By Nancy Dorrance
with photography by Bernard Clark
For years, Diana Reyers helped other people find the courage to share personal — and often traumatic — aspects of their lives through memoir. Then the Kingston authenticity coach realized she’d been avoiding writing her own.
“Here I was encouraging others to tell their stories, when I hadn’t done the same thing, fully, myself,” she says. It was 2022, the COVID pandemic persisted, and her husband, Hank’s, struggle with Parkinson’s disease was on a downward spiral.
Calling it “one of the hardest things I’ve had to do,“ Diana began mining details of her life that she’d never revealed before. By the time she had finished, her manuscript contained more than 100,000 words. And miraculously, the debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that had plagued her for 15 years and six surgeries went into remission.
Diana firmly believes that the onset of her autoimmune disease in her late 40s was linked to unprocessed emotional trauma from her childhood. “That was a real wake-up call for me,” she says now. “Hank and I were both extraordinarily healthy at the time; we ate well, we exercised, we had a nice family together. That diagnosis was the last thing I expected!”. . .
