This has been a literary and artistic weekend. On Friday night, I went with my friend to a reading he was participating in. There were
stories and poems, some better some not. I went in with editing brain, as I’d
been working on my blog pitch for Saturday’s event, so I was perhaps a little
more attuned to exact wording and working than I might have been. But it
whetted my appetite. I could taste the lead of the pencil, slicing lines,
words, structure. I remembered I know how to do this.

Saturday, I went to the writing conference, with panels
about publishing and teaching, and then had to leave to go get platelets at the
ER (normal and expected, just always shitty timing on the weekends). But,
getting the call from my doctor telling me I had to be there asap, I pulled
aside the agent I was going to meet with, and sat with him as he ate lunch.

Basically, he said he liked my writing, but not my project.
And honestly, I was relieved. I don’t want to change this blog. I like this blog. I was starting to get concerned about
having to change it to make it more marketable or take it down if there was a
book based on it. He said I could use it as raw material, but he more liked when
I was talking about the content aspect of the “Failure to Launch” generation that we
30somethings are – a sort of “burden of potential” generation. He said that could be a worthy project, I could be a “voice of your
generation.”

Well, who knows. I don’t really have much more to say on
it, except that I am it. He asked
what I’d write after a book was sold, what would be my next project. I said,
Uh… I’d just keep blogging, I guess. Which I would. This is a mainstay for me,
and whatever else I decide to do, I want to be here.

I was inspired to
look at my poetry again. To submit things to literary magazines, etc. I mean, I
have a lot of work – it must belong somewhere!

Today, I spent some time searching through my hard drive for my poems
around sex. I realized, a little while ago now, that I’ve been writing about
issues of sex and intimacy for years.
I’ve been writing about the oscillation between wanting and rejecting, having
and withdrawing. Most of my work, in fact, is about this. When I look at it.

So? What’s there? Maybe there’s a collection. Maybe a few of
the poems have a place with a journal or magazine. Maybe it’s time to look at
them objectively, and see if there’s an answer that I’ve been pointing toward,
like some deus ex machina that will “solve the problem” of being serially
single. … Maybe not. But the work is worth looking at again. Stitching it
together to see what comes – if these patches may become a quilt.

Plus, one of the literary agents I met was cute. So there’s
that 😉

And then, this morning. I spent breakfast with a disparate
group of Oaklandites (Oaklanders?), each with a creative bent, and we talked
craft and marketing and drive and practice and verve and projects and invites
to each others’ events and theater and gallery trips.

There was something to this morning – an underlining of the
world of art and artists I belong in.

And, there was something to yesterday morning as well – an
underlining of the world I
don’t belong in.

I had a very strange few minutes, trying to listen to the
panel talk about adjunct teaching and lesson planning, and the thought kept
intruding creating sound-canceling headphones: I have had cancer, and you have
not.

I felt apart from for a good little while, seeing old
classmates who compliment the hair cut, not knowing it fell out from chemo. I
felt like they and their plans and designs are so damn small compared to what
just happened.

And then. Luckily, I got over it, over myself, over the
separation. Each of us has “stuff.” I read in a memoir the other day (divorce,
not cancer memoir, cuz you gotta mix it up) the woman tell another that all our pain
weighs the same. There isn’t a pain contest so, Ha ha, I win.

I was reading Caroline Myss’s book before I returned it
overdue, and she talked about not identifying with our trauma. Not overidentifying with it. Not using it as a weapon or a
shield. Not having to tell people why my hair is short. Not having to back away
from your joy or the markings of others’ “normal” lives using cancer as
deflection from connecting.

Connection is really what all this weekend boils down to. I
got to feel connected to my writing again, to my eye as a writer again. I got
to feel connected to the writing community at the reading and the artist
community at breakfast – and that “community” is composed of my friends. I feel like I am coming to establish a familiarity
in the creative world … and I. Want. More.

Over last summer, when I was frantically and pleadingly
looking for work, following my graduation, I was on the phone with a friend.
I told him that if something didn’t change soon, I was going to simply burn it all down.

He asked me what I meant by that, and in my frustration and
desperation, I could only reply that I would just fuck everything up. If it was
shit anyway, what would more shit matter? Who knows, maybe I’d relapse, sleep
with a bunch of people, get into hard drugs, leave California with no plan and no net. Whatever it was,
my grinding ache for change would catalyze the burning down of the bridges to
safety and identity I’d built for myself. – Fuck it.

