In one of my cancer books, it suggests that perhaps we
write a letter to the parts of us that have physically changed as a result of
cancer and its treatment. Thus, I bring you…

Dear Flat Tush,

I suppose it’s taken me so long to face you, because I can’t keep on turning around and around to try and see you in the
full-length mirror. However, now that I have the chance to speak with you more
formally, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.

For so many years, I have put you down, making fun of you
for being so flat that you’re like a straight line from my back to my thighs. Telling others I can’t sit on inflatable rafts for fear of puncturing them with my protuberant butt bones. The times that I’ve rolled my eyes at how uncomfortable you make it to sit on metal or wooden furniture, wishing, oh wishing, you’d be different. For years I have assumed that you would just go on taking my derision, and put up with being the butt end of my jokes.

But sadly, this has not been the case. Since my developing
cancer and becoming, if possible, even more sedentary, you have become … concave.

The scooped-out innards of an ice-cream container, the weird thing a foam pillow does when you press your fist in it, that desperate vision of a bounce-house deflating. 

Oh, Flat Tush, Flat TUSH!

You are now but a former shadow of the
flatness that you once were, it seems almost a dream how you were before – I swear,
you were actually pert… or pert-like. I promise I only incessantly poked at that
crease out of love. That tense/release thing I used to do to pretend you were
something more than you were… oh, how insensitive of me!

I see now how lucky I was with you before, and how much
we’ll need to firm up a new relationship of trust. I
shouldn’t have taken you for granted, Flat Tush. With all that cancer
has taken from you, I promise to build you back up to your (only-mildly-flat!) former glory. 

On my honor,

Molly

Home. I am home after spending the week in the hospital. I
sat this morning at my breakfast table with the morning light slanting in, the
cypress trees I watch build and shed their leaves for these past two years, my
peets coffee in a new mug, my morning pages, a metal fork and an actual
plate, my space heater licking my calves.

Yesterday evening, I lounged on the couch with my cat curled on the
chenille blanket across my lap, and I said something to her that I’ve asked her
often and many times: “How did I get so lucky?” How did I get so lucky to have
and find you, I have intoned to her over the two years I’ve had her, and lived
here in this apartment.

And that line, that question struck me, and I began to cry.
Not out of sadness, but out of cognitive dissonance with everything that is, I am still lucky to have her, and to have found her. To
sit with my bald head, unemployment, uncertain mortality, and to ask her how I
got to be so lucky? … It was a moment, to be sure.

Because, all in all, I’m moving through this. I am not where I was when this all began. In the immediate
terror and incredulity. I have more of a sense of what to expect now, and I am
not as scared of the times in the hospital, or the times after when I my
“counts” get all low. I can pack for the hospital differently now – in fact, I
can pack at all. All of this is different than it was in the beginning. I am in
a different phase of this – I can feel it, and it feels good, or a million
times better at least.

There are still a lot of places I want change and comfort
through this. I want to contact the young adult cancer support group. I want to
stop eating as much crap because “I deserve it.” But, for today, that’s all
I’ll say about what I want to change about me and my situation. Because I’m tired
of haranguing myself, honestly.

I’ve put up a whole new set of dates people can sign up on
the online calendar to bring me meals daily, but I’ve realized that another
part of how I have cared for and nurtured myself has been through cooking. I
like to cook. Sure, perhaps I can’t get to the store the same way and spend all
that time with you germ-infested folks(!), but I can still do some. And,
although asking folks to bring me food daily was important last time I was
home, this time, I want the chance to start making food for myself again, if
only every other day.

I’ve begun reading a book called Kicking Cancer in the
Kitchen, and although it too purports the
benefits of vegetarianism, my chiropractor/nutritionist said that especially
right now, I don’t go veggie. It’s so strange – I was vegan – VEGAN(!) – the month before I got cancer. The month of
August and September, the only animal protein I had was eggs in the morning.
(So, yeah, I guess I wasn’t *really* vegan, but for the most part!) So it’s
strange to read this book purporting the merits of a whole food, healthy, leafy
green diet, …. when.i.was.already.doing.that.

