The Day of Magical Thinking

When bad things happen, some people of faith tend to say, “Well, that wasn’t God; that was just a bad thing happening.”

Holocaust, dead babies, friends overdosing: Not God. Just happenstance. 

To try to integrate trauma into a worldview that includes a benevolent power underlying all, one must, according to some, reject the trauma as a part of the benevolent power’s purview. 

Now, granted, one might imagine that an all-powerful being would probably have the authority to have a hand in such things. But for the case of some arguments, we’re told, Shit happens. 

Awakened in me, or at least uncovered in me, recently is a boatload of anger. A feeling of betrayal by some power in the Universe that just as I was beginning to come out of the trauma of a history dotted with: abuse, neglect, rape, alcoholism, pauperism and solitude: that it would be then that my blood would suddenly turn to cancer inside me. 

However, in order to feel a betrayal, I must believe that it was personal. Or, if not personal, that there was somehow a fairness or order in the Universe that was reversing on me. 

And, I can’t. I can’t anymore believe that I’ve been betrayed because it is upsetting the fabric of my nature. 

To think, Okay, now I have to go through trauma recovery around cancer on top of all the rest I was dealing with, makes me feel hideously resentful and angry and frustrated, and in the end, hopeless. 

Because if things are going to abruptly turn to a pit of fire at any given moment, what’s the point? What’s the point in healing, helping, creating, being?

And I can’t have that. I can’t be someone who carries around the question, What’s the point?

It’s very bad for me. 

So, what if I try something different, for even a day? Car won’t start? Shit happens. Find a penny on the sidewalk: Good shit happens. Cancer recurs and I have to transplant my bone marrow by shearing away the essence of my body? Well, Shit Happens. 

I dunno. Doesn’t sound realistic to me. But, then again, what does?

Do I just assume good things will happen to and for me, and wash aside the traumas? I am someone who believes that repression and white-washing doesn’t actually work, so what if you just reject it, instead of repress it?

If I begin to believe that I’m someone who can have stability, joy, purpose, fulfillment, connection and ease… well, anything that doesn’t fit with that worldview just file under “Not God”?

And here’s the rub with the whole “God,” Higher Power, Benevolent Force, Life Itself, Universe shit:

I happen to belong to -- and had my life saved by -- a group of people who say that in order to not drink yourself into oblivion and become a tornado in the lives of others … you need a “spiritual solution.”

Uh. Hmmm….

So, what if. What if just for a day (because hey, it’s a day I fought the fuck hard for anyway), I just assume and walk about and believe that good shit happens? That I have good luck. That I am destined to fulfillment in my work and romantic life. 

What if I let my anger and betrayal and hurt and aghastness rest… not shoved away or down, but just set into an open box called, “Shit Happens”? 

Meh. It's worth a shot. 

The Look-Good.

I was with a group of close friends on Friday night, celebrating one of their “not getting drunk and sleeping with strangers” anniversaries. These are women I’ve known for nearly my whole 8 years of not doing the same, and who know me and have seen me through my best and worst. 

And I couldn’t tell them the truth. 

It wasn’t until the assembled group was about to close that I got up, walked to the podium at the front of the room and said, “This is the place you’re supposed to tell the hard things. And, things are really bad.”

I began to sob. I eeked out that 5 months ago, I burned my life down, and I’m exhausted and isolated. I told the group that I realized I had to say something when, tonight, I couldn’t hold eye contact with my friends over our dinner. That the closest women I have in my life, I couldn’t look at for too long, because if I did… they would see… and I would break down crying. 

And I didn’t want to do that. 

Because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything to do. So, why talk about it?

I told them about being an expert at looking good on the outside, and feeling like dog shit on the inside. Now, the thing about the “look good” is that, sure, who doesn’t want to look good? Especially when you are feeling crappy, sometimes it’s nice to say, Well, at least I can still pull myself together. At least I can assemble an outfit, put on a little makeup, and … look good. 

However, the other thing about the “look good” is that generally, if you look good, people assume you feel good. And that’s part of the guise of it, of course; that’s part of its purpose… is to fool people. Because if no one asks, you don’t have to tell. 

It’s a pretty little prison we wrap ourselves up in, in an effort to try to do it alone. Because, again, what else is there to do?

In my case, I’m going on interviews, auditions, tours of school, taking tests, ordering physics books. I’m going about the wildest flurry of activity, the other day, I called it a blizzard. 

All this manic pushing to get out of my current situation that I feel ashamed I got into again. Molly, quitting another job without a plan. Molly, struggling to find work, again. Molly looking into a hundred different career paths, and feeling like a strung-out shell of a person through it all. 

Because, as I said earlier: Things are really bad. 

There’s a lot of crying, a lot of hopelessness, a lot of just trying to make it through these extended, exhausting retail days. 

A co-worker I’ve been sharing some of my, “Someone get me out of here” activities with said yesterday that shouldn’t this (the retail job) feel laughable in comparison to what I’ve been through? (She knows about the cancer.) And I said, No. 

Instead, it feels like, “Haven’t I been through enough that I shouldn’t have to deal with this fucking bullshit?” That’s how it feels. 

It feels like I push and try and explore and push and try and explore, and nothing moves. 

I feel like the hamster on the wheel, working so fucking hard, and getting no where. 

I will say that this new idea to pursue teaching feels like the first thing that makes real and doable sense in all my career lily-pad hopping. So, that feels like a win, and progress, and hope. 

And in the center of that remains the fact that my feet and legs ache, right now, I’m earning half what I did when I was at my office job, I have a dwindling savings account that was really fucking hard-earned, and I have no back-up.

So. What? Why do you talk to anyone about that anyway? No one really has anything to tell you of use, except, “We love you and you’ll get through this.” … And take that to the bank. 

But, no. It’s fabulous that I have people around me, and I know there’s something to telling the truth, and so I did. When I realized I couldn’t look my best friends in the eye for fear they might see the truth of what’s happening beyond the “look good,” it was time to say something. (Though, perhaps earlier could have been better, too.)

Did they particularly have anything that shorn through the bleakness in which I find myself, again? Not really. No magic bullets. No words of enlightenment. Just simple suggestions like, Go to a meeting everyday with people who actually know you, and share about this. 

And so, I am. 

I hate it. I feel vulnerable, and I want everybody to not talk to me about it afterward — but there’s no controlling people. 

Because here’s the undercurrent of all this surface nonsense, all this struggle to stay and get afloat and to try to believe that things will change and get better if I keep doing "the next right thing," that life will even out, that I'll be okay...: 

The undercurrent is: I. Don't. Know. That. (None of us do, surely.)

But, specifically, I'm talking cancer. I have a lot of cancer grief to go through, and I don’t know how. 

Partly I don't talk about it because I feel it's so dramatic to talk about, because I'm scared people will roll their eyes, and think, "Sheesh, enough with the cancer already; you lived, didn't you? Move on!" 

I don’t know how to share with people about how angry, betrayed, and every day still terrified -- with every cough, or sleepless night, or strange headache -- about a recurrence I feel. 

I don’t know how to begin to put faith back into a universe and a universal law that arbitrarily may decide to kill you "just cuz." How to “come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to wholeness” when everything solid was ripped from under me in an instant. 

And that’s what I’m being asked to do. I’m at the point, again, where I’m supposed to contemplate my idea of a “higher power,” and I want everybody to take their, “It’s the cycle of life and death,” it’s love, it’s community, and shove it with red hot poker down their own throats. 