Luckily, a) I could hear myself, and how ludicrous it would
be to do anything to jeopardize the few scraggs of stability I had, and b) I
got a job soon thereafter.

However, I have some of the same feelings coming up at the
moment.

And some of the same perspective, but sometimes, Fuck
perspective.

When I was in the hospital last week, and they’re monitoring
the recurring eye infection, the eye doctor reported to me that the right pupil
of my long harangued right eye was slightly smaller than my left. He said,
That’s strange. … And that’s it. He didn’t have an explanation, and said he
hoped it would simply correct itself. Like these eye things have done in the
past.

Then yesterday, I noticed that the vision in my right eye
had become slightly weaker than my left. And again, I feel like I’m being …
tested? Not given a break? Harassed?

GO PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE!!

If this doesn’t change, if something doesn’t let up, I’m
going to burn it down.

Is how the thought went this morning. More a repetition of
words, echoes of last year than actual current emotion, but the tears of
exhaustion and relentless “bucking up” were real and current enough.

I’m reading Brene Brown’s book on resilience, and I have all
the markers of someone who is. And I’m TIRED of being resilient. And yet, what
else is there? You buck up, you show up. You do what’s asked of you, because in
this life that’s all and only the thing that we can do.

What else is there?

Well, sure, I could burn it down. I could make my life
harder than it is now by making decisions that cut at my self-esteem and
relationships. But, I know that won’t and doesn’t help. Creating more chaos to
distract from other chaos doesn’t actually solve the original chaos. It simply compounds it.

Making a knot into a bigger knot so you don’t have to see
the original knot isn’t a strategy for untangling or serenity.

So, what? What then, what now?

One of the tools of resilience is spirituality, which she
defines, and I paraphrase loosely as the belief that things can change. Pretty
much, a belief in hope and the common bond of humanity. One thing I can hold
onto from her definitions is the idea of believing in change. The power of
things to change. That perhaps that’s a “Higher Power” – things will change.
It’s the seed of hope, and the antidote to hopelessness and powerlessness.

Will I go blind in my right eye? I don’t know. But something
will change, or this will become the natural state of my eye, in which case
I’ll adjust to that, and that will be
the change.

Another quality of resilience is perspective. Regaining our
footholds of self, something I’ve talked about often here, about reminding
myself who I am, instead of falling down the rabbit hole of despair of
everything bad happens to me. Sure, bad shit is and has happened to me. But
that’s not the whole of the story. I may not get to day one of the professional
development day today (spending an hour on Oakland city bus with a compromised
immune system is probably not the best thing for my health), but I am borrowing
my friend’s car for tomorrow, and will certainly be able to meet with the literary
agent I signed up to meet. I have work to do today. Functional, parametered
things to do. I have a blog to edit, a proposal to finish, pages to print.
My whole life is not defined by this episode, the eye, or the cancer. That’s
resilience.

I still lick the delicious pop of evil, and square my jaw
with the taste of destroying what I’ve built simply so I don’t have to feel
what I am feeling.

But, for this week at least, I’ve simply eaten my feelings
“away,” which I guess is better than drinking them. 

One year ago, I was preparing my blog to be
pitched to a literary agent at a professional development event at my school.

This year, same time, guess what I’m doing?

Obviously, the content has changed, but I don’t think the
voice has. Someone asked me yesterday, as I fretted about editing and the
limited time I have to throw something together that’s passable, whether my
writing has improved from the time I began blogging about cancer.

I don’t think it has. I mean, I read back to the first entry,
and I can see complete and utter ways that it needs tightening, but I think my
writing is pretty much the same. Sort of the way I speak, commas where there
are breaks in my head, but not necessarily where they should officially go.
Beginning sentences with “And” a lot.

I think perhaps my style has crystallized since the
beginning of the blog at all, but that’s I suppose what happens after two
years. I’m not sure what any of this will mean for this blog right here, the
one I’m writing to you now if there’s any interest whatsoever, this weekend, or
at another time. Do I take all these down? All those you have read already? Is
there a narrative arc at all, besides the timeline of chemo? What about the
loose ends of my relationship with my father, or the sex trauma healing? Do I
even write about that at all, or take it out, since it’s work in progress and
a squishy subject most people don’t want to know about anyway, or so I
assume/interpret?