But, “whatever,” as they say.

I do know how to eat, and to some extent cook, healthfully,
but there’s a lot to learn, and a lot to branch out from my narrow knowledge of
it all. So, I’m looking forward to experimenting. It’s another form of art –
it’s always been for me, cooking. There are the months when it’s visual art, or
music, and then there are the months it’s cooking. I was marinating and baking
my own organic tofu this summer. I was soaking, cooking, and blending my own
hummus for Christ’s sake! I was experimenting, I was having fun. It’s another
way, I’ve realized that I can have fun within the means and bounds of my body’s
abilities right now.

My friend brought me chard from the farmer’s market when she
came to round me up from the hospital yesterday; this morning, it made itself
into my morning eggs. (I have a thing for eggs.)

Speaking of which, perhaps as TMI as it might be, I don’t know, I got my period again this month. Perhaps that may
seem inconsequential to you, … but it means the world to me. It means that last
month and this month, despite pouring nuclear shit into a port that feeds directly
into my heart, my ovaries are still working. It means that I withstand this
chemo stuff better than most people expect. I don’t get nauseous, or puke, or
get mouth sores, or skin rashes. Like Bella saying she was made to be a
vampire, I was perhaps made to withstand chemo. (and that is the dorkiest reference you may have from me
today)

But, it’s huge, guys. It’s a big deal to me to see that
despite all of this trauma and ruffianism that is happening to my body, there
are systems that are still working. It means that I might not have hot flashes
at 31, or have to shop the feminine lubrication aisle. It means my body still
works.

I am alive. I have heat, water, housing, finances, internet,
food, family, friends, a kitty, clothing, and I live off of one of the best
streets in the area.

I’ve been thrown off the course of where I was (but then
too, I had no idea where that course was going, so perhaps I wasn’t on one at
all), and today, I find myself, Lucky. 

Since my conversation with Renee last week about allowing
myself to receive from others (and thereby interpret from a Higher Power) instead of exhausting myself from my own reserves, I’ve been considering how I
manage resources.

For the most part, I live within very meager means; I always
have. I don’t really live extravagantly, and would go on shopping binges to
make up for the time I kept such a tight lid on everything. My apartment is
perfect for what I need it to be, except for the lack of artist space in it. My
computer is perfect, except that the operating system is so old, I can’t access
the Kaiser email system without refreshing four times. My clothing is perfect,
except that the majority of the clothing is several years and a style old. And
my love life is perfect, except for the aching lack of intimacy and connection.

When I have resources coming toward me, I tend to either
reject them or blow through them quickly, so I can be back at smallness again,
where I’m familiar, if not comfortable. On my blog site, I can see what blogs
have been read recently, and for some reason, someone accessed and read one from 2010 called “too much to ask,” so I went back to read it myself. It’s all about
how to allow myself to receive good things. Hmm. Sounds familiar. I know there’s another blog about a
meditation in which I was supposed to be allowing myself to receive light from
benevolent sources, but I refused to allow that light in and kept my guard up like Wonder Woman’s bracelets –
you’re not getting in here! Pew! Pew! I have been working on how to manage resources for
years, and have been rejecting them for years.

I have a free ticket to; If you want me to put you in
touch with; Sure, you can show your art here …

And I let these connections languish. Those things are for
people who can sustain momentum and movement. As evidenced to myself by myself,
I’m a person who manages resources by rejecting or blowing through them – what
kind of a manager is that – of course I
can’t possibly contact your friend – “I don’t have it in me.”

I’m just becoming more aware right now of how habitual this
process is for me, of keeping myself small and insulated and insular. And of
how exhausting, and ineffectual it is.

The problem is that I don’t want to be small or ineffectual, and that’s where I run against
myself. So, I’m back to the suggestion from Renee last week about allowing my
former, or current, rather, way of doing things dissolve without attempting to figure out how to put them back
together. I know this way isn’t working, but I don’t actually know a different
or better way. So, I have to allow it to resolve itself – which, of course, is
a frightening prospect, but not as frightening as continuing to live in a
shoebox existence.