Because: Fuck. You. (non-cancer having people, she mumbles mentally.)

I am going at all this activity pretty much on my own, without the guidance and space of meditation, without a wisp of a belief in the goodness of the world, or in the belief that efforts bring results. 

And it’s really hurting me. 

There’s a lot of work I’m going to have to do on this, and I feel SO TIRED. I’m so tired. Have you fought cancer and then had to go about the daily business of living, getting parking tickets and paying bills you can’t afford? And are you now being asked to reconcile that traumatizing experience with a belief in goodness or constancy in the universe in order to stay sober and not kill yourself?

Few of us have. And I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t know who to turn to. 

And so, I’m doing this -- or have been trying to do this -- all alone, in many ways. Sure, I’m reaching out, and the shell of isolation is cracking, and I imagine “good” things will come of it. But for now, I’m just so tired. 

So that’s what’s beyond the “Look-Good,” friends. It’s not pretty, or happy, or palatable for many, including myself. It’s sad and raw and real and really fucking painful to be where I am right now. 

And… if one of you tells me “this too shall pass” or "everybody dies sometime," i’ll shove an iron through your cranium.

(Because it is small comfort, even though it’s true.)

There always had to be a fly...

...in the ointment.

If things were going well, there was always the knowledge that my father’s parents were shut-ins and deleterious hoarders. Or that my mom was manic-depressive. Or that my brother had a horrible stutter.

There was always the reminder that my clothing was bought at discount stores, that my father had an awful temper, or that my mom’s parents had died under circumstances that ripped her family apart and isolated us against them.

If things were going well, there was always a skeleton or two to whisper in your ear about not believing good things were for you, about being dragged down, about not being allowed to be happy.

Today, those long-quieted skeletons, imagined they’ve been exorcised for years, have begun their murmurous palaver again.

Yesterday, I had a phone call with my mother. She is sick. Again. It’s the same or similar cold/sinus infection she’s been struggling against for over a year. And when it came up last year, when she didn’t know why she kept getting sick, when doctors didn’t immediately know why either, I called my psychic.

Because at the time, all roads led to cancer. Did she have it? What was going on? What can I do?

No, said the woman on the phone. It’s not cancer, but whatever it is, if she doesn’t deal with this, with what’s underlying it, it could be the beginning of a long road to the end. This could be the thing that takes her out.

Whatever your thoughts about intuitives aside, I’d worked with her enough that she knew of what she spoke. And from all indications since that phone call over a year ago, it’s proving pretty accurate. My mom is still sick. Healthier, Sick, Healthier Sick.

And I’m dragged immediately back into a curtain-drawn bedroom where she’d curled up against the light, fighting another one of her chronic migraines. I’m dragged immediately back into being a child taking care of her mother, telling her to get out of bed. Leaving her there, and getting my brother and I out the door for school.

My mother is a woman of chronic ailments. And this newest one, whatever its cause, reason, purpose, is dragging me down again with her.

What is love, comes the question? What is equanimity? What is detachment, enlightenment? Fate? What is the caustic, oxidizing rust that others’ baggage leaches onto you and your own path?

And what is my responsibility in helping them through their pain?

Especially if they don’t recognize it as such.

So much has come up lately about codependence versus interdependence. About leaving others to their experiences and feelings, and letting that not affect what I’m doing and how I’m feeling. Even something as simple as the play, and trying to not let the audiences’ reactions sway my mood.

I feel angry. I feel angry this feels like it’s happening again. I feel angry that I’m powerless about how she cares for and treats her body, about how she schedules her work in the 12-hour days without lunch breaks. About how she spends her off days flattened, recuperating from her over-working.

I’ve had to do so much work on letting her have her experiences, despite my opinions, and yet. And yet. I’m human. And I love her, and I don’t want her to be in pain. And I don’t want her to deteriorate.

And moreso, I don’t want her life to affect mine.

When does a child grow up? What is the role of a loved one? How can you, and can you, let someone crawl along the bottom of their own experience, while you make strides in the direction of your own fulfillment?

Because that’s what’s at stake here. Callous as it may sound, it doesn’t matter, ultimately, what happens with my mom. What matters is what I take on about it. How I allow it to affect me. And mostly, can I continue to make my life what I want it to be when there are still murmuring skeletons?

My whole life, I’ve been distracted by the flies. I’ve allowed my attention to be derailed in fishing them out, or I’ve simply allowed them to decree that I cannot be happy because they exist. That I cannot find success because there are flaws in the tapestry of my surroundings.

Obviously, I write about it today because I’m upset and I don’t have the answer to these questions. Because I don’t know how to move forward when there are tendrils threatening to draw you back.

So, for today, I’ll leave it both as an open question, and as evidence of a success. Because, today, I get to tell you about it. And darkness can’t live in the light. 

T’shuvah

(In my vague and limited Jewish knowledge) T’shuvah refers to the time in the Jewish calendar between Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—and Yom Kippur—when our names are sealed in the “Book of Life” by G-d for the next year.

T’shuvah literally means to return, but most interpretations take it to mean a time of repentance. A time of atoning for our “sins,” and to acknowledge where we’ve “missed the mark” of our own moral target.

I’m not one for “sins,” or for “atoning,” or for asking forgiveness from a spiritual entity. In my own spiritual practice, there is a habit of taking note of where we’ve been wrong and amending that behavior, whether through direct conversation with someone we’ve harmed or through choosing to act differently in the future.

But, the idea of asking a “higher power” to forgive me for anything at all has never sat well with me. I simply don’t think that anything that has the power to create life and death and change and love would need my asking. I believe that whatever “G-d” is, “it” is much too loving or non-personified to ever require me to ask it to forgive my behavior.

As I said, I still think the process of taking stock of my behavior and righting my own wrongs is very important to my emotional wellbeing and my personal relationships. But on the spiritual plane, G-d would never need me to ask for forgiveness. There’s nothing to forgive – there’s only love, acceptance, and a desire for me to be my best self.

That said, I have been reflecting that this week of t’shuvah has certainly been one of returning. I feel that my actions are those of a woman returning to herself and her values; returning to my true nature, and returning to ideas and hopes that were feared or abandoned.

I am in a musical. I’ve returned to that dream of acting and singing, despite the fears and self-judgments it still brings up in me.

I have officially announced this week that I am moving on from my office job. Again, a return to my true desires, my internal compass. I have stopped hitting the Snooze button on my instincts and drives.

No matter what comes of it, disaster or “success,” I am trying something brand new for me. And that is certainly a return to curiosity, innocence, hope, and creation.

I told my coworker that I boycott Yom Kippur these days. The fasting and the communal atoning of sins. I shun this day and its activities because the idea is that by atoning for our sins, we will be “inscribed in the Book of Life” for another year.

According to the Jewish calendar, in 2012 the evening closing Yom Kippur was the moment of my Leukemia diagnosis. I spent the day of Yom Kippur in an ER. And closed the chapter of that day with cancer. I was 30 years old.

I have done a lot of work around turning that diagnosis into the seeds of a new life. But I will never deny that I have a few wheelbarrows full of anger and grief that still need … sorting or composting or alleviation. Or simply time to feel them, and then to let them go, perhaps, if that’s what happens.