Obviously, this is a nice nut for my monkey mind to try to crack,
and so I’ll do what I think I ought to, and what’s been proscribed for me to do
– put together a proposal to the best of my ability using their parameters,
edit the shit out of a few of my more stellar entries, and say, Hey, I came, I
saw, I submitted.

I had a really bad dream last night. I was trying to help an
old high school friend with his cancer, telling him about eating right, and his
family began to swarm and attack me, in that traumatic way I mentioned above.
It was truly terrifying, and I woke up crying. I’ve had nightmares before, and
I usually stack them in a category of, “You must be on the path to healing,
because your subconscious is pulling out all the stops to keep you stuck,” and
I feel shaken, but heartened that I’m on the right track. This one could be
like that, too; it also felt, however, like what my dad did to me: Hey, look
you’re still really messed up in this area, you can’t possibly move forward;
you have too much work to do to be healed.

I think it’s true that I still have work to do in that area.
I want to connect with the somatic therapist again, who I said I’d contact when
my treatment was done. But, I also think that action is the best thing too.
There is no “fixed.” There is no “better enough.” As I’ve said before, there is
no starting gun for me to begin my life, or living my life, or trying to put
together a proposal, or emailing an online journal about writing a column for
them.

I don’t know how to do that stuff. I don’t know how to be
fixed, or propose, or query; but I can try with small actions, can’t I? I can
believe that it’s worth the effort – that I’m worth the effort, right?

I don’t want to be broken anymore, and I don’t know how to be or if there is a fixed, so I guess the best thing I can ever hope for myself is to try. Which
is lightyears from where I’d begun. 

Just Kidding.

Sort of.

This morning, I awoke in my own bed, jauntily off the floor,
thanks to my new adult bedframe. My cat prowling around me, with a mewling, Are
you up? You up now? [head butt] You
up?

I lay in the last moments of a dream where G-d came to
dinner at my house, and I greeted him like a loved Uncle, and he literally wore
a buttoned sweater vest.

A friend sent me a text last night to continue a
conversation on adulthood we’d been having, and she reported a quote she’d
heard that Adulthood is a continuum, and usually we’re the last to know where
we are on it.

I considered the event of “CANCER,” and what changes have
occurred in and around me since this began in the middle of last September. My
friend who sprung me from the hospital yesterday morning reminded me over
brunch that perhaps “20/20 vision” didn’t mean twenty minutes. That perhaps the lessons or changes that may or may
not have occurred are going to be a little more subtle, and lotus-like, if I
see them at all.

I have the beginnings/endings of the normal – ahem, if you
can call this normal – side-effects and routines of post-chemo treatment: My
taste for water sours, and I drink enough fizzy flavored water to make me feel
bad about the environment (but it’s better than getting dehydrated because
water tastes like a fetid pond). My taste for coffee sours too, which would make this
a great time to quit the sucker, but as the line goes, “I can’t quit you.”

My muscles begin to ache as if I’d done an intense work out,
a soreness that permeates down close to the bone, so I know that whatever
it is they dripped into me this past week is working somehow to search and
destroy any lingering leukemic cells.

And, I get the typical fatigue, needing more rest and naps,
but feeling more restless as well and wanting to get back out into the world. A
desire I will temper, considering the fall-out from last chemo round’s
adventures.

I begin to think about a party, hosting something to say
thank you to everyone, to think about a trip to the Great America theme park,
to compile a list of everything that’s happened in the last year, in the last 7
months. I start to think about a closing.

And yet. It is of course unknown if it is or not. Like
anything. A continuum.

I get to talk with others about my writing and the viability
of trying to “do something” with it. I get to talk about how I want to be
different, but also how I want to stop trying so hard to be different.

I get to hear others reflect that my writing has inspired
them to change x, or confront y.

I get to recognize that no matter what is “NEXT,” I have
faced cancer. Cancer, people. That thing
that says, Hey, you lug, guess what? You might die soon. Surprise!

