience, and deepens our understanding. I mean, ways to do it is definitely just listen to talks like this, right? Listen to conversations. Especially, I encourage us to do it in ways that... Places we might not would think we'd learn anything, do in places that make you uncomfortable. Go there. See what you discover. See, listen to the point where you go, that's how weird, I don't know about that. Write that part down. Why? What is that? Investigate it. Or, wow, that really struck me. I got teary right there. What is it? Write that line down. Discover it. Write on it. Same with books. Listen to the resources that people give. Go to them.

Like, literally, go check them out. And then one thing that's really fun is to say if someone recommends a book, go look at who recommends that book? And do this trail and you can go back. It's really interesting because you find all these folks that are telling a different variation of the same thing, and you're deepening your knowledge around it. Very fun. Yes.

Brian Lee
I think one of the things as I'm coming across all these books is doing a deep dive into the footnotes.

Megan Febuary
Oh, yes.

Brian Lee
I love footnotes. And end notes is like, Oh, this thought was interesting. Let me go check their sources down and track that down. And it just sends you on this really fun rabbit trail. So I love the term play and discovery when it comes to writing and vocabulary.

Megan Febuary
It's so fun. Have a journal that's filled with your study of language and things you're learning. If you can call it your Discovery Journal or something, fine. And you just put down all these words, and then you You can make little maps, you can draw pictures. It's good for your perfection. You do ugly drawings. Do things that are just ugly and dare yourself to not rip off the page or start a new journal because your handwriting was bad or you write something that didn't make any sense. Keep it and then reflect on it.

Brian Lee
Well, and I love that it's such a helpful reframing for people who don't feel like they did well in school, or English wasn't my strong suit, or language, or writing, or any of these things. It doesn't have to be a It doesn't have to be an obligatory thing to do the story work. It can be play and discovery. Yes, it can be hard. Yes, it could be painful. Yes, we're diving into trauma, and we can hold attention that, yes, it can also be play and discovery and fun.

Megan Febuary
Oh my gosh. It's everything. So one of the people that I have learned so much from in terms of teachers is Linda Berry. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's a cartoonist and educator. And so she has all these books around how how to create like, cartoons and illustrations. And her books are basically her story work, really, and how to create these messy bad art as, around our stories as we write them down and create it. And so it's really fun, but it is a way to come to story and get to know yourself through like, visual expression, which can be really frustrating and hard if we're like, no, this has to look good. This has to be cute. If I have this journal, this art pad or sketch pad, I better have some really good drawings. But what I found in it in doing this is it's so nourishing for my younger self And that's what I think writing is about, what journaling is about, what drawing is all about, doing the thing that you know you're probably going to be bad at, whatever, who says what is bad? I don't know.

But letting yourself go there and discovering a new sense of compassion around playing. It's playing in that space. It's incredible work to nourish all the ages that believe we could play and be messy and creative and write that awful things.

Brian Lee
Do you have a favorite book of hers?

Megan Febuary
Oh, yeah. I mean, she has so many. Picture This. It's really good.

Brian Lee
I'm going to add it to the links for people.

Megan Febuary
Do it. But literally, just tell them anything by Linda Berry.

Brian Lee
Love it. I love all of this. We're talking about the process of discovery. And so I love that you also write that the process of writing our stories is not a sprint or a marathon, but more like a nature trail. Tell us about that.

Megan Febuary
I was teaching at this trauma-informed conference. Or actually, it wasn't even on trauma-informed. It was just a writing conference, and I was speaking on the trauma-informed writing. And everyone there is like, Tell me about how to write and do this in a trauma-informed way. And of course, my recommendation was to slow the role, remove yourself from that hustle vibe. I know it's hard. I know that Insta literally is like, How Insta can we do everything? It's the complete opposite. We're living in this opposite space. But letting yourself take your time with the process, especially as tender as story recollection and putting words on the page. So a lot of the times the phrase is like, let it be not a sprint, but a marathon. Usually the people go there and I go, well, not a marathon, but a nature trail. And the idea with the nature with our story where it is you're taking your walk along and you stop at certain places to take in the view. So you step back from your story and you can read over it, you can look at it like just the overview of it. And there are times where you can zoom in and really pay attention to the depth.

And then you walk a little more and you take in another view. Let yourself get lost a little bit. Let yourself go and wander down a trail in your story that you didn't know where it was going to take you, and maybe be surprised at where you end up. And then get back on the trail and guide. So maybe there's not so much a clear direction on this, but you're taking the trail to see and pay attention and listen. So much of this writing, if we let ourselves do the nature trail version of it, we give ourselves a lot more freedom. But I'm not saying that we don't have structure, outlines. There's some plan in place that can be really helpful and create those edges, those borders. But I think it's really important that we have some bendable space in that. And you could think of the nature trails, there's borders to the forest, right? But within it, you can explore. So, yeah.

Brian Lee
Yeah. There's a, speaking of terms, there's one that just popped in the mind. I don't remember if I heard it, Laurie Wilbert talks about a couple of other people, the idea of sauntering. And just taking your time through the woods and choosing to stay on the trail or pick that one instead. And it's like, sometimes there are boundaries, sometimes there are not. And just being able to do that with our stories, that it doesn't have to feel like a have to, that there doesn't even have to be a finish line to cross. But it's just that process of exploration and discovery.