Things that come to mind like ordering a ‘monologues for
women’ book, but I don’t actually look one up. The flight lesson thing that’s
been on my list of things I want to do for years. The ice skating thing I was
talking about yesterday – a free trip to
the rink to do something fun for myself … well, I’m just so busy over here
being UNfun.

No wonder I feel so tired; this lack of fun. This lack of
flow. My therapist was very astute yesterday when she finally put it in no
uncertain terms: I am ambivalent about intimacy. I both desperately desire it,
and am terrified of it. It’s the same coin as “resources.” I want, but I’m
scared. I want to move forward, or differently, but goddamned, I don’t know
what that’ll look like. She and I have been working on this forever, but it was
the first time I really got to see my hemming and hawing about connection and
relationships, an energetic exchange in its own right.

In the relationships that I have had, they have been an
unequal exchange, again, like with my “stuff,” allowing me to subsist with less
than I actually want, and rejecting those options that look more healthy – like
blowing through a chunk of cash, so I’m back at square one, I will take your
genuine desire to know me better as a threat to my way of life.

My way of life isn’t working.

I want it to work better. I have to trust that if I let go
of what I currently and already know that I will be taken care of.

I hate the maudlin nature of this quote, and I have my
doubts, but it’s been coming to mind over the last few days nevertheless:

When you take a leap of faith, G-d will either catch you, or
you will be given wings to fly.

I know the ultimate
cheesiness of that sentiment, but if I’m at the end of what I know how to do,
there really isn’t anything left
except to leap, and trust that whatever comes, somehow and eventually, it will be
better and healthier for me than what is. 

In contrast with yesterday, today I got to write my morning
pages before the chemo began, and just now, I got to go up to the 12^th
floor and sit with a group of folks for an hour and try not to think about
myself. – I admit it was hard; the self-centered thing is hard to kick, in
this and, certainly other situations. But there was someone there talking
about struggling against themselves, and trying to “get it right,” and I knew
the kind of pain he was going through to stop living in a self-destructive way,
and I felt empathy.

Empathy is a tough thing when you have cancer. Like this
morning, when my nurse told me that she hated to work weekends around the
holidays, because she never gets her Christmas shopping done in time.  – I found it hard to have empathy, even
though, surely, somewhere, I do recognize it must be frustrating once again for
someone to want to do things “right,” and not getting them done that way.

I also, this morning, got to speak with my therapist on the
phone, which was also helpful. I didn’t get to the meditation or the blog until
now, … and to be honest, I haven’t gotten to the
meditation at all. But, at least I’m not as ornery as yesterday. Getting out of
this room for an hour helped.

Knowing, that most likely I will be released tomorrow after
I receive my final dose of chemo Round 3 tonight from 9-midnight, well, that
helps too.

I think I’ve decided that I’d rather do the Hawaii thing
when I can really appreciate it. There is, however, the fear that once this
treatment thing is over, I’ll jump right back into the fray, and will once
again have no time or money for the things that I’d really like to do.

I am scared shitless of doing the same things again and
again. Of going back to a sedentary life.

So, part of this let’s go to Hawaii NOW thing is to preemptively strike against my own
pattern – but… that’s not really a sustainable solution either.

Furthermore, if I push out my treatment instead of taking it
on schedule, this all winds up a longer process, which isn’t what I want
either. So, I think I’m going to aim to go to the retreat in January (in Napa,
not Maui!) after my chemo treatment.
We’ll see – it’ll be my intention. My health does come first, but it’s hard to
know right now what is the primary mode of health I’m meaning when I say that.

Is it my mental health? Treatable (in theory and fantasy) by
a trip to somewhere warm and totally far away from this. Is it my spiritual
health? Treatable (in theory and fantasy) by a trip up to the Napa hills for a
day and a half. Is it my physical health that is “the most important thing” to
me right now? Treatable by maintaining my course of chemotherapy treatments.

