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. 

Climbing Kilimanjaro (or at least, reading the Guide Book)

I was on the phone this morning with my friend on the East coast. She recently returned from her frankly stellar honeymoon cruise around the Mediterranean, and after regaling me with her now-insider-tourist viewpoint (Istanbul Markets = Yes; Parthenon = overcrowded; Sistine Chapel = Who are we kidding, Yes.), she asked me what I was up to.

I told her that I’m recently reading memoirs on marriage. I said, even though it’s not something that’s currently on the radar, one day it probably will be, and like someone who’s gonna climb Kilimanjaro, I ought to read the guide book.

So, I now have on my coffee table, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage and Other Affairs, one woman’s story of how infidelity on both sides corroded her marriage, and No Cheating, No Dying: I had a good marriage, then I tried to make it better. Also, out of a rubber-necker’s curiosity, a while ago I’d read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed to see if her second book would be as good as the first (and, well, sort of).

To me, reading these marriage memoirs is like getting the read-out from a fallen plane’s black-box: What went wrong? What went right? What are the junction places and fuses that tend to blink out first? What can you do, if anything, to reinforce them before they do?

I've had a thirst for this kind of reading over the last several years. I was a Fiction Fiction Fiction only reader for many years, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury,…JK Rowling, because real life was *so boring,* and allegory could be so much more useful... But, lately, I find myself almost exclusively prowling the non-fiction, first-persons; most specifically, picking those that have something to do with where I want to be.

Last Spring, it was the memoirs of Tina Fey (comic, leader, success), Betty White (comic, still-kicking), Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (writer, comic, realist) and Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed which actually inspired me to research the best hiking boots for someone with flat feet (not purchased).

I read the following to balance out the light, or rather I read the above to balance out the dark I was reading at the time: Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal and Augusten Burrough’s Running with Scissors.

I wanted to know many things from reading these books: I wanted to know how to be a successful woman in tough businesses, I wanted to know how to be an artist, writer, performer and make it stick, and mostly I wanted to know how you keep moving forward in a hard world, and keep your sense of humor.

During the time I was sick, you couldn’t peel me from a cancer memoir. It was all I read. Except for that one on divorce (Stacy Morrison’s Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce), since it seemed equally catastrophic, and I like the word optimist in a title.

When my friend first leant me the Lance Armstrong book, It's Not About the Bike, last October, I said thanks with a pressed I’m-never-gonna-read-that-Nobody-else-knows-what-it’s-like-to-have-cancer smile. But, still, I brought it back to the hospital with me for my second round of chemo, and eventually hardly put it down between temperature- and blood-pressure monitorings.

People asked what I thought about all the controversy that was coming out about him then, and I said I didn’t give a shit – He survived cancer, and lived to write a book about it. That's all I needed to know. 

Honestly, I can’t remember the other ones I read – chemo brain, perhaps – but that’s what I read these books for: How in the hell did you do that? How can I?

This summer’s reading of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life resulted in home-made tomato sauce (and a half a plat of rotting tomatoes), an awkward okra experiment, and many afternoon delights with a basket of fresh figs.

And now, now, it’s marriage. It’s also, Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else that Really Matters, Anne Kreamer’s exploration of what it means to grow older in American culture, one strand at a time.

This is probably the book that sparked my whole memoir thing, long before I actually read one. I’d still been living in San Francisco, Borders was still in business, and I was at the Stonestown Mall. Somehow, perhaps while looking for some “recovery” related book which are often in the “self-help” section, I saw her book, and remember picking it up, reading the back copy and noting that it was an interesting idea.

This week, I saw Kreamer's book on the memoir shelf of my now-housed-in-a-trailer-behind-a-school public library branch. I picked it up. And devoured it.

So, what about all this? What does it “mean” or matter? Well, one thing, I suppose, is that reading these books enables me to see that I’m not alone in my struggles--I’m not alone in living in the world with real people and real tragedies and real humor, and most importantly, real chutzpah.

Also, aside from Lance Armstrong and the Burroughs one (which frankly left me more disturbed than helped), all the books I’ve been reading are by women.

Women, claiming their right to share their inane (Betty White), heartbreaking (Winterson), path-back-toward-the-light (Morrison) stories. Women using their voice to say, Here, here is where I’ve been frayed and flayed and fraught and fought, and I'm still here to tell you about it.

These women are my heroes. And so I will continue to head straight for that shelf in the library/trailer, because I want to climb Kilimanjaro, too. 

Good Luck with That.

A few days ago, I ran into an acquaintance. Sitting down next to me, without so much as a Hey, How are ya?, he says matter-of-factly, “My girlfriend needs to have both her hips replaced.”

… “Uh,” I reply nonplussed, “Good luck with that?”

“Well, I just figured since you’d been through something hard, you’d understand.”

And I do, but I am not the human receptacle of life trauma, nor am I the oracle for how to deal with it.