I get to reflect on how well I’ve done, whatever that
actually means to me. I get to see that I didn’t fall apart and never return,
or regress to childhood (for any length of time). I wasn’t destroyed by this.

Does that make me stronger? I don’t know. More perseverant?
I don’t know.

These are the questions I asked my friend over brunch
yesterday, and so, I’ll leave myself with the thought: Relax. Whatever it is,
whatever it’s done, this part, this phase
is done.

And even if it should come back, I never, ever have to do this part again. 

“Tell me how” implies that there is a right way, and that
you know how to do it.

“Show me how” implies that there is a guideline to follow,
and I can learn according to my own humanity, with mistakes and triumphs.

Tell me how means that I don’t trust myself, and that I am
better off letting you figure things out for me, leading the way so that I
don’t fuck it up.

Show me how means that we are collaborators, each learning
from one another, and there is no expert or right way.

Tell, versus discover. Tell, there is a certainty in this
world; discover, nothing is certain.

Maybe there is no reason for this cancer, except that my
cells mutated. Period, the end.

Maybe there is no vault combination to happiness in life,
and it’s all a trial and error.

Maybe I can let go of the throttle-hold on how to live
properly, my strict code and belief that the world will “open up to me,” “fall
into place” if I just learn how to live properly.

I brought a certain notebook with me to the hospital this
time. I use it mainly for recording my shamanic journey meditations, or work
that I do with others around that realm of my practice. I read through some of
it during my stay, and came across a meditation I’d forgotten, one where I’d come
to meet my grandfather, my mom’s dad, who died when I was about 11.

I’d dreamt of him before, had memories of him, with his blue
v-neck sweater, tall as anything. In this meditation, his advice to me was,
“Live … And don’t worry so much.”

Good advice.

I’ve been thinking about living, how I’ve been doing it, and
wrestling with it, and flaying in it and struggling against it, and demanding
it reveal its secrets to me, so that I can finally relax.

When, in fact, the relaxing is when the revelations occur.

An example I heard recently was about the Dead Sea in
Israel, or really any salt body of water – if you flail and struggle, you’ll
drown; if you let yourself relax, you’ll float.

I’ve been thinking about the intersection perhaps of the two
gods I’ve been struggling with – the one that is the calm center of the
Universe, and allows for glimpses of what can only be called love; and the one
that might be personal to me, and actually interested in my living a life worth
living.

My friend said perhaps there’s both; and perhaps I’ll never know.

I’ve been thinking about relaxing. About putting an end to
my frantic digging. Digging for answers, for a new life, for one that looks
more secure and accomplished than my own. Digging for peace – frenetically.
I’ve been thinking about the possibility
that a power greater than myself might be able to care for me, in a
partnership.

I’ve been thinking about how much less worry I’d have if I
didn’t demand so much of myself; so much of myself to be different than I am – to be published perhaps, a good pianist, gainfully employed in meaningful work, partnered, happy. To wrestle myself into
happiness.

I don’t think it works that way.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase from my friend, that it
is our responsibility to make our lives one worth living; that we’re the only
ones who can do that for ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we are alone in doing it.

I’ve been thinking about the words mystery, paradox,
wonder. Words given to me by a
friend this morning in her own expression of what god might be to her.

We don’t get to know, and we don’t have to know. I don’t
have to know the answer. I don’t have to know the outcome. I don’t have to
change what you think of me. I don’t have to change how I am around you. I don’t even have to change how well I play the piano.

The only thing I have to change is simple: I have to open my
palm, and allow myself to live. 

Alice awakens from Wonderland, and even Audrey
Hepburn returns to her princess duties at the end of Roman Holiday.

There is a pervasive idea, in me, and I suspect in many of
my generation, that if we hold out long enough, things will “fall into place.”
That, like a combination safe, if we only knew the correct combination, just the right number for the one that’s marked Career, Romance, Family, all the cylinders would fall into place with that magic clicking sound, the vault
would unlock — *angelic voices sing “Ahh!”* — and Oz would open to us.

Unfortunately, Dorothy also awakens from Oz.

I met with my friend who’s a depth hypnotherapist yesterday,
and we plumbed such psychic depths that I poured out a gallon of tears, and not
paltry breakthroughs.

