Defiantly

Some issues with opening up to people about things that really matter to you:

• They don't listen. You can be crying, you can be pouring out your deepest fears, and they'll ignore you, brush you off, tell you what you really need to be doing. They don't listen. They don't hear. They only hear the sound of their own voice inside their head. 
• They judge you. You're being dramatic, you're seeking attention, you're fishing for compliments or platitudes. You're weak, you're whiny, you're annoying. People suspect you have an agenda.
• They no can handle. What you're saying brings out their own pain and anxieties and all they can see is themselves. They're uncomfortable with your vulnerability because it reminds them of their own perceived inadequacies.

So what happens? No matter how relevant it is to them or how your experiences affect their lives, they reject you and your story. 

They will find ways to discredit you. They will call you names, bring you down, make you sound unreliable. Because if you're not trustworthy, neither is your logic or feelings, ideas, and opinions. If you don't have any credibility, then they don't have to listen to your nonsense.

They will find ways to drown out your voice and ignore that you're saying anything at all. They do this by talking loudly, which may actually manifest as loud talking, but also includes posting articles or blogs written by experts who cite scientific studies that refute what you say. Or it could simply be talking over you so you don't get a chance to speak or shut you down so they don't have to hear it.

It's not so much that I think I have so much to say that is relevant to anyone but me, and it's not that I think things happen in only way every single time for myself, let alone for all of us, ever. My intent in sharing my story is twofold: it is therapy and I hope that someone else who hears my story might not feel as alone as I did/do. There is strength in numbers and misery loves company. And when someone else approaches me to say that something I wrote or said resonated with them, that my journey sounds eerily like their own, I realize that I can live with the haters. I can live with people thinking I'm seeking attention, with the people who try to drown me out and discredit me because me and these other folks over here? We connected.

There's a certain generational element, though, that I think is also relevant to this discussion. In general, I think many of us are conditioned to keep our traps shut. To speak out is to be ungrateful, shameful, dishonorable, or just messy. We don't talk about feelings, especially if they're negative ones. We don't talk about pain, sorrow, despair, frustration, and the like. It is strength to endure in silence, and people count on that silence. They get used to it until it becomes the norm. (For that matter, we also don't dwell on things like how much people mean to us and how connected we might feel to them).

My story for the moment revolves around my reproductive health. About how a hormonal imbalance resulted in heavy, unpredictable bleeding for nearly a year (but really for most of my life). My story revolves around the countless treatments, ultrasounds, and doctor visits and repeatedly proving myself and the severity of my plight to countless nurses, techs, and coworkers. My story for the moment revolves around my struggle to make sense of my cancer diagnosis, the silencing/avoidance of any conversation that followed that diagnosis, and the uncertainty of what it means to me in the future. I was blindsided when I learned I couldn't donate blood for another year. I wasn't expecting that. I forget that cancer, though eradicated from my body before I even knew I had it, is not through with me yet. It will affect my future in ways like donating blood and like more frequent doctor checkups.

I feel abandoned by my doctors who talked about cancer so nonchalantly. I feel foolish because I didn't advocate for myself in a satisfactory way (which is really to say at all). I don't talk about cancer and I don't think about it, but it's not really that I don't think about it as much as I avoid thinking about it. I don't feel entitled to it. I don't feel entitled to it because in comparison to other people's journeys and the severity of other cancers, I feel pretty manini.

I am afraid to think about cancer. I am afraid of what I'll learn about myself, the people around me (including my doctors), and how my relationship to the world will change. I am less concerned about the physical threats, although that's pretty real, and worried about the psychological and emotional aspects. I am afraid to talk about cancer because I fear being rejected. I fear being ridiculed. I fear people talking behind my back and accusing me of attention-seeking behavior, or being weak, of being over dramatic. I am afraid to write about cancer because so many of you have been touched by cancer and I'm afraid that I will come off as a knowitall when really my story is so very small.

I have been conditioned, like many of you, I'm guessing, to be silent. To not complain, to not ask for things, to not call people out for their own shortcomings or their offense to you. For me to speak about something like this makes me very uncomfortable. I'd really rather not talk about cancer or bleeding or admitting to foolishly not advocating for myself. That's just embarrassing. For me to speak about this takes a lot of effort and trust, and I feel particularly vulnerable and open to judgement and criticism. I cannot in my personal life talk about my strange relationship with cancer because it's a frightening thing to deal with, even my teeny tiny nearly non-existent brush with it. Even now as I'm writing this I feel this incredibly strong urge (and you can probably tell without me pointing it out) to minimize my experience.

As much as I want to keep telling myself that this whole thing is behind me-- I'm uterus-free, after all!-- it keeps finding its way into my my mind and guts. It keeps wanting to turn me inside out, and for the most part, the only people who still ask how I'm doing are people I haven't seen since before the hysterectomy. And that's not really a criticism of all or any of you because even I want to put the whole thing away for good. But I think the general assumption is that my troubles are over and I've fully recovered from the surgery. And yet I emerge daily unsure of who I am and who I was and where I'm supposed to be. I'm so confused about how my hormones have been affecting me, shaping me, constructing my personality in subtle and persistent ways. Not just my hormones, even, but the stresses of dealing with the uncertainties of the bleeding, of the headaches of the bleeding itself, the very real anemia, and the despair that blanketed everything.