Megan Febuary
I love it. Yeah. I think it's really important. And as we're writing to ask ourselves, what can I write today that will help me be available for tomorrow? How can I write today? That's good. Because a lot of times what happens is we sprint, like you want to say that, or marathon so hard, and we're like, well, that's cool. You reach a goal that you have, but then you burn out or you bruise a muscle or whatever it might be, tear a muscle that you're not able to keep up the pace. So what if you went at a pace that is sustainable, creatively sustainable for you? Really thinking about that and creating a writing plan, if you're working on a book or something, creating a writing plan that feels like, Okay, what would be sustainable? What's doable for me? What allows some flexibility because life happens that won't throw me off and won't burn me out? What is a plan I could create or a nature trail, a writing nature trail that sets me up for success around this thing that I really want to do?

Brian Lee
Thank you. There's so many other questions that I want to ask that we'll run out of time for about being a witness, a word witness for ourselves, about engaging our past pains and choosing to bless or curse, about somatic writing. But where I want to wrap up, or we can schedule another hour to do this again, is after a hurricane, where do you begin to rebuild when the heaps of rubble are twice your size and all you have is a measly shovel, one scoop at a time? And I imagine that for people who are part of this community who have experienced untold piles of grief and trauma doing the work of rupture and repair, even when it looks overwhelming, do you have any reminders or hope for people who have been working for so long but still see this mess in front of them?

Megan Febuary
Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. Again, I feel tender and emotional around that. Being someone from the South. We see a lot of hurricanes and a lot of disaster that comes through. And when you do see it, it feels like, wow, where do you even start? And I think that can feel like the place when we're beginning to work through recalling story or beginning to heal various pains. It can feel like, wow, I'm just looking at this massive disaster. When I used to do disaster relief work, you start with the outward thing, you start with the edges, and you work your way in I think it's similar, and you just take... You start addressing one thing at a time. I think this is where you also bringing people around you, safe people, loving people, a community around you. If we were to sit there, say, we out to this disaster relief, we're working on this house that just got demolished. If it's just us, the process is going to be so slow and discouraging. But if we have others around us that are helping us gather, that are reflecting with us, that we can chat through where we're at as we clean, as we bring the fridge to the side of the road, there's a community outside of that isolated space.

So I'd say it is really helpful that way to begin to see shift because then you get that witness, right? Of, Hey, I know it feels like you're recycling this, but you're actually... I see how you're shifting beyond this, even though it feels like you're in the same place. I see how you're growing beyond this. So having that reflector back is really important, having that person and people around you to be able to see that with. But also, I'd say, too, just as a writing exercise is to document your journey, document these different pieces that you pick up and reflect on them. And you can always come back to these reflections and see how you've grown and changed over the years by returning to them and seeing how you've evolved. I think it can be easy to forget that we have moved, not beyond entirely, but we have moved beyond it to a degree. One of the things that I write about, too, is we can't change what happened. We have all these things that happened, but we can change the meaning around them. It's the same idea with this as we're gathering the pieces.

We can't reverse the experience, but we can look at it from a new perspective. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. It hurts like hell, but we can look at it and go, Oh, but I have compassion for this experience now, or I see I have a more rounded view around what was taking place. So all these things are really important parts of gathering the pieces, the salvage, and beginning to make sense of your life and how to care for it.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Thank you. I think and hope people will find that really helpful as they figure out when and how they're ready to engage in their own stories. Where can people find or connect with you?

Megan Febuary
My website, meganfebuary.com. Febuary is spelled F-E-B-U-A-R-Y. It's how we probably all spell it.

Brian Lee
The way we all want to spell it, yeah. Exactly.

Megan Febuary
It should be. That's my name. So you can find me there. You'll find every link humanly possible. You could just go there. That'd be the easiest. And then, of course, brave the page. My book is on there as well. So just check it out. And I hope it speaks to everyone that's listening that really wants to dive into their story and writing and reflection.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Everyone, go get a copy. Brave the Page: How Writing Our Hard Stories Brings Healing and Wholeness. We will have all the links in the show notes. Megan, thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah.

Megan Febuary
Thank you, Brian. I love this conversation. I appreciate you.

Brian Lee
What a fun and fantastic conversation. If you enjoyed it as much as I did, be sure to follow Megan and say thanks for being on the show. You can find links and all the things in the show notes. Coming up on the show, we have Megan Hampton, Ben Cremer, Katherine Spearing, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, and many more. Next time, we'll be talking with Monica DiCristina about her book, Your Pain Has a Name. Subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review or share with your friends. It really helps us to grow and continue providing quality content for you.

And a special thank you to our listeners who make the show possible through their financial support. If you find the show valuable, consider donating today at the link in the show notes. This episode was hosted and executive-produced by me, Brian Lee. Editing by Heidi Critz and postproduction by Lisa Carnegis.

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it's been helpful. Here's to moving toward healing and wholeness. Together. I'll see you next time.