I don’t know. All of them are important to me, obviously.
But what are ways that I can support my mental and spiritual health without
compromising my physical health, and all the vice versas?

Well, that’s something that came up on the phone today with
my therapist. What would I do that was
fun? What can I still physically do that is fun? If I weren’t a cancer patient, what would I be doing for fun? ….
Hm, that really stumped me, as the reality was I wasn’t having too much fun
before all this began anyway.

I did come up with something – I’ve taken myself ice skating
a few times over the last year, beginning last holiday season with the most
marvelous date with me and my inner child/little girl, who insisted on Hot Chocolate when the skating was done.

I’ve gone since then, just for fun, because I’m terrible,
and I have an amazing time being terrible. I flail, and have to let
10-year-olds pass by me as we all hold on to the guard rail for dear life; I
laugh my bloody ass off is what I do, and have a smile a meter wide. I love
being silly like that – enjoying myself for the pure sense of not caring what
it looks like, how good I am, if it’s cool. I love it. That is joy to me.

I have a friend who works at a skating rink here in Oakland,
and she’s told me several times that I can just text her when I want to go, and
she’ll hook me up. She told me this almost a year ago – but still I haven’t gone. When I get my strength back from this round, I want to do that. I want to laugh. I am so tired of not laughing.

The other “how can Molly have fun” thing that was come up
with (it was a short list) was to go up to visit Sonoma, to take a day trip.
Although I began visiting up there when there was a crew of young, hilarious, create-fun-out-of-anything 20somethings, they’re now a group of 30somethings dispersed
somewhat – but the sense is still there. I feel, and have always felt better,
when I go up there. Like my heart is being poured in, filled in from the bottom
up with this silvery liquid I didn’t know I was dying of thirst for. Every time I go, I feel that “I can breathe bigger up there.”

They know how to laugh up there. I don’t know that
particularly this group of friends will still be up there or available; but I can
try to see if I can’t get a day to make it work – to drive out into those
rolling hills, to arrive to do nothing except be atrociously silly and know how
much fun that is.

So, these are my two fun things. My two intentions right now
to inject some levity into this somber scene that is cancer treatment.

Having set down the whole Am I going to die question, now I
want to know how I’m going to live. 

You sit around and wait to get better enough, so that you
can then get sick enough to get better.

I’m bored with the whole thing. All the time spent waiting,
when I feel I should be all “carpe diem,” but I can’t climb a flight of stairs
without getting winded.

I feel like a self-pitying fool, and quite self-centered to
boot, with all the time and energy that I focus on me, and others focus on me –
the doctors and nurses, and medications and lab results, and blood tests and urine checks … Can’t you focus on someone else for a minute
– can’t I get out of dodge, please?

That’s what part of my mood is. I asked my doctor if I could
push back January’s chemo session in order to go to my annual women’s retreat.
It means starting about 10 days after we normally would, which I don’t think is a big deal, but I’m not a doctor. He
said there’s no study that ethically could test if we push people back 10 days,
so he doesn’t know, but he’s not totally behind my request either.

And so, I feel like when the fuck does anything get to be
fun again? I’ve had two legitimately fun days, when I went to a Halloween
party, and I went to the beach, and it wasn’t about me, or doctors, or cancer,
or hospitals. It was about being a goddamned girl, living a goddamned life.
Where the fuck is that anymore? 

Knowing that I’m probably going to go on the retreat, or
thinking so before I asked my doctor this morning, I started to wonder if I
couldn’t also get farther away from this
all – like Hawaii far – before the retreat then. And I started to put out feelers to people who know
people, and lo, there’s a willing and friendly person in Maui, and a friend
with willing air miles.

But, then the talk with the doctor, and a talk with my mom –
and why would I want to go to one of the most gorgeous places on earth, a place I’ve never been, when I
can’t even walk a half hour on flat ground? Why would I want to carpe if I
can’t enjoy the diem?

I don’t. I just want to not be doing this, this sad, pathetic, self-pity thing. This thing
where I sit around and wait to get sick, and sit around and wait to get healthy,
and then do it all over again.