One said breakthrough was about this Adulthood thing again.
About taking responsibility, which is the opposite of the belief that things
will “fall into place.” Instead, I am told, I’m going to have to become willing
to re-parent myself. To take responsibility to care for myself – which
apparently doesn’t just mean trips to the spa, and that nice new pair of
earrings.

Apparently, caring for myself, parenting myself, becoming a
responsible homosapien adult in the 21^st century means what it means
to any parent: rules, discipline, boundaries, support, encouragement, love. It
means sending the kid to school even though they don’t want to go, but you, as
the parent, know it’s what’s best for them. It means not feeding them junk,
even though that’s the quicker, easier thing to do, but taking the time to
prepare something healthy, and washing the dishes when you’re done, because
it’s simply your job as the grown-up.

I means encouraging the 30 minutes of music practice a day,
the two hours of solid homework, because you know that after a month or a year,
those half hours will add to something more, even though it is not instant gratification.

Adulthood means giving up the illusion of instant
gratification, letting go of the idea that Oz will appear if you hold your
breath as you pass cemeteries and let someone cut in front of you on the
highway. There is no “tit for tat” here. There is no Cosmic Score Board, where
my good deeds are ranked, and my bad deeds are demerits. The payoff of the good
deed is the thing itself. The payoff of doing the dishes is the ease with which
to cook on them again. There may not be a pat on the back for this; but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. 

This may all seem like elementary to you (and I use that
term with purpose), but to me, it’s not. I did not learn these things in
elementary school, or at any other grade or age I’ve been.

I learned yesterday in this meditation/therapy session that
my magical thinking must end. That I’m going to have to accumulate new
experiences for the Experience Bank that will provide evidence that hard work
is worth the effort — just for its own sake. Because I’ve never tried hard work, I have no idea if
that’s true.

But, I deserve better “parents” than the one I’ve been being
to myself. I deserve better than ice cream for dinner and wide television eyes. Children need boundaries, structure, predictability, stability. No one
can offer these to me. Not a job, a boyfriend, even a “god.” I can have, or ask
for help from Sources within/without me, but, in the end, I’m the only one who
can give myself what I need.

And I need to grow up.

I need to wake up.

Yesterday, I went to the symphony. As I sat in the rotunda,
with floating silver sheets suspended over the orchestra like god had dropped a
sheaf of silken paper, and hundreds of brushed pipes aligned against the
wall, people dotting and shifting, but mainly holding still and being lifted or
rapt into their own experience, I had a moment.

I’ve had them before during this time. And I’ve tried to sort them as gratitude, but it’s not quite that. It’s something more than
gratitude or being present, more than being alive or sensing grace – it’s
something transcendent, a few radiant seconds in a row where you are reminded
that this doesn’t exist on any other plane of existence that you know of, and
yet, you, yourself are here to experience it. You understand for a moment the
aching pressure of beauty, the sharply finite gift of life, and you feel like a quote from American Beauty. …

I teared up a little in my velvet fold-down seat, trying not to let the person I was
with see me. And brief as it was, it is precisely those moments that make this life one worth living. To not
be taken from this, is what I
begged among the pieces of my half-built bedframe.

I go into the hospital on Monday for the fifth round of
chemo. The final round of chemo. The round that, according to
statistics, raises to 40 per cent my chances of living. This is the protocol the medical
community has studied, the course of treatment and sum total of what they know to
do for me. Anything thereafter is a crap shoot.

Every time I’ve had to go in, I have a few days beforehand that
begin to feel like a countdown to a guillotine, even though in this case, it
approximates a countdown to a “cure.” I start to collect what I’ll pack in my
head, compiling the list of where things are, and what I’ll need.

By this point, it’s down to a science, and I still overpack,
thinking that my stuff, the comfort of my stuff will keep the fear at bay, and
maintain an illusion of normality.

No. It’s not easy. Yes. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever
done. 

But, I had another moment yesterday, too.

I realized that, collectively, we’re facing cancer. Me; my
mom; my brother; you, my friends. Together, we’re getting through this. That’s
pretty amazing to me.

This fifth round is not the end. There are months and years
when I know that a headache will immediately make me question if the clot they
found in my brain is moving and about to cause a
stroke. I will question if a few nights of sleeplessness or days of fatigue mean there’s
something wrong with my blood. Or if, like a shitty day in September, what I
think is strep throat will turn out to be cancer.