But for me, the idea that on one of the most holy days of the Jewish year, on the day when a person is either granted another year of life or is not, I cannot hold the tragedy of being told half my blood was cancer on that same day. 

And, I imagine, my feelings toward all of this will transform, lessen, or evolve. But, for now, I boycott Yom Kippur.

I have used this week of T’shuvah to take stock of where I am desirous to return to and acknowledge and rejoice in the truth of my soul, and to note where I already am. I have used this week to affirm that life can be new and different and fulfilling.

I will never need the forgiveness of an entity that is either made of benevolence or simply is the indifferent force of Life itself.

My week of T’shuvah is and has returned me to a place of excitement and possibility. I don’t need a communal atonement to reward me for how exceptional that is. 

That said. Shanah Tovah u'Metukah -- May you have a good (tovah) and sweet (metukah) year, friends. And may we write our own Books of Life. 

Aesop was a Scientist.

Chances are, like me, you’ve heard a hundred versions Aesop's fable, "The Oak and the Reed," wherein we're taught to bend like a reed in a storm, instead of remaining stalwart as an oak which will be blown over.

The moral is to remain flexible in the face of challenge or adversity, instead of becoming rigid and unmoving. To move with the times, to let things shift around you without trying to control them or how they’re affecting you. To be at ease with how things are, because when the storm does pass, if you’ve remained reed-like, you’ll stand up into the sunlight again.

Yes, we’ve all heard this, and again if you’re like me, you vacillate between these flora’s coping mechanisms, flexible to rigid and back again. Sometimes within the same hour.

However, one story I didn’t know was one I heard on the little audio book I’m listening to now: The Biodome Moral.

(Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the Pauly Shore movie, but it’s valuable nonetheless.)

Scientists in the 80s, the book reports, created a perfect replica of Earth and Earth’s atmosphere within a dome. They then sent 8 scientists into the dome to live there for 2 years. Among their findings was what happened to the trees.

Inside the dome, there was no wind and no storms. The scientists assumed that without the challenges of storms to damage the trees, they would grow taller and stronger and faster than those outside the dome.

Indeed, the trees grew faster and taller. But not stronger.

The trees were weak, and easily uprooted. The scientists discovered that the trees needed the challenge of the storms, of withstanding the storms, in order to become strong and healthy. By eliminating all adversity from their lives, they became big and tall, sure, but they also became hollow and weak.

Remind us of any other species?

I am not an advocate for adversity. I bristle vehemently when told that adversity is "a blessing," as I’m occasionally told about my cancer.

Which, by the way – never tell someone that. If they want to say that to you, great; listen, nod, be compassionate. But never be the one to tell them that it makes them stronger, never tell them that there will be a gift from it, or that it is itself a gift. All these things may be true, but fuck you, healthy person, for telling me to look on the bright side of leaking out my ass for a month. Even though you mean it authentically, lovingly, and truthfully.

I happen to know these things are true. I write here that they are; that having had that adversity has impelled and propelled me to engage in my life and in activities that I’d procrastinated on; necessitated my creating new relationships and boundaries that I’d been too scared to create before. Having had and survived cancer has irrevocably changed the rest of my life and given miles of perspective to every other storm I may encounter.

But if you haven’t noticed, sometimes we get tired of encountering storms, and I’d really prefer for you to not steal my lemons to make your own lemonade. -- And I still wouldn't call it a blessing. An opportunity, I'd concede. But I'm sure no one ever said: Bless me, father, with life-threatening illness. 

... I guess I still have some letters of complaint to write to the Universe's customer service department.

So,

The absence of storms makes us weaker. But, the preponderance of storms makes us exhausted.

To continue in fable-speak then, I suppose it’s appropriate to quote Goldilocks on the merits of balance and the middle way. To endeavor to create, withstand, be free from and grow from challenges that are not too big, not too small, but “Just Right.”

Wilderness Survival

So, here's a funny.

Remember when I posted that blog about finding equanimity in my relationships? About not being thrown by others emotions (or even my own)? Yeah, that one I posted on Friday... three days ago?

Well, guess what I've been given the opportunity to practice these last three days?

Bingo!

To be respectful, I will simply say that I saw many chances to retaliate and behave how I used to -- particularly, by being curt, punishing, and seethingly silent. If I behave that way, you, of course, will apologize for your behavior, and change in the way that I want you to, right?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I really noticed how I wanted to react, my first reaction. How my disappointment wanted to come out as being mean. Instead, I tried to my best to "let it go." I had that silly Frozen song in my head a lot this weekend!

How others are choosing to behave is none of my business. As it affects me, it is my business. But it's up to me to choose how I want that to be expressed.

Let's just say that I was pissed, so much so that I was on the phone while driving, and got pulled over by a cop before I even left San Francisco.

Luckily I was let off with a warning (and I know how much those tickets cost!), but it gave me the opportunity to pause and look at why I was behaving in the way I was -- in a way that wasn't good for me.

The whole weekend ended up, for me, being an exercise in letting other people have their emotions and their actions, and not being drawn into that drama. It's camping. It's supposed to be light, fun, and not particularly insightful, except maybe the insight and rest and joy that comes from being in the silence of the forest. Which, is never actually that silent, once you get quiet enough. That's one of the things I love about it. To hear the rustle of the trees, the little animals, the little noises. How this tree sounds as it sways in the wind as opposed to that tree.

Luckily, I was able to ask for some of that time for myself, so that I could get my stillness in.

I am no saint, and I am no angel, and I have no business judging others, or assuming that they should be any way other than they are. But I do get to ask for what I need, and I do get to behave in a way that is in alignment with how I want to be. Despite that my brain gremlins are momentarily eviscerating you.

Upon arrival home to Oakland, I get a phone call. It's my dad.

Really?

I let it go to voicemail. I'm emptying out the cooler in my bathtub. It rings again.

Now I think it's an emergency. Nope: After a decade of being engaged to the same woman, he's finally getting married.

The last weekend of the play I'm playing the lead in.

I was *informed* I should see if they can get the understudy to do that weekend. I wasn't asked what play it was. I wasn't told congratulations. I was told, in the voice of force only my father knows how to invoke, that I should be there.

I told him I'd ask about the understudy.

I called my brother, who'd left me a voicemail about this earlier that day. If the invitations were going out the next week, it was clear that this plan was in place quite some time ago, no? Could be that I could have been informed a little earlier, no?

I was virulently reminded of when I was sick with cancer, and my father told me that he could only call me after dark, when I was exhausted from my days of chemo, that "This is how it works." This is what he told me about not being able to call me earlier. "This is how it works."

After I got off the phone with him yesterday, I remembered that. This occasion, this insistence that I be there, despite whatever (SUCCESS) is going on in my life, is part of his pattern of demand, and selfishness.

And, an inability to say something like: You know, Molly, it would mean a lot to me if you could be there.

I told my brother when we were discussing the viability of my coming out, plane tickets, and where to stay, things that my dad has obviously not thought of. ... that I would talk to my network. That I would look at my numbers. Maybe ask him to pay for half the plane ticket out, since I'm not in a position to go back east again right now.

But then, I do know how awful it is to ask for money from him.

So, I will talk to my network. I will repeat "Let it go" in my head, and I will remember the thing I usually forget when I feel made small by him: I am awesome.

My being in a play IS a big deal. My getting a lead role IS a big deal. I'm doing a brave and new thing. I am taking chances to be greater in my life. And the exercise in equanimity is to allow and remember and embrace and be bolstered by these facts.