The good part is that I’m now familiar enough with this to
know what to expect; but the bad part is, I now know what to expect.

I can expect to feel lethargic, and have to append every
single text with, “but text me beforehand, just to check that I’m up to it.” I can
expect to watch t.v. shows on DVD, even though I’m tired of watching them. I
can expect to read spiritual literature every day, and know that it means
something to me, but can’t change how fucking stupid and boring this all is.

I was bored with my job; I got cancer. I’m bored with
cancer; I should get a job.

I don’t really know what
to do. This is where I am, and what I have to do now. The disease and the cure
don’t care that I’m tired of them, I have to do it anyway. I don’t want to die.

But I can’t really call this living. 

(I imagine this is where someone posts that poster of the kitten in a tree, saying Hang In There.) Puke. 

As of noon today, I am halfway through my chemotherapy
treatment. 

As in, I completed 3 of the 6 doses that make up Round 3, and Round
3 is halfway to the total of 5 I will have. 10 weeks, it’s been since I was diagnosed with Leukemia, and
I guess the total of the 20 weeks of my life for a life is not so bad. But, I’m tired today, from the cumulative
effects of it all.

This morning I was writing my morning pages, and just as I wrote
that I was feeling kind of off today, just then, I got a phone call from a
woman I know who’d had cancer and wanted to know if she could drop off some
cancer-fighting affirmation CDs someone had given to her during treatment. At
the exact same time that I was on the phone with her, I got a text from another
friend saying that she wanted to cover the remaining cost of the women’s new
year’s retreat I’ve gone on for the past 4 years. … And that her mother-in-law, a 4-time
cancer survivor, wanted to donate funds to my holiday wish list as well.

Talk about timing.

A friend texted me a few weeks ago, and in her great
empathy, she said that she wished she had a magic power that could make all
this go away. I replied that she does have a magic power: “The same power that saved Harry Potter’s life
over and over again – Love.”

Cheesy and hokey as my reply to her was (and knowing it was
just a good line) 😉 I do believe that to be true. That love can heal; that love
can save.

Sometimes, as we all know, “love” is not enough. It doesn’t
change the person you want to change in the ways you want them to change. It’s
not enough to bridge gaps between lovers that have value mismatches. Love isn’t
always enough to make everything alright … But it doesn’t hurt, does it?

Well, except in that song, “Love Hurts”…

Today, this halfway mark, is a nondescript day with rain
lightly falling and a grey view of the construction site out my window. It’s a
worker-bee kind of day, doing what it’s supposed to be doing, without much pomp
or circumstance. But, it has been dotted by these moments of care and love – a
friend with a coffee; one with a bowl of soup; another, a new book and hat; still others, a donation.

I’ve been trying to actively catalogue these gifts of human kindness as shows of Universal love and kindness, and so I’ve sort of begun keeping
a list of all these things. The list is already very, very long.

(And that’s it for my, “I’m tired, but I wanted to stamp the
occasion and check in with you” blog. Thank you for reading – I hope your reading material picks up
from here) 😉

There was a time, a decade ago, when I was also in a
hospital, when I also was bald, and when I also was frightened of what was
happening to me.

In most aspects, these are entirely different
experiences, but it’s been hard for me at present to not recollect and compare the two.

At the time, at 21, I was committed to a hospital for erratic
behavior that others close to me (though there weren’t very many anymore)
interpreted as apparent manic, perhaps bipolar, behavior: I had shaved my head. I had
torn down posters that belonged to my college roommates and left them strewn about. I had
missed enough classes to not be graduating with my roommates. And I had cursed
out my father before being kicked out.

What these people close to me did not know was that I was
drinking daily, dating a guy who sold psychedelic mushrooms and fed me liberally from his store, and was stoned most of the time.

Therefore, in my addled opinion, all the above “erratic” behavior was justifiable by
me: I was helping, I was expressing myself, I was partying, man. …

Nonetheless, I found myself for two and a half months behind the thick glass of
institutional windows and locked ward doors.

