The Why Not.

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.