I want to find some version of a me that I'm happy with. I want to stop struggling to feel good about myself and in general. I want to feel validated and heard. I'm learning to remember myself and in the power of my voice, and I'm slowly even starting to believe in it. I don't know why I ever believed I am unworthy of compassion, but it's proving a difficult thing to unlearn. So many of my friends have approached me either in person or in writing to tell me that they've experienced very similar reproductive issues and experiences with their doctors and loved ones. Some of them have said they were inspired to finally seek medical attention after reading my story. Some of them, like my sister, recognize they need to see a doctor but aren't yet ready to face that particular music for whatever reasons. Even after all that I continue to doubt the legitimacy of my voice.

Here's the thing, though. I am stubborn and I am a writer. I have to write and I write to soothe myself and to work things out in my head. I cannot foresee a time when I will stop writing and stop sharing, so I will continue to write and share. Even when my emotional and insecure self worries about being judged and silenced and mocked, I share because that's who I am. It's just who I am.

For All My Life

For all my life there has been the beach.

For all my life there has been the beach.

It's worth saying twice or a million times. Because for all my life, there has been the beach. When my life is shit, I seek and find refuge in the ocean. It welcomes and embraces me, it scolds me for being away so long, it tells me that I'm radiant. It recognizes me. It remembers me. It takes my pain and makes it float, just for the moment, outside of me. It presses pause and I can breathe. The ocean, it strengthens me. It makes me happy to be alive.

I don't ever feel like dying, but I'm not always happy to be alive. I'm often confused and pulled in multiple directions. I want to be loved and cherished. I want to be happy. I want to be productive. I want to finish writing a novel. I want to make a difference in my students' lives. I want to know that what I give to the world is not for nothing. I want to feel valued.

When I'm in the ocean, as I sit in the shallow water and talk stories with my sisters, when I float on my back and my hair fans out around me (less so now that my hair is always shorter), as I read a book under the hot, unforgiving sun, I feel good. I don't have the stereotypically ideal beach body, yet how rarely do I feel inadequate walking amongst hot, nearly naked bodies. I feel strong. I feel confident. I feel so completely comfortable in my skin in a way that I never do anywhere or anytime else. Nobody can make me feel inferior when I'm on the beach. And yes, these thoughts actually pass through my mind each time I'm there.

It is necessary for me to visit the ocean. I count myself lucky that for all my life there has been the beach. I am lucky that my parents valued time at the beach. We went after school and on the weekends. We camped out on the beach back when we had neither tarp nor table nor the knowledge we have now. When my first boyfriend, Doug, had moved away, leaving me brokenhearted and crying on the sofa for days, my mom shoved me out the door and onto the beach. I think that was the first time that I'd realized where I was supposed to go for healing. I spent a lot of time that summer strapping mismatched fins to my feet and catching waves on a borrowed body board-- not even doing it well, but doing it nonetheless.

I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk these days. Charlie began clearing it off for me, which was no small task, and then Kama and Judah helped me refine. I needed a workspace. Somewhere for me. Somewhere for the work of writing and healing. Like the beach, for all my life, there have been words. For all my life, I have been sitting somewhere, writing things down, trying to make sense of my world. I have been using this space lately for the same healing I seek at the beach.

So often these days, I am in conflict with myself as I strive toward a happiness I have not felt in a long time. I am constantly uncomfortable, which I'm assured is totally normal and necessary if I want to change my bad habits. It sits like a rock in the space between my shoulders-- heavy when I stand, painful if I lie down. Once I am comfortable with these new dance moves, I've been told I should start feeling better. Because the goal of the new moves isn't to get what I want (although, wouldn't that be nice?), it's to find my voice.

I used to go dancing a lot, too. I used to find my joy there. Again, I don't have the stereotypically ideal body for the club scene, and I don't have the moves, either. But no one can make me feel diminished when I dance.

These are sacred spaces. I can dance, I can write, and I can visit the ocean. These are my centers of power. I am strong. In every other place in my life, people find ways to diminish me. Make me feel bad about myself, about what I do, about what I value, about what I want. And I don't understand why because if I stop to consider, I already usually feel shitty enough without any help whatsoever.

I vow, then, to return to these bases of power whenever I feel weak. Whenever I seek sustenance and when I need to be embraced for the wonderful person I sometimes feel like I am. I invite any and all of you to join me to dance, to write, to go beach. Maybe you need the healing, too. Maybe you like try something different.

Anyway, I'll close with this quote I found. Paula D'arcy is someone I discovered in a very old issue of Parabola magazine, and I've often posted that quote about being good to those who are good to us. Then I stumbled across this gem, which I think is especially relevant to the work I'm doing:

"I wish I could