This was not a highlight of my existence. And yet. The first
night I was brought onto the “watch ward,” they wheeled another college student
in on a gurney who, shaking his fist at the sky, bellowed, “DO NOT GO GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT!!” And I
thought to myself that all of this nonsense, this adventure, as I saw it at the time, would
make great fodder for the book I would one day write about myself.

Very few people came to visit me in that ward. My family, and my best friend.

And the rabbi from my synagogue who knew me from
Sunday school age.

To contrast this sad sad scene …

This time, I’ve also had rabbis come to visit me. Rabbis who
I now work with, a rabbi who I just happened to befriend almost 5 years ago, and another who sent me a gift card to Whole Foods.

This time, tons of
people have visited me, and tons of people know that I’m here and are sending cards, gifts, thoughts, texts. Prayers. 

This time, I am not huddled over a toilet to retch up pills
that made me dull. Or rooming with a girl who sincerely believed helicopters were following her. Or picking at (the admittedly same) dull food with a man who got drunk and laid down on the train tracks. 

Like last time, my brother has given me books to cheer me
up. Like last time, that same best friend is coming to visit me.

But, the contrast with who I am now and who is showing up for
me now, the vastness of my circle of friends, and the enormity of their (your) heart
and generosity – … the contrast is staggering.

I am still bald, unable to leave the hospital, and dependent
on doctors who prescribe me things I’d rather not take. Like then, I am battling a
life-threatening disease, then called addiction, now called cancer. But, unlike
then – I have a sense of who I am beyond this disease. I have a belief in who I
am and things greater than who I am (like Love, for example) to ground me during my fear. And I have faith that this chaos can be met with
fortitude and with the occasional breath of levity.

Though both, I’d wager, make for pretty interesting writing. 

Today, I’ll go into the hospital for Round 3 of chemo. This
is 3 of 5 rounds, and so, I’m almost halfway there. I’m psyched. I feel like
there’s an end to this. Or this portion of it at least.

This morning, I tried a different style of meditation. It’s
one that my friend said she does: she lights a candle, and sits, writing down
whatever comes. I’ve never “written” during meditation before – but, I’ll tell
you, it worked.

Sure, there are all the initial thoughts about stuff that
needs to be done, etc. Some of which I wrote down, some of which was just
chatter. But, then I got to some good stuff, and was writing down some new
prompt questions for my workshop that I’m facilitating this morning for some of
my women friends.

I didn’t “have it in me” prior to this morning to think up
new questions, and so it was a marvelous thing to just have these new questions
come – there’s a journaling portion at the beginning of the workshop to explore some of our ideas around creativity and spirituality (hence the name of the
workshop!), and I’ve used the same prompts for over a year, but wasn’t sure how
I’d “get” new ones. I’ve been so tired, I even thought about canceling today,
but I am actually feeling more enthusiastic about the whole thing now.

This morning, it was raining kennels, rather than cats and
dogs, and I interpreted the aching, raging winds and the slap of the rain
against my windows as a show of this Universal power that I’ve been trying to
become open to. That the show of that kind of roar of the elements is proof, or
evidence, or a sample of what is available to me, should I allow myself to be
available.

Last night, I looked up the cancer blog “Life, Interrupted.”
I identified like gangbusters. And, too, I recognize a hint – well, maybe more
than a hint – of jealousy. Which sounds preposterous. Being jealous of a woman
with Leukemia. But… She’s got a blog on the New York Times website. She’s got a
boyfriend supporting her. She gets to occasionally stay in the home she grew up in, in the town she grew up in, with both parents present to care for her. And, she got to save some of her
eggs.

So, yeah. I’m envious of that. But, I don’t envy what she
talks about for her bone marrow transplant or her experience of chemo. She had to go with transplant, as her cancer didn’t go into
remission after the first round of chemo, as mine did. I don’t envy her nausea,
mouth sores, or physical pain.

Instead, what I “get”
are friends who come to help me pack up for this next round. I get people
texting me to ask what they can bring me and when they can see me. I get to
acknowledge that I’ve puked once
in this whole process and that nausea has been at a minimum, if at all. And I get to state that I got my period this month,
which bodes well for how my soldiering ovaries are bearing forth through the
chemo.