See, the thing is, is that I’m still walking through this, guys. It’s coming up to a year out from diagnosis, and when I had a sore throat that lasted more than a few days earlier this month, I freaked out, and tried not to freak out. I went to the doctor, and I catastrophized and I came back to reality, and all the tests came back normal.

I have a first date with my bass teacher next week (despite you nay-sayers!), and I can’t help but think of what an awful thing it would be to date me and have my cancer relapse – you’re not signing up for that, or are you? To have Damocles’ Sword hanging not only over my head, but the head of someone, anyone, who loves me? (A sword hangs over this figure, who never knows if or when it will fall.)

I am engaging in my life differently than pre-cancer, but I still have places that challenge me to the point of tears, and I worry that this will “cause” cancer again.

I am not free from this worry yet, and I am not available to take your shipwrecked persons into my dinghy. Here’s a life-vest. Dinghy Full. Find your own.

That said, how many people supported me, etc.etc., during this time, I know. But, I cannot help you process, people. I’m sorry. My compassion meter is broken. The well is dry.

That said, when I heard that a friend’s sister was just diagnosed with AML, the same type of cancer I had, I jumped at the chance to share my resources and what worked for me, comforted me, and helped me to maintain my “calm at the center of the storm” which has now broken and allows me to fall apart, engage in fun, and also to stare at that sword say, “You f*cker.”

Therefore, your friend, sister, aunt, co-worker, barista who has cancer? Here’s a link to my own list of what I found helpful. If you don’t mind, please share this with them instead of asking me. I’m sorry, but my dinghy is full. 

Break on Through to the Other Side

I performed in my first show on Saturday. I played bass and I sang, and I broke a string and borrowed someone else’s and lost my place and played wrong notes and sang out of tune, and hopped up and down in my boots and smiled like a raving fool and had an absolutely fabulous time.

Some of the feedback from my friends has been along the lines of, I feel like I’ve now finally seen you in your element, doing what you’re supposed to be doing – you looked so right, so natural up there. And – they’re right. I feel so natural and so right up there.

I was on my way to rehearsal last week and was on the phone with my girl friend from Long Island. We were talking, again, about work, my work, jobs, career, etc., and as I gushed that being in the band is my favorite thing in my life right now, she asked me what it was about it that I loved?

I love that I get to play with other people, that we create something out of nothing, and offer it to other people. That we create an atmosphere, an experience for others, that we get to have an impact on how people feel, to create emotions and movement in them. I love that I get to be collaborative, it’s not just me and a guitar, that I get to learn and bounce off of others’ ideas, that I get to be a part of a group that wants to do the same thing.

This, isn’t new. I wrote a blog on New Year’s Eve 2011-2012 that included the following:

Performance, A Challenge (12 31 11)

I want to perform. I want to ignite, excite, catalyze, engender, enmorphize. I want you to witness me. I want you to be changed in the witnessing. I want the love in you to awaken and stir as I open myself to you. I want to be there for it. Present. My best, most available self. I want you to fall in love with yourself in the process. Discover the ancient and cavernous depth of your heart. I want to be your tour guide. To lead you where you are ready to be led. I want to change the world, for good. One heart at a time, beginning with my own. And I am becoming Ready. I am ready to transform.

Pyrotechnic Performance: What I want to do when I grow up. (8 5 10)

I want to startle your emotions and steamroll you with feeling. I want to seize and agitate the flames of my inner fuel and fury and ignite and catch you on fire too. I want to blast you out of your seat aghast at the wonder that is G-d bellowing through me. I want to own this. I want to master play and expand this. I want to hone sharpen and broaden the depth of what I have to offer you. I want to journey with you through the lands of the psyche and crash you upon the shores of revelation. I want to allow you to lick and contemplate these wounds as you stagger toward the exit when I'm done. 


I want to heave you into oblivion and gently reel you back in.

None of this has changed, except that I feel I actually am more ready for it. I actually am more ready to simply try, to put myself out there, however expertly or inexpertly, and just try damnit. Forget Yoda, I think there is a try. It’s the same as doing, perhaps. Or rather, I am in fact no more ready than I have been before, but, I'm simply doing it anyway, putting the action first, and watching my willingness follow. (So maybe Yoda was right after all...)

I have been afraid to let you know how important these things are to me. How important it is to me to stand in front of you and give, offer, collaborate, combine, and reveal what I really am and have. I have been afraid that if I tell you what this means to me, and I am disappointed with your response or with my own performance, that I couldn’t take the disappointment. But, I feel ZERO disappointment. The people who are meant to help me in this are showing up. I am getting help to get better, to improve, and even if I didn’t, there’s room for me anyway.

I’m finally listening to myself, which is a phenomenal thing to do.

And you know what, I’m proud of myself, too. Which itself is a phenomenon. 

I have affirmations plugged into my phone to ding on the hour. One of them is: "I intend to make a difference." Although this was meant around my "job," my next "career move," when my friend reported to me yesterday that seeing me up there touched her deeply, inspired her to see me, having lived and now doing what I've always wanted to do -- I realized that perhaps, I already am. 