I know that this will happen; and I know that this is
normal. I know that like someone who’s been mugged on a certain block, my
blood pressure will go up as I pass it again. I know I won’t
feel like a “normal” person for a while, and will forever be on the side of the
river labeled “Cancer Survivor,” while most people I know and love are on the
other bank.

But even though you don’t stand with me here, I know you do.
Even though there are nights I experience alone, and surgeries that tuck into
my skin and not yours, I know that there is a “we” in what has faced this, and
what will win.

I know, too, that I often darkly smirk at myself (often on
buses, for whatever reason) as I think how ironic it will be if I’m wrong, and have all these blogs about how it won’t be me, and it is.

But, that’s the truth of this: both/and. Still and
always.

So, if the truth is so big that it can encompass delusion, faith, love, uncertainty, life and death, then let me share with you what I wrote in my journal yesterday morning:

The enormity of this – we’re facing cancer. Not
perfectly, as there is no perfect, but we are. We have. We are
facing it & are prevailing. What does it mean to prevail here? To not slit
my wrists. To still breathe, talk, engage, even a little. To have my heart intact. To
not lose it & never find it.  That’s prevail. 

If it is possible for me to have the capacity to do so, I
think I figured out what happened these last two weeks, now that I’m finally
pulling out of the swamp of it.

It’s not typical for me to go quite so dark, which isn’t to
say it’s not appropriate, understandable, or even expected, but it was both
surprising and a little frightening to me.

So, of course, being me, I look for WHY, instead of simply accepting
that I could have a couple of (very) bad days during a 5 month course of chemo
treatment for Leukemia.

But, I digress.

I’ll start with another story that leads me to validate my
hypothesis.

In November, I got into a bad fight with my Dad on the
phone, a period some of you readers may remember. Feeling accused, embattled,
and belittled by my father, I spent an evening feeling as though the rug of my
identity had been pulled back, and I stood again as the raw teenage fuck-up.
Feeling defensive, and “bad,” and unsure of myself and my needs or boundaries.
Unsure I was allowed to have any, and sure that if I did, I wasn’t allowed to
express them.

I spent a few hours like that. A shamed animal. But it
didn’t quite fit. Just as these couple of days/weeks of quick-sand depression
haven’t felt quite right.

I met up with some of my peers that night, and went home,
and as I lay in bed, still seething from the attack, I remembered something I said aloud then and wrote here: I am awesome.

The interaction with my father had stripped from me all the
work and identity I’d been laying groundwork for in the last decade. A decade
my father has no idea about. The person who I’ve become, the person I’ve
struggled to gain every ounce of self-esteem to be. He doesn’t know what I
forgot: I am worthy.

It is this very same aura of interaction that played out
with the white coats during my recent eye-infection hospital stay. I felt belittled,
unheard, and dismissed. I felt, again, stripped of the knowledge of myself, of
the reality of myself, and again was back to the timid, mouse of a girl, feeling
chastised and shamed.

Well. Fuck. That.

Although it took me a few weeks this time, instead of the
evening it took in November, for me to remember who I am, I am finally coming
to see straight again.

Part of this has been you. Several of you have reached out
to me and told me what my words mean to you, telling me how you are making
changes in your life based on what my writing inspires in you, telling me that
you are inspired to examine your own life and choices as a result of me
examining mine. You’ve told me I have value, and I’m once again starting to
feel it.

It’s amazing that outside forces can have such a drastic
influence on how we feel – or I feel –
about ourselves. But, they do. And sometimes they’re fleeting, a moment of
twinge as someone says something callous or inaccurate, but are easily brushed
aside by a few repetitions of the phrase, “That’s more about them than it is
about me.”

Sometimes, you’re so emotionally depleted already, and so
shocked by a scary and sudden situation, that a room full of doctors telling
you that your reaction to a drug might be invented, that your decision to take
care of yourself is going to be a fatal one, that what you are doing is
wrong, that it sweeps away the whole of
what you’ve built inside yourself, and around yourself as markers of esteem and
identity.

And sometimes that void where your self had been, and the
blackness of the “you” you thought you’d overcome through years of friendship and therapy, becomes all you can see. A pit of despair and desolation. Stripped
violently clean of all intimations of who you really are, and who you have
become.