Also, I’m in remission.

I get to have my brother arrive next Saturday, and know that
he’ll play me guitar, and we’ll sing together, no matter how well or not this
round goes. I get to have my best friend from New Jersey come out right after
Christmas. I get to have my friend Debby deliver a prayer I’m writing to Israel,
where she’s going this week.

I don’t have to envy
her. I do envy her her blog, but, really, I also get to have people continue to tell me
that my own writing means something to them – and no matter the scale, that
actually is what is important to
me. I have a friend, too, who’s offered to help me if I want to “take my
writing to the next level,” and put me in touch with people she knows.

I am not devoid or absent of resources. And these are all external ones. I’ve been trying so hard to dig deep within myself to “make
it work,” to make decisions, to do my own cooking, laundry, walk to places that
I can get rides to instead. I’ve been trying to hold the ache and the hurt of
what’s happened with my dad all by myself. I’ve been trying to figure out what
happens when Round 5 will be done – who I will be, what I will do, where I will
live.

I don’t need to do this.

My friend came by to do acupuncture on me yesterday, and he
confirmed physically what I’ve been expressing emotionally – my systems are exhausted. They/I am tired on so many levels. I don’t need to
do more on my own.

I’ve been using coffee to back-balance the fatigue I feel,
which makes me a little chagrined, as coffee creates an acidic environment in
your body, which means it’s a breeding ground for cancer.

I could identify so much with what the Life, Interrupted
author talks about – asking the question with everything you do, Is this the best? Is this the best choice of food or activity? Is this the best use of my time, is this the best
thing on the menu, is this the best restaurant, is this the best conversation,
is this the best movie to see? Is this the best way to spend this precious Tick
Tocking time? No wonder I’m exhausted.

So much of what she talks about, I can relate to. It was
strange to read her sentence, I assume that people with cancer will know what
I’m talking about. I do. I am a person, I won’t say “with,” but who has had cancer. I do
get it. I am part, now, of a club that I never wanted to be a member of, but
which has allowed me to see and experience things that the majority of the
population doesn’t.

I don’t take pride in this, but I do take it as a chance to greatly expand my capacity for empathy. There is
a whole portion of humans now whom I can relate to, and understand. I know
before all this, I would read these touching and emotional stories and
accounts, or I would hear of someone with cancer, survived or not, and I would
momentarily feel affected. And then I’d move on. That’s someone else’s
experience, not mine (“Thank G-d,” perhaps I’d add, if I were feeling aware).

But, it is different now. I “get,” as in understand, things
that I never would or have. I don’t admire my position, but I recognize the
quasi-unique place that I am now in.

What this means, or will mean, I don’t know. It doesn’t
really have to “mean” anything. Just
that I feel more attuned to a larger part of the human race. And I guess that
does “mean” something. 

My friend Renee, the depth hypnotherapist, came by again
yesterday. She asked how I was, and I said, I felt exhausted. Depleted on levels all, soul, physical, mental. All. I have no more resources. And don’t know how to refuel.

She said I have trouble asking for, and accepting, help. I
didn’t know it was that obvious. In fact, as habitual as it is, I didn’t really realize that I do it.
She said she’s known me well for quite some time. Which is true.

We looked some at my resistance to accepting help. How I
feel that to allow help (and we can substitute love, as it’s the same thing,
really) is to allow in a Trojan horse. She said that was an interesting thing
to say; to me, it sounds normal, and obvious. I guess it’s not.

When I spoke in the previous blog about allowing people to
set up house on my “lawn” and that I just retreat farther inside myself, this
is the same track. To allow someone in, is to allow them to harm me, step on my
grass, or burn my house down.

Better to stay shut and shuttered.

We talked about the 25 and 75 per cents again. I realized
this morning through some meditation that ultimately, I have been presenting
only 25% of myself to be available for love, because to allow the rest to come
forward is too dangerous.