It is not a surprise that the weekend I claim that I've moving "beyond" being thrown by others, I'm given several (immediate!) chances to practice what I preached.

A mentor once told me that our "character defects" (or, outmoded coping mechanisms) aren't relieved from us. They aren't removed. Instead, we're given opportunities to either pick them up again, or to act a different way.

I haven't known what that other way is, until I'm given the chance to try something else. If I only reach for what I know, I do the same thing. It's not that I feel relieved of being thrown by others' emotions. I just feel more able to deal with what that brings up for me, and how I choose to engage with that.

What will happen with my friend? Change.

What will happen with my father? I can only hope: Change.

Well, Shoot.

There has been all this heartache in me about wanting my father to change. To be loving, available, vulnerable and open. I have wanted this to happen for as long as I can remember, and I’ve held out a resentment toward him for his inability to do this for that long, too.

I have tried many ways around and through this resentment: loving kindness, acceptance, letters to god, letters to him I didn’t send, letters to him I did. Individuation meditations, praying daily for his peace and happiness, envisioning him as a child... But nothing has moved this boulder of a need.

And I finally realized what the need really is. It is not that I need my father to change. At this point, it’s that I need him not to. Because if he did, then I would have to look at being loving, available, vulnerable and open to him. And this causes trouble, because this is not safe.

So, keeping my resentment toward him has been a circuitous way to protect myself from my being vulnerable to him.

It’s all well and good to want someone to change – but when faced with the actuality of their transformation, how do we deal with that?

I wish I could tell you that I have overblown the situation, and he’s kinder than he appears, and being vulnerable to him could maybe, possibly, just-give-it-one-more-try, be a good idea.

But it’s not. Unfortunately, I have enough evidence to support this. Not ancient, you yelled I was a liar during a game of Clue when I was 5. Like, recent, appallingly turning my vulnerability against me evidence.

So, here’s the thing. I can forgive all of that. I can be willing to forgive it all, anyway. But do I want to change my behavior? Not really.

I’ve spent all this time trying to find my way around the rock of resentment to get toward connection, but when I look instead at what the rock is doing for me, not to me, I get to see that maybe it’s been doing the right thing all along. And this realization is hard for a person like me.

I have fear that keeping myself separate from him will cause bile in my soul and in my body, and corrode other relationships. I have fear that by not being vulnerable to him, I’m going to call down some cosmic retribution and be serially alone. I have fear that I’m not “spiritual” enough, or evolved enough or recovered enough, or else I’d be able to have him in my life as a loving and caring adult, both ways 'round.

I have shame that I can’t allow this relationship to flourish. That I refuse to be the asshole who riles on the ground before him and begs him to love me. I have been doing that for as long as I can remember, too.

But the thing I always thought I wanted was for him to do that too. To acknowledge his faults, to claim ownership of his behavior, and to beg my forgiveness.

What I see now, is that if he actually did, I don’t want to give it – that forgiveness is a door to love. And with him, love is a door to hurt.

The boulder has been there doing this job all along.

Until I learn a “healthier” way of screening those doors, they’ll just have to remain shut. 

But, damnit, I *do* care.

I’ve had “I’ve got you, babe” stuck in my head for the last few days. I’m catching up on the 2nd half of the final season of House, and one of the characters was singing and playing it the other day. I’ve been thinking about it, vaguely, in relation to the whole “turning it over” concept that’s asked of me in my current work. Turn it, everything, present, past, future, over to something else, something “caring,” it tells us because, as we’ve learned by now, trying to do it, to finagle it on my own, doesn’t work out too well.

However, this “care” business... Well, we heard me gripe about “god” the other day. And luckily I still have a few prompt questions to write through and maybe get somewhere with around … “god.” I just don’t know what will come of it. Although I’ll do it anyway.

I know I’m “not alone,” I know that there’s healing and progress and momentum in doing this work without knowing the outcome. But, I’ve had to up my own woo-woo-ness to help get me there a little. Because, as I’ve said, sometimes “god’s plan” includes some really fucked up shit. And fuck trusting that “thing” whatsoever. Asshole.

Jews are supposed to “wrestle and grapple” with god. It’s part of what we’re asked and allowed to do.

On Saturday night, I saw a play that was focused around a Catholic family in the 50s and their relationship to each other, Catholicism, and a nun with a heart condition. The main character is a 12 year old boy, heading to confirmation, and he keeps on questioning the doctrines. Why did god put us here, is one of the questions the nun asks. He replies, To have fun. – That’s not the proscribed answer, by the way.

If you don’t learn this, you go to hell. Well, I’m not sure I believe in hell, he replies.

He isn’t quashed at the end; in fact, his questioning helps to open everyone else up.

And so, I have to believe that my questioning, my hesitance, my ire will do the same.

I am past a point of blind faith. But, sometimes there’s nothing else than that either. So, what then?

There’s a billboard I drive past on the way to work. For about a month, it was an ad for a casino, portraying simply the eyes of a ravenous, coy, coaxing woman. The copy read: Luck will find you.

Each time I drove past it, I said aloud, No it won't.

Luck doesn’t find us. We find Luck. To quote the 80s: “There is no fate but what we make.”

And yet, … I’m past the point of blind willfulness, too.

I know that a belief in hope and change, in love, lead me to show up for things that are uncomfortable. I know that my knowledge that I really can’t do it alone leads me to call people, write this homework shit, and hope that the next right action will open up to me.

I know I’m not hopeless, or a hopeless case. I know I’m not throwing off the mantle of faith in favor of self will-ing myself through my life. I’ve spent plenty of torn-up hours trying to “make it work.” Trying to change others, my past, present, and future.

So, I know I’m at surrender. I know I’m at the place of letting go, and trusting “what is.” Or trying to trust it, rather.

But, I’m scared. I’m scared for me, I’m cautious with my hope for others; I’m a great scoop more apathetic about the god thing, at the same time I’m more charged about “moving forward” in many places in my life.

I’m tired. I’m grieving the loss of innocence. I cannot yet believe in the (fucking) “care” of a higher power. I think Fate is an asshole. The schmuck who pulls your chair out from beneath you when you’re about to sit and, like Nelson on The Simpsons, cackles, “Heh Heh!”

I thought I’d given up that one, that punitive idea, that pull me closer/push me away god.

I could decide to call this all evidence of that god, and therefore defy and reject the whole concept. Every day I go to work with a woman who lost her baby at 8 months pregnant. Every day, she and I, simply by our presence, remind one another that nothing is certain in this life. Joy is not guaranteed.

So, like I said, I’m ramping up my woo-woo tools again. I’m reading affirmations, listening to them, signed up for the Oprah/Deepak meditation month. I’ve got to. I’ve got to give myself some pudding in which the medicine is slipped.

I’ve got to tell myself, in a fake it till you make it way, that I am alright. That 5-year mortality statistics don’t mean anything to a bad-ass like me. That I am cooler than I think I am, and worth every effort and so much 'then some' that I take toward my health and my goals.

I’ve got to say, I believe in the care of these simple things. In the care of a little self-love. In the care of a coffee date with a friend, the soft breathing of a baby.

Anything else can go fuck itself. 

Rage against the dying of your light.