Perhaps it’s fitting that during this time, I lost my
wallet, and with it my ID, my identity.

The unfortunate part about that hole is that you can’t
really recognize that it is a hole you’ve fallen into, off of the path of “Who
You Are.” It just looks like the hole that is, always has been, and always will
be. There aren’t alternatives to the heaviness, the weightedness you feel.

And yet, even in it — this time — I could feel moments where
it just wasn’t right. This pit of despair didn’t fit properly this time. It is
a hole too small for the actuality of who I am and who I have become, and
indeed who I will become.

Those chinks and pinholes in the depths grow with the
mirroring you guys give me, eventually. Eventually.

And so the pit falls away. I don’t “climb out of it;” Like
Neo, you realize, There is no spoon.
This is just the Matrix, and this
reality isn’t real, and it crumbles like so much sodden cardboard.

Reality forms as your eyes adjust, and you touch your arm
and leg and face, and you see the history upon which you’ve built, and you see
the community which has gravitated in a loving arc around you, and you see with
evidence and conviction that you are valid, worthy — and that dissociations from
this truth are only temporary. 

My mom told me she bought the book The Year of
Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of
the year that her husband died and her adult daughter lay in a coma, about to die.

I’m not sure how to take that information. But my mom said she wanted to see how someone could turn that kind of grief into wisdom,
or something that didn’t drown her, or at least something that could be spun into art, like a strand from Rumpelstiltskin. 

When I was 19, I had a breakup that shattered me. I had made
a very drunken, public display of humiliation of both myself and my boyfriend
that alienated a large group of friends and caused me and everyone else, including my suddenly-ex-boyfriend, to sort of revile me.

I spent a week without eating solid food, drinking only Dr.
Pepper and smoking only Marlboro Reds (his brand) on the front stoop of the house my
parents still shared. I was shell-shocked. I was numb, demoralized, heart-broken. I began to compose suicide notes on the computer (why not
hand-written, I don’t know).

Then, my brother, Ben, said something very important to me: “I don’t want to be the kid in school whose sister killed herself.”

It was what I needed to hear. I got it. I got the isolation
and selfishness of suicide. The clawing temptations to end something that
begins something in the lives of everyone else you know. I couldn’t do that to
him. I got it; and it saved my life. 

In the fourth year, the senior year of college, when all my
classmates and roommates where heading toward graduation, and I was heading to
the bar and failing out, I was also heading toward the prospect of returning to
the home my dad now occupied as a divorced man. He and I had a tumultuous
relationship at the time (not unheard of for us), and in retrospect, I think part of my self-destruction and manic partying/numbing was to keep me
from thinking about moving back to that house with a man I was afraid of. Part
of it, perhaps, was to even make things so chaotic that I couldn’t be allowed
back to the house – that wherever I ended up would be safer than with him.

That place ended up being a psych ward for two months. Which,
… was not pleasant, but kept me from him. And, in the end helped me to
straighten out enough to pull some wits together to be able to move back in
with him and my brother at the end of that summer my friends were celebrating
their new adult freedom.

As I consider the closing of this cancer process, I have
been nudged by this memory more than once. I have a fear of repeating the
process of that destruction – knowing, as I do, that I will be returning to a
job that makes me feel small, and, I fear, to the general pall of lostness and crippled joy.

This fear, these feelings of fear that I will repeat some
self-destruction in order to avoid that which I label as diminishing, crushing,
hopeless (as with returning home 10 years ago), has dissipated a little in the
few days since it’s appeared, but I acknowledge it, and tousle it around. Is this why I don’t
want to do round 5 of chemo? Or why I stopped my antibiotics last week, under
the reasoning that they were affecting my liver and causing me to sleep 14
hours a day?

The other day, I used a tool a therapist taught me in order to
gauge my decision to do the fifth round or not. I asked my deepest self, on a
scale of one to ten, how much did I internally support going for the 5^th
round? The answer was 5; 5 of ten. Not high. But, then I asked the converse.
How much did I internally support the decision of not doing the 5^th round? Answer, 2. Even
less.

So, no. I don’t want to do this round — Who would? – but I
believe in that path more than I believe in not doing it.