A year in pictures. (the whole worth a thousand words thing)

 June 2012

 December 2012

June 2013

2nd and 3rd photos by Aaron Haines

To die to sleep*

You will end these miles on your knees,
scraping through glass and what glitters
that isn't gold like they said.

You will pick through it anyway,
hoping the next piece is solution,
absolution, peace.

Not long past a milemarker,
you will simply give way, flatten
your body to the ground
exhausted by all the false
expectations and trial of
working So Damned Hard.

As the shards pierce and mold your skin,
sleep will come and, with it, surrender.


May 2013.

*Hamlet

So, once you achieve enlightenment, you don’t have to meditate anymore, right?

When I first stopped drinking alcoholically 7 years ago, I engaged in a process of change that was reported to bring about a “spiritual awakening,” to put me in touch with a Higher Power of my own understanding that would, it was also reported, solve all my problems.

I asked a group of these people who had experience with this change process the following question: So, once I have a spiritual awakening, I can drink normally, right?

The group laughed, I didn’t quite understand why—I thought it was a legitimate question—and eventually I read and began to understand why: “Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever.”

You can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber.

This weekend, I went to Harbin Hot Springs with a group of girl friends. It was my first time to this “clothing optional” new-agey camping resort, and my friend recommended that I get a massage while I was up there. So, on Thursday night, I trolled through their offerings, and came across something called an “Amanae” treatment. … This was not a massage. It is, according to their publicity, a “spiritual, emotional bodywork release,” the intention of which is to let go of stored emotions in the body through the use of breath and a bit of “laying on of hands.”

On Saturday morning, as soon as I arrived, I went straight to my appointment. I laid on a massage table, the flowy-dressed, Australian(?)-accented woman put her hand over my heart, and thus proceeded an hour of on and off bawling and crying.

Let me say again, this was not a massage! But, whatever it was, things happened. Thoughts came up, and my throat would start to burn and she’d put her hand there without me telling her so. Her finger would press into my heart, and like juicing a citrus, out would pour tears. It was weird, but totally my kind of weird.

Thoughts came up about my father, about my work, about cancer. About G-d. The Why’s and the pain and the agony and the grief and the confusion and the frustration and the betrayal. All of it came up and, luckily, out.

I am again engaged in the specific process of change I began 7 years ago, and am again at a part about release, forgiveness, softness, letting go, and acceptance. I did more writing up there at Harbin, and on the last day, I asked my friends if they wanted to write down those things they wanted to release, to leave here on that (purportedly) sacred ground, and to write those things they wanted to embrace. Then, we’d go up to a vista spot, and bury them.

So, we did.

I put into the ground the things I want to let go, stop spinning about, beating myself up over, as well as those things I want to bring closer to me, to my experience, to my belief. I buried both, because neither of these are up to me—whether that which I release is really eased, or that which I want to call in (or call forth) will be. It ends up as G-d’s poker hand, getting to hold or fold whatever “he” wants.

That said, through all of the writing I’ve done lately, that crazy ass non-massage, and simply a lot of intention setting and reminders on my phone(!), I feel a little—maybe even a lot—lighter. I feel a little more at peace and ease. When the thoughts about my career or dad have come up since, I don’t feel as much angst about them.

And here’s the kicker. 

On Friday night I did a meditation around individuation from my father, about asking him to forgive me for not being able to fix those things he thinks wrong with his life, and for any failings or shortcomings he may think I have. I told him, in meditation, that I forgive him for his inability to fix that which I believe is wrong with my life, and forgive him the failings and shortcomings I think he has.

I did a bunch of writing in response to some questions in this book I have, and saw more and again how he was formed in this world, and his own trials that led him to the behavior and mindset that he has. I saw a primary “fault” of his as his unwillingness to forgive his own step-father for being unavailable. I saw that as my own.

As I was driving back from Harbin last night, in pinged all the texts that got lost in no-reception land. One was from my father.

My grandfather, his step-dad, died on Saturday night.

My dad told me when he came to see me when I was first diagnosed in September that he was finally finding forgiveness around his own father. My skepticism aside, I was glad to hear that he even saw his lack of compassion and was finding his own version of it.

So, I texted my father back. I was sorry for his loss, and so very glad he was able to find some peace with his step-father while he was still alive.

Who knows. Who knows what this means, if anything, for my own relationship with my dad. Who knows if my own work, my own realizations and shifting, and (final?) grieving around my hurt by him created the space that Ed needed to pass on. Who knows if that timely a communication was related in any way, following the requested months of silence between my father and me.

But I felt ease around composing my reply, around offering him the kindness of information that I’d been away and hadn’t received his text ‘til then. I questioned whether I was being co-dependent, whether he needed to know I’d been away, whether my intention was to ensure he wasn’t going to be angry with me for my delay. But, in the end, I decided it was a kind thing to do. It was his father, the only one he’d ever known.

With my obvious increased enlightenment and equanimity around my relationships that I’ve obviously attained over the last several days, the question came this morning as I heated up my coffee -- do I still need to meditate?

Well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide. ;)