So, I’ve seen this somatic therapist (Rosen Method) now about 4 times, and each time I plan to go, I wonder if we’re “doing” anything, if anything is “happening,” especially if anything is “changing.” I want results to long-harbored ills, and I want them now. Or at least evidence that we’re heading in that direction.

Damn this woo-woo laying on of hands, heal thyself bullshit – gimme the Rx, gimme the fix, and let’s get on with this “life” business. Or more accurately, let’s get on with the happy life business. Enough processing. More doing, more getting, more fulfillment, more joy, more security, more ….

She told me that if I keep on trying to skip over my emotions, they’ll still just be there. Waiting, licking at the back of my throat, causing the tension in my shoulders I’ve carried for decades. If I put a lid on them, feel them well up, and force them back down, … well, I could finish that sentence with, “Then you might get cancer.”

But I’m so good at emoting. I’m an emotional wreck! No, I kid, but I am an emotional person, I feel things, deeply, often, sometimes. So, where am I not feeling what needs to come up and out?

“Anger wasn’t an allowable emotion,” I told her. I know I’m not unique in that. But anger was modeled as a way to impose, control, terrorize. Anger, I interpreted, is bad. It causes people to behave badly, meanly, poisoned.

Anger, I also surmised, is consuming. When you are angry, you are nothing else but a hot, raging ball of ferocity. No humanity, no compassion, no faults.

I’ve worked on anger before; I’ve read Julia Cameron saying, Anger is a call to action. It shows us where our boundaries are being crossed, and calls us to take action in their assertion. (to paraphrase.)

Anger is healthy. Anger is right.

Anger is totally not allowed.

This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, anyway. Ask my coworkers! But I feel it as a place where my veil of self-control has slipped, instead of as an integrated part of my expression. I feel my anger as a failure. Something to be overcome, overruled, rooted out.

But, that’s simply not the case, and the more I keep it separate from myself and an integrated whole, the more compartmentalized and dissociated I will be.

It’s not like I want to be the Hulk, or a crank, or someone who’s angry all the time. I just want to allow it to be a part of my emotional range, just like compassion or amusement, and like boredom or fear or apathy. I don’t quash with visceral force even these less “comfortable” emotions; I don’t feel shame over feeling them. Positive or negative ones.

But Anger. And grief. Get the cold shoulder. The taut one. The tense, clamped down, forcible shoulder.

Being a somatic therapist in this way of working, it’s sort of like reiki, only she’s not "sending me good vibes;" she's observing how my body tenses or releases, acknowledges “true” things, or asks me to rephrase, since that didn’t “feel true.” I don’t know precisely what polygraph she’s plugged into in my body, but when I do rephrase to something less "proper," I do feel the difference.

She can feel very acutely when, this week, I began to talk about my disappointment around work. And I began to say that it feels like I’m just giving my dad more evidence that I’m the fuck-up daughter. He’s the Dudley Do-Right (his words), beyond reproach and reproaching everyone else – can you feel my anger, too? – and that I don’t have a firm career track, a “successful” life, feels like more evidence for him that I’m the fuck-up. She asked if I felt that way about the career stuff. And I said, no, I simply feel like a failure. Which I interpret through all the lovely filters of his I’ve internalized as a fuck-up. Which I suppose is the same thing, come to think of it.

You’ve heard this before from me. The antipathy toward getting better, or simply seeing myself as better because it would change the entire nature of my relationship with him. There wouldn’t be a relationship – certainly not the one we’ve had, at least. And so for now, in fact since cancer, there is no relationship. Yell at your sick daughter while she’s getting chemo, and you stop getting the right to shame me. Sorry, Pops. I’m sitting on the bench right now.

But I haven’t walked out of the park, have I? I still want revenge. I still want to pain him. I still want him to see the error of his ways then and now, and be the father I want that I’ve never had. I still have that hope. And so my anger kicks in when I recall him to others. My frustration. My deep deep disappointment.

But only for a flash. As soon as I let myself have a moment of anger, even now, I have this impulse to say, Well, focus on yourself, Molly, and what you can change, and your expectations; you’re living your life away from him, and yadda yadda bullshit.

I need to feel angry! I need to feel betrayed. I need to rail against the fate and circumstance of it, and I need to let it pass.

I never let it pass. Pass through me. Through my red, pumping oxygenated blood.

She asked me as I lay (clothed!) on the massage table, Can you feel that? Can you feel when you got angry how much energy there was? Your voice got loud, your body got hot.

And then it was gone. And then my shoulders tense, my gut constricts. I’m not allowed to be angry. I’m not supposed to be.

I don’t want to let it flow through me. I’m terrified of being consumed by it like they were.

But, I have had the experience a few years ago around grief. I was terrified that if I began to let it out, it would drown me. If I started to cry, to feel it, it would overwhelm me, and I would be lost in it. In the psych ward in it. So, I held it back. (I do still.) But during that time, maybe 5 or so years ago, in the presence and care of another therapist, I let myself feel some of what I needed to. I let it pass through me, out of me, I let it disorient me.

But it didn’t dismantle me. I wasn’t wrecked by it. I felt it. It was hard and sad and wracking, but it wasn’t annihilating.

I will try to remember that as I go forward here, because it feels really old and really sad to hold my body in fight/flight/freeze all the time, and to interpret my life and myself as anything other than brilliant. 

Grudge Match

I was alone on a pier in Hana, Maui when I let it begin to fall.

The sky was an angry gray, spitting water in sideways. The chop of the surf against the dock was ravenous, vitriolic, annihilating. And it felt so very congruous with how I did, that I could allow it all to fall.

If you’d been on the shore a few hundred meters away, across the cove, you couldn’t have heard my assault on the wind and water and fate. The ocean’s temperament absorbed my rage, my indignation, my betrayal, my despair. It opened and closed around me like an itchen woolen cloak, letting me shrug it off and tell it off, and snug it tight around me again. I kneeled into the dock, the waves battering the weathered and mossy posts, and I let the grief of my cancer batter it in return.

A year and a few months later, I sat on a dock jutting out into the water of Salem, Mass. It was like revisiting an old friend who also happens to be your sparring partner. And I let her have it again.

Not quite as fully, but enough to let her know I think she’s a cheap-shot, below-the-belt motherfucker. Enough to let her know that this isn’t settled, that I’m retitling it The Woman and The Sea.

I told my companion that I simply felt that the ocean could take it; could take my rage, could acknowledge, absorb and handle it-- honestly, so that I don’t have to all the time. The ocean somehow makes it okay for me to fall apart a little, to let the broken, tired spit-fire within both take some shots back, and collapse onto the ropes for a while.

It’s hard work pretending everything is alright. And, sometimes, it actually is, and it’s not pretending, and there’s healing that happens in that letting go, in that “moving on.”

A friend once told me that grief is not linear. And I get that.

Some people might assume, Hey, cancer’s gone, rejoice! All done. But, when you’ve been body-checked by Death (to mix metaphors), the thin copper taste of revenge laps at the back of your throat and you say to yourself, Motherfucker, I will rail you back.

As impotent and impossible as you know that fight to be, you rail and swing and charge back anyway.

Because, you sort of believe that it was that railing that fought it off the last time. That it was the rage and vitriol and deep, aching, terrorized clinging to Life that overcame cancer, and so you call on it again when you remember. You taste the acid again, and you spit putrid bile back against it.