I’m going to the doctor today to look at my eye again, and
I’m going to have to fess up to having stopped the antibiotics (though, by the
way, I’ve had more energy since I stopped them…even though the eye really hasn’t improved). I’m scared that because of
the chastisement my oncologist gave me when I left the hospital during the
eye-infection debacle — about playing it straight, and following doctors’ orders — she’s going to revoke my 5^th round privilege, as apparently
there were other doctors on the Chemo Approval Board who thought that if I was
being such a petulant patient, then maybe I shouldn’t have it … but, she told
me pointedly, she’d stood up for me, so, basically, play nice, and don’t let her down or
make her eat her words.

Great. Now I have your reputation to worry about? Or to
worry about not getting treatment that I need because I fucked with treatment I
didn’t know I needed?

There’s a lot of chatter here. A lot of brain chaos, and a lot of crying lately. But, in
the end, it’s all a choice. Either I am choosing to make decisions that support
living, or I’m not. I can make those decisions no matter what job I hold. And I can hold the talisman of my
brother’s brave words to me as a reason to keep putting one foot in front of
the other, to endure one more antibiotic or round of chemo, to make one more phone
call, to wash one more dish, to write one more gratitude list, to craft one
more blog – because I still don’t want to be that girl.

And, god willing, I’ll never have to be. 

Somewhere along my way, I was having a conversation with a
snowboard instructor. He said that most people attempt to learn themselves, as
they go, and thus when they come to him, he has to retrain them in the correct
ways to do the sport, and unlearn the bad habits they picked up from their own
trial and error.

When I had my depth hypnotherapy session on Thursday, we/I
came to an interesting statement: It’s not my fault that I don’t know how to be
an adult. And that I would both have to forgive myself, and allow myself the
patience to learn.

Most of us are sort of thrust into the world with little
idea of how to navigate it, and based on the resources we have available, we
make choices, which then make habits. Like the snowboarders, some of these habits
have to be broken, because they are eventually causing more harm to us than
good.

Taking responsibility for myself and my life has never formed itself as a habit. It has been “easier” to make decisions by default, allowing the
clock to run out, so a decision is made for me. Or to eek by on the path of
least resistance and least gain, and measure out a mediocre and dissatisfying
life. It’s been that way since grade school, making moderate efforts that achieved pretty
good results, simply on the fact that I had wits about me.

But, the “real world” (whatever made that phrase popular, I’ll
never know; is there a fake one? are some more real than others?) doesn’t reward of half-assedness. All that I’ve ever read about
success or achievement has been predicated on firm and consistent effort, on perseverance,
and on taking responsibility, since, really, no one will do it for us. (I’ve
written some about this limbo non-adulthood in my most frequently read blog post — likely due to its titillating title — “Magical Accidental
Orgasm,” and that was some time ago, yet still stands true.)

What my friend said the other day about creating a life worth
living implies, no, necessitates taking responsibility. And for a long time, I’ve beat myself up
for not being a persistent, consistent person. Lashing myself for being a
half-asser, for starting things I don’t finish. … Instead of allowing myself to
learn how to be another way.

These are just patterns that have become habits. They are
not irreversible. But I first have to forgive myself for not knowing what I don’t
know. It isn’t my fault that I don’t
know how to save money and invest in a 401(k). I am not an inherently broken
person because I don’t have longevity on my resume. It is not a hangable
offense to not know how to have an intimate relationship based on mutuality,
trust, and empathy.

The offense is in not making effort to change this. And, so,
slowly, I do, and am. I excavate this shame, show it to the light, let the
facets of belittlement and lies burn off in the sun, and lay it to rest, as I
call you up and ask you, Hey, how do you file taxes properly? How do you know
how much to put in a savings account? What are your systems of checks-and-balances
that keep you moving forward and taking action on your own behalf every day, and not sinking into lethargy and Facebook?

If I want to live, and I do, then I’d like to learn how to live differently. It won’t be the easy,
sliding by way, but that easy sliding by way has become more painful than helpful now, and ultimately, it isn’t how I want to be, or who I feel myself to be.

As the phrase goes, “This isn’t an overnight matter,” but
the small action of holding myself and my history with compassion rather than derision is likely
to help the process.