I went back to this event when I was 15 or 16 when I
suddenly and traumatically learned or interpreted that there was only one thing
that “they” (read: guys, but extrapolated to “the world”) wanted to see of me.
I retreated inside myself very harshly and drastically at that moment. In my meditation, as I stood next to that car, parked on the dark side-street of my
suburban charming town, in real life, I bawled.

This was not okay.

And so I learned that to prevent myself from being truly harmed, I
would give you what would be “approved of,” what I thought you wanted to see,
and the rest of me, the color part of me, would remain shut up. You will get my
25 per cent. This is what garners your approval. The exterior. The surface. I
won’t allow myself to get burned.

Surely, unfortunately, I had plenty more experiences to
support the idea to that to let people in is to get hurt apocalyptically. After
the decimation of my first love experience, I started smoking. After the
second, I started using psychedelics. Anything to not feel how betrayed and
wounded I was by you. Or how betrayed and wounded I was by myself, for again allowing that larger part of me to be vulnerable.

To shut down the majority of myself has had major consequences
in my life. The refusal to ask for help/allow for help is just one manifestation.
Because I interpreted that I could only be or use or share or show the 25 per
cent of myself, I’ve been stymied in most areas of my life.

We spoke about my job. And tentative though I am to write
about it, as I know my coworkers read this. … I cannot go back to doing that
work, I sobbed on the couch yesterday. I have been trying to get out of the
secretary world for some time now, and I always seem to find myself back in it.

Renee told me that we, alone, cannot construct the new
ideas. That I have to be willing to trust that if I dismantle my own ideas, the
box of the 25%, that something else will
construct itself in its place. A new container. But that I don’t have
to figure it out. That if I try to figure
out how to let these old fallacies go, and try to figure out what to put in its
place, I will simply construct what I’ve always known.

I have to be willing to let it get messy, and believe that
it will recorrect. To eliminate a container of water, the water will spill all
out over the table. Can I allow it to spill, and believe that something else,
something more accurate healthy will create itself?

Romance and Finance are what seem to plague most of us. And
this abuse and crippling of myself have affected me in both these
areas. In both I feel empty. Because I have been working on the presumption
that I must only be and show this limited portion of myself.

The fallacy of the employment tack has been as follows: If I
have a stable, steady job, my dad will approve of me, and therefore I will be
whole. However, it is only that 25% that is being approved of, and the rest of
me is stifled, I feel horrible and not whole at all. Great, workable equation, eh? So, the question is, am I willing to let go
of this impossible quest for my dad’s approval of this tiny portion in order to allow air to the whole of myself?

Structurally, I have been in a system where only this small,
active, visible part of myself has been supported. I have no idea how to support the rest of me. But, as Renee said, I don’t have to support me. I have to let go of the idea that I somehow need to know or give or figure or create. This is my problem, and my challenge/invitation. 

And again, it will come back to letting it, others, in. Letting
myself, allowing myself to look for support. To look at people showing up for
me now as a show of Universal support, no longer interpreting the “Santa Claus”
rewarding/punishing G-d.

People are showing up for me. They are, out of the goodness
of their hearts, offering me love in the form of laundry, dvds, tupperware, texts.
“Be careful not to trust,” says the fearful part of me. “You know what happened
last time.”

In fact, “last time,” was a long time ago. Evidence that
love is harmful is an outdated concept. With little to support it.

Sure, I can look at the events with my dad lately, or I can
look at my last relationship. But these are two out of, say, a hundred people
who have shown up for me during my illness.

I’m scared. But I want to be a grown up. I want to stand
forward with the whole of myself. I want to be more than a goddamned secretary.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with being one, if you are one! It’s just wrong
for me.) I want to be more than perpetually single, and afraid.

I’m afraid anyway, this way. Why not try to be afraid of the
something new then? Or, rather, try to be afraid, and do it anyway. Open myself
to the intention of letting in more
light. More life. Open myself to the intention of receiving. And allow myself
to stay out of the way as “it” constructs a new, useful, and healthy container for — you guessed it — Universal Love.