I’m grateful I know the ocean is a place I have to spit back at. I’m grateful that it's a place I can allow some of the armor, the shield, to fall for a little while. I also feel as if I am known by it, and in those moments, you’re like weary boxers who hug one another in the middle of the fight in order to catch your breath. You each acknowledge your exhaustion and in silent truce, hug your opponent, because they’re all you have. 

The Father-Daughter Dance

My friend found out yesterday that her father is dying in Switzerland, and she and another friend happened to be at my house yesterday morning when she got the call. It felt like divine timing that she “happened” to be at my house, instead of alone in her apartment, when she received this call, and then had to argue with her phone company to get international calling added to her account so that she could call the ER where her dad was admitted.

We were able to sit there with her, just to sit in my kitchen while she paced my living room, on the phone. Able to make her tea and just set it there, whether she wanted to drink it or could or not. Able to bear witness to her tears, and her fear and her love and her fraughtness about timing and money and taxes and passports and citizenship.

We were able to help her talk through her very next steps, just the ones she needed to do that day in order to prepare to get on a flight tonight.

It was a gift to be able to be present with that.

These past two days, I’ve pulled the “Emperor” card. Shuffled them thoroughly, cut the deck, and again, this morning, I pulled the Emperor card.

I squick at this card. I don’t like it. In my book, it lists the traits of this card: Fathering, Structure, Authority, Regulation.

Um, you all know my dad was in the military, yes?

My friend yesterday, between phone calls, told us how much she loved and admired her father; what a kind man he was, how great a man he was. It was obvious that she had great esteem for him.

I, do not have the same feelings toward my own. And strangely, I got an email from him just a few days ago.

We haven’t spoken in months. Not since his brother died unexpectedly over Christmas.

But, I had been thinking about him, and that it was probably time for me to send an, “I’m not dead” email, just a check-in, just to touch base. And then, there was his email.

So, I replied. Reported the generic updates I would tell a casual acquaintance about my life. And it’ll probably be another several months until we speak again.

I’m still livid, folks. I’m still angered and betrayed and astonished at how he behaved when I had cancer, when I was going through chemo. How he demanded phone calls on his time table, instead of mine, when I was the one in a hospital bed with chemo dripping into a port in my chest. How he simply told me, when I asked for this to change, that, “This is how it works.” How, even though he was newly retired and was working in the yard of his fiancé, he somehow didn’t have any other time in the day to call his daughter in the hospital.

And mostly, it’s just sad. It just still saddens me that this man has no idea how to show up for people. That if it isn’t something that is structured, regulated, and orderly, he doesn’t know how to address it, and therefore, he simply tries to quash it. And, unfortunately, people, I’ve grown up too much to be quashed by him anymore.

I’ve done a ton of work around him, asking for compassion and forgiveness. In fact, just these few weeks, I’ve been using a new affirmation: I forgive my dad fully and easily.

Strange to realize now, after the new email, the Emperor card, my friend’s ailing father, that this might be part of that process. This doesn’t seem like coincidental timing to me.

I know that I have more work to do. I know that I feel very unwilling to forgive him, even at the same time that I have compassion and understanding for someone who never, ever had kindness modeled for him. Someone who didn’t have his own father, and only a step-father who demanded perfection and doled out derision. I know “how” to have compassion for him. And sometimes, many times, I have it.

But, forgiveness is another thing.

And I know that my unwillingness to forgive, to continue to drink the poison I intend for him, is only holding me back, and is only creating blackness in the light I want to move toward. I know that my unwillingness to forgive yokes me to him as surely as shackles, or, perhaps, as surely as love. 

I also know that it is only in the past few weeks that I’ve begun seeing this new therapist, and last week, just the mention of my father, almost in passing, came up. She remarked later that it was clear there was some work to be done there. Which, obviously, I know, and hope for us to do together.

The last thing, and the only thing that’s keeping me from burning that Emperor card is the end of the description in my book. It says this card can also stand in for the archetypal father “in his role as guide, protector, and provider.”

Surely, mine was not able to be this in a way that was supportive. But these are the exact qualities that I’ve been seeking and hoping the “Universe” embodies. That I’ve been praying for, and trying to trust the Universe to have. That it supports me with guidance, protection, and provisions.

Individual, versus Archetype. Reality versus Fantasy. Compassion versus forgiveness.

I really hate that card. 

Nature vs. Nurture.

Being raised by a psychoanalyst, I grew up believing pretty strongly in Nurture vs. Nature. I believed adamantly in Tabula Rasa, and that every aspect of my personality was developed in reaction to my environment.

Eventually, even through a Psychology Major (that switched to Minor), I began to admit that perhaps there were a few inborn traits that one has out of the womb, but the majority of a human’s personality was forged out of their experiences before the age of 3.

But, I have to admit that the aggregate of my own lifetime experiences, up to and including a Leukemia diagnosis, has begun to make me admit that perhaps there is something more to the Gattaca within us. Perhaps something like perseverance, courage, and visceral insistence on life has more to do with my wiring as “human” and as “Molly,” in particular.

I would never peg myself as someone brave or bold. I don’t charge into the fray, or head corporations, or tie myself to a tree before a bulldozer. I have few of the outward markings I would associate with leader or change-maker.

But I am compelled to admit that my undertakings as an adult do, in sum, mark me as someone willing to rage, to rail, to fight, to excavate all in the service of healing.

Though perhaps if my formative years hadn’t been what they were, I wouldn’t find the need to heal from much. Perhaps.

I had a therapist a few years ago who said something novel to me: Your dad is not a courageous man. This struck me as apocryphal. My father, the one so quick to temper and anger and rule of iron fist was not brave? Isn’t that what violence is—bravery? Isn’t that what power is—anger?

Yet, her words rang so unbelievably true. Like seeing the Wizard behind the curtain in Oz. I know now that that kind of anger does usually hide and house one who is critically afraid. I mean, I usually wear my black leather jacket when I’m feeling more insecure, as if its made of chainmail instead of leather.

But, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday, answering her question about why I was in Victoria’s Secret the other day. I told her about my upcoming trip to meet my consummate penpal—and she squealed. She thought it was so bold and brave, and adventurous, and ALIVE. She rattled on that this experience is going to help so many other people down the line, help women to see that life is meant to be lived.

It sounded so epic when she mirrored it back like that! And maybe it is. And maybe it’s not.

But, I do know that with every meditation, every alternative healer, every inventory, every striving, every goddamn picking myself up, that I am taking something back. That I am reclaiming something. And if that impulse to charge onward, in light of all that is, is called courage, then I guess the Wizard granted me a heart on the day that I was born. 

Discovering The Third Thing

A or B, Molly? Your life depends on it. Is it black or white, Molly? Your life depends on it. Is Dad coming home right now, your life depends on it. Is he in a temper-FIGURE IT OUT-your life depends on it. Is Mom crying? Is she still alive-LISTEN HARD-your life depends on it. Is it black or is it white, Molly, YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

A woman I met once and have never seen or sought out again asked me, What if there's a “third thing?”

Much of what I hear is about how we break things into black and white, but that life is not that way. There is an indoctrination, as above italicized, that makes us learn and perceive that life is and must be black and white as a way of survival. And in adulthood, that must be unlearned.

What folks have suggested as remedy to this, however, is “life is gray,” shades of grey (no allusion intended). That it’s somewhere in the middle.

