As promised, we wanted to support breast cancer awareness, and this is our first post related to the cause. Today’s post comes to us from Christina Ledbetter.

Writing for Ta-Tas

I am a runner. A slow, jabber-mouthed, dramatic runner. It started about six years ago when I casually asked my husband if he thought I could run a 5K if I trained hard enough. That weekend he accompanied me to our neighborhood park and set his wristwatch to record for how long I could actually run without stopping. I began running laps around the playground, and made it sixteen minutes straight before stumbling to a hunched over position, gasping, “That’s it! That’s as far as I can run.” Six years later, when I’m having a hard time starting a run, I think, “Well I know I can at least go sixteen stupid minutes.”

That first 5K I trained for and ran was a breast cancer awareness run. Pick any weekend day for the next four weeks, and you’ll be able to find a breast cancer awareness/fundraising run to join in just about any city in the country. I’ve run the Houston one a few times now, and two of those times was with my sweet friend Ann who lost her mother to breast cancer. While we filled out our signs to wear on our backs, the “I’m running for…” Ann cried. While the race is massively impactful and serves as therapy for a lot of people, simply writing “Mary Ann” seemed to be more emotional than the race itself.

And it’s got us at Kbuuk wondering, if simply writing down someone’s name is powerful enough to make tears well up, what would it look like to write a book about them? And how would it impact a person dealing with the same loss who happens to read it? Just some things to consider as we begin this month. If you’ve dealt with cancer and found writing about it helped, we’d love to hear about it. How did writing aid the journey?

If you have a story to share about your experience with breast cancer, we’d love for you to share and publish on Kbuuk, and we’ll spotlight it during this month.