Therapy Through Literature

One novel that really had an impact on my mental health is Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman. The main plot of the novel is young CeeCee Honeycutt who deals with a mother with her own mental illness, her father’s absence, her mothers death, and healing from her trauma. It is a coming of age novel that I read during my own “coming of age” period of my life. I first read it in the sixth grade, and my own mother passed away about a year later in the seventh grade. When that happened, I began to relate a lot to the novel: a young bookworm with good grades who has to take care of a mentally ill mother and ultimately has to deal with the trauma and her death. My own mother was mentally ill and I had to take care of her just as much as she took care of me as her child. I read it again after my mom passed and found it really helpful with quotes about loss, healing, and grief. Healing, of course, isn’t linear. My mom passed when I was 13, and I’m 22 now, still dealing with what I had to go through as a kid. About a year ago I read it for the third or fourth time, this time with a pen in hand. I underlined quotes I found particularly impactful, ones I could go back to and revisit if I ever needed it. While I don’t have the novel here with me on campus, I managed to find one quote I remember annotating:

“Now there’s something else I know. You might not think you’re grieving, but grief comes in all sorts of ways. There’s the kind of grief that leaves you numb and the kind of grief that rips your world in half. And then there’s another kind of grief that doesn’t feel like grief at all. It’s like a tiny splinter you don’t even know you have until it festers so deep it has nowhere left to go but into your soul. I think that’s the hardest kind of grief there is because you know you’re hurting but you don’t know why.”

That second time of grief is the kind that stuck with me into adulthood. Up until a couple years ago, I thought I had “gotten over” her death in high school. Yeah, I was wildly incorrect. I took me starting therapy to realize I still had some healing work to do. This novel helped me address feelings of anger, loss, grief and guilt. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, not just those going through a loss.