Years ago, I decided that “grey” didn’t work for me in this metaphor, too bland; that instead, “not black and white” could be interpreted as “in color.” Life isn’t “black and white;” it’s in color.

But, this woman told me something else entirely. That it’s something I haven’t even conceived of before.

We were not talking about life. We were talking about sex.

I was telling her how I've vacillated in my life between the icons I have named Betty Crocker and The Vixen. How I swing the pendulum of myself from one to the other; bored by the first, burned by the second.

I was emailing with a friend yesterday about how some of situations I find myself in at the moment are reminiscent of something that happened in my early twenties, a situation I got myself in as a result of swinging from Betty Crocker to the Vixen, to disastrous results. She pointed out a few places where things are different now, that I’m sober, older, and it was just plain different.

But there is a rubber band that pulls this circumstance back to then, a sense memory that lashes out, OH! UH-UH we’ve done this, lady! Remember!! Remember the outcome, the consequences, the disaster! Warning, warning!

She tells me it’s not the same. I remind myself of the year; I look around myself at who and where I am. And it’s very freaking hard to separate the past from the present.

Which brings us back to the trust I’ve been working on. To trust that I am different, that I am safe, that I can allow myself to experience life in a different way today. That I am able to be the third thing.

It only occurred to me today that perhaps the person I’m becoming as I sort all this out is the third thing, neither the puritanical Betty Crocker (who avoids all human contact in search of the unicorn idea of a risk-less relationship), nor The Vixen (who overrides all hesitance toward prurient wantonness).

I had my first initial phone call yesterday with a woman who works somatically with trauma. We’re scheduled to meet next Wednesday, the one day I have off rehearsal during “tech week.” As helpful and warm and not really "getting into anything" as our conversation went, my body closed up tighter than an asshole over a flame. And, this is why I want to see her! (duh.)

I used the words “ingress” and “egress” a lot in my morning pages today, the allowance of things to enter and to exit. Currently, I allow some of myself out, but I refuse anything entry. Or, if I allow entry of someone or some emotion, then I refuse them anything in return.

The two-way mirror of my skin. One side can look in, the other cannot look out.

The third thing, here, would be a window, instead. (Don’t even suggest something without a pane; I might deck you.)

Brain Dump.

i could write about how beautiful winter is here

that right now the rain is dripping over the green and flowering
back garden and tree-hidden houses behind my building.

i could write about how i feel stuck on this writing/
self-inventory i’m supposed to be doing, and haven’t been able

to work on because we’re not doing it the way

it was designed, and i feel lost and unsupported

and conflicted about telling the person I’m working

with because i have before and things haven’t

changed, and I don’t know if it’s just me being

stubborn or avoidant or if this is really just

too precarious to attempt by myself, when

the work was designed to be done in person

with another person.

i could write about how i cancelled my audition

in san jose last night because a) i didn’t realize

how far san jose was, and b) i think i might get

the role I auditioned for on wednesday in Marin

and the plays run concurrently.

i could write about coming home last night, instead,

and “resting,” actually lying on the couch after cutting

up some beets and turnips and putting them in the oven

and putting a blanket over me and my heating pad and

shutting my eyes. and just letting myself and my eyes, especially,

rest while the vegetables roasted. how luxurious it felt

to simply do nothing – not nothing, aka watch netflix,

not nothing aka clean my house, just nothing, and not

nothing aka meditate, which could be similar but wasn’t

as my mind wandered and i let it, and i let it get a little fuzzy

and out of focus as my cat balled up in my lap to rest, too.

i could write about my friend texting me his friend’s dad is

about to die from cancer, and texting him my sympathy, but

that i wasn’t available to process around grief of that kind.

I could tell you, it’s because it’s too activating for me because

it reminds me that my cancer is only a year past, that last year

at this time i was preparing for my fifth and final round of chemo

and hearing about someone else’s cancer just reminds me how

close i am to mine.

                               but that’s not why i didn’t want to hear

about it. i don’t want to hear about your friend's cancer because i

don’t care. because i realized when i got his text that i am still

so viciously angry about what happened that i don’t have room

to be compassionate, really. because i only have room to think

about my own cancer, and to especially not think about it. to

not touch into the feelings I still have about it.

                                                                          and then we’re back

to the work that i’m not writing about right now that’s supposed to

exorcise and alchemize resentment and trauma and pain.

i could tell you that i don’t give a shit that other people have cancer

and you’re having feelings of finality and loss and grief, because

i sat in the sodden, rotten trench of it for a year, and i’m pretending

right now that i hadn’t. that i hadn’t had to think about mortality

every single day. that the finality of life wasn't consistently licking

at my ear, whispering about carpe diem and fatal rules about forgiveness 

as health. and boo-fucking-hoo that any of you now are called to
process such things with such naive surprise as if none of this existed
before it happened to someone you have a glancing acquaintance with. 

i could tell you i looked into the woman who’s profession is

helping others heal from trauma. and that my tax return might go

toward sessions with her, or someone she recommends in the east bay.

i could tell you that my eyes hurt from looking at computers all the time

and that i’m also grateful that my job doesn’t include working outside

in the rain or food service or pest removal or any other thing unpleasant.

i could write about any of these things. but
                                                                  i guess i just did.

What’s My Age Again?

I stopped by the optometry office on my way out of the medical lab. It was the last week of December and I thought it would be a good day to get my labs drawn, test my blood, get some confirming news for the new year, good or bad, at least it’s truth.

At the eye sales desk, he told me that my glasses order was last filled in 2011, that I’d had the glasses I’m wearing for nearly 3 years. That people usually reorder every year or two.

And it reminds me that I lost a year. 

I was diagnosed with leukemia a week before my 31st birthday. I don’t remember it much, who was there, if we sang -- I think we did -- except that in my threadbare hospital gown, I opined, Next year, instead of cancer, can we get brunch instead? – And we did.

But in many ways, I feel like I didn’t actually live my 31st year (or 32nd if you’re being technical). Suddenly I find myself reminding myself, Yes, I’m 32 now. 31 sort of did and didn’t happen.

I know that a few years from now, these missing months won’t seem as missing, won’t feel as real, except sometimes it strikes me that I spent half a year in a hospital. That when I consider, “last year at this time,” I was bald and packing for my 4th round of chemo. And now it’s done. And it’s weird.

When I try to express this weirdness in a way that might make sense to other people, I say that it’s like my life took this enormous detour, but now I’m suddenly back to where I parted with the road, and that side road doesn’t even exist. 

How do you go back to “normal” after that? It’s not to give the event credence it doesn’t deserve, or to use my cancer as a talisman of pain or suffering, or even of validation – it’s just to say, Yes, it actually happened, and yet, so what?

So what. It’s a hard thing to say about cancer, without sounding callous. But, really, what does it mean now?

What has it meant this past year? That’s easy to answer – everything. Everything I do is in response to it, even though “nothing has changed.” That’s the weirdness of it. I work at the same job. I sleep in the same apartment. I watch the same t.v. shows.

Many things I’ve done differently, many things I’ve started, tried, done, seen, been. But, when does its relevance fade – does its relevance fade? If everything I do, which I assure you I measure against my cancer stick, is in response to it, when do I stop mentioning it, when does it stop being a significant part of who I express myself to be. When I stop mentioning it out loud, which sometimes I note I do, and sometimes I pointedly don’t, … what does that mean, if anything?

I text a cute guy, after actually asking aloud, “if today was my last day on Earth...” I drink a badly mis-measured version of turmeric tea, because it’s listed in Kicking Cancer in the Kitchen. I’m stewing marrow bones in a crock pot right now because I’ve read they have immune boosting properties.

I flew a plane, got into a band, went to Hawaii, because I had cancer.

I bought a car, had sex with that cute guy, built my first bedframe because I had cancer.

I saw Book of Mormon because I had cancer, and stopped talking to my dad because of it, too.

I measure how much time I waste or spend on Netflix against cancer. I measure how much sleep I get against cancer. I won’t read bad books, but I'll read damnyouautocorrect until it hurts to laugh any more.

What does it mean, though? Is it relevant? To you. To you, man on the street, do you care what makes me laugh a little freer? Do you care why I eat organic eggs, or buy gold boots, or notice the moon? Does it matter to you that everything has changed and nothing is different?

Probably not.

So, what about the missing year – if it wrought all of these changes, it wasn’t missing, right? That’s the point, right?

Sure. Maybe. 

Still, I wish I could have gotten new glasses, and gone without the eviscerating fear.

Thanks. 

Cancer.

About a month ago, I was diagnosed with Leukemia. And my whole life changed.

I don’t know what this change is, was, will be, but I know that I am in several ways entirely different than I was. The way, at least right now, that I see things are entirely new. And profoundly grateful. I almost died. And yet, I didn’t.

We each get this each day – I got this each day, prior to this happening. I got the chance to understand that life was precious, but I didn’t, really. I understood it, but to really feel it? Well, it’s different now,

and it brings up a host of other questions. Am I allowed to still watch Ben Stiller movies? Am I allowed to spend a day on the couch? Will I now stop stopping myself short on all my varied art projects, and allow myself to follow through on anything that I’ve started? I have no idea.

I’d like to think that part of this “change” – for lack of a better term for “life altering sudden tragic happening” – will indeed move me toward being more in my art, more in my life. I’d like to believe that part of this whole thing is a very nasty kick-upside-the-head lesson in not living for tomorrow. That I’m being given the chance to very acutely see that life is short and tenuous, and so I ought to embrace the talents that I have, and finally let myself explore them fully so that I might share them with you.

I’d like to believe that there are lessons here. Otherwise, what the fuck.

I’d like to believe that the Universe or my Higher Power couldn’t -- for some reason completely unknown to me – send me a postcard, or a dream, or a message on Facebook. That for some reason this lesson had to be learned hard, and fast, and therefore more gentle methods of smoothing a rock down to its shiny parts were not available to this massive Power.

I’ve been out of the hospital for a week now, and I will go back in next Monday for another round of chemo. This will be the 2^nd in a series of, likely, 5 treatments. The words that I’ve had to learn over this month scare the crap out of me. I don’t want to use words like chemo, nausea, pain meds, pneumonia. I don’t want to hear “How bad is the pain on a scale of 1 to 10,” or, “It’s time for your shot,” or “Well, we expect this.”

I’ve oscillated since I’ve been out of the hospital between those few stages of grief – anger, grief, acceptance. Often within the same minute. When I was in the hospital, there wasn’t time for anything except acceptance. This is happening. Period. Go with it. And, despite what you may think, it’s really f’ing busy in the hospital with people coming in and out at all hours of the day and night, throwing information or medication at you. There’s not really time to process, space to absorb and consolidate what has been happening to me.

And so, being home now, I’m getting the chance to experience what I couldn’t while basically holding my breath for 3 weeks. I’m getting to realize the enormity of what happened. The slow, marinating, seeping reality – I almost died. The nurse told me that I had 49% leukemic cells in my blood when I came into the hospital – WITH STREP THROAT – and that if I hadn’t come in, I would have died within two weeks. I would have gotten a bleed, likely in my brain, and I would have just died. No one would have known – no one would have known why. Relapse? Suicide? Understanding this fact has begun to lead me to know that I need help in holding the space for all this – and yesterday I contacted a cancer support group.

AND, I have to tell you, I don’t want to be someone who needs a cancer support group – I shouldn’t have motherfucking cancer in order to need such a group. A month ago, this was unfathomable.

This morning, I read my last Morning Pages entry from the week before I went into the hospital. I haven’t written morning pages since then, I was too sick, and then too hospitalized. And so I read them, and I see myself talking about how my throat really is starting to hurt. About how I went to the art store Flax and got new pens and a notebook and talked to the woman in the back about different types of pressed paper – hot press versus cold, what would be good for the art I want to do. About the café I’d emailed with the month before about putting up a show in their space, and how he wanted to do November, but I simply wasn’t ready, as it was the end of September at the time.

I’d written about the clothing I’d bought for cheap at good thrift shops, and the flying lesson I was scheduled for, which ended up being the day I went into the ER. I wrote about being excited, about art that I would make. About missing my family, and wanting to go home for Thanksgiving to see them.

In some ways, it feels like reading a journal from junior high, it feels so long ago. And yet, it’s all still me. And that’s something that I want to take away from this too. This process is going to be HARD, challenging, painful, difficult, and yet, I’m still me. As I was writing my first Morning Pages this morning since that last entry, I was inwardly elated to see my handwriting hadn’t changed. That major facts of who I am have not changed. That things that were important to me then, “before cancer,” are still things that are important to me now. – art, family, adventure.

I’ve been blasted with some of the nastiest chemicals, shorn down to the barest slices of my body ... but my handwriting is still the same.

I could go into the ways in which gratitude has become this sort of well of tears behind my eyes at all times. I could talk about how just waking up this morning feels like a gift. But I don’t want to today, really. I could list the thanks and the inundation of love and support and care, but that’s not what this blog is about this morning, at least. It’s not a love fest, it’s just a truth fest. About where I am this very day, at this very time, arguing and stamping and shaking a fist at the sky with WHY in the m’f’in hell couldn’t you have made this a little bit of a gentler lesson? About how I feel like I’m some sort of icon now, with people telling me all the time what an inspiration you are, when I’ve had diarrhea for 3 out of the last 4 weeks. I’ve asked people what on earth that even means, an inspiration to what? What have I inspired in you? What am I inspiring you to do? I haven't done anything except lived.

I get to be bitter about it. And I get to be amazingly thankful to get to be bitter about it – to be alive enough to have emotions enough to get to scorn about it.

It is surely true, the love and support I’ve gotten. And yet, there’s a part of me that feels angry that I even have a situation in which to receive such love and support. I know people love me. Couldn’t I have had my 31^st birthday at a restaurant with them, instead of in a hospital bed? Couldn’t I have learned to get out of the way of my own creativity and drive and lust for life in a different, gentler way? Couldn’t I have gotten to see my family by flying East for Thanksgiving, instead of them flying West to hold my hand while my hair falls out?

I’m grateful for this blog – this tempestuous blog that gives me the chance to be honest in every way. Which I want to use to springboard to something else, to write in another venue, maybe one that’s paid. I’m glad that I get to write here, as someone told me, as I speak – that if I write the way I talk, they said, I’m surely a great writer. I don’t know how much that is true, but somehow the cancer lets me see it a little more clearly. And perhaps begin to accept it. I want to explore my talent more – because there simply is more there. I want to push into it, and I want to share it.

I swear I would have gotten there without this whole cancer thing, but I guess I really didn’t have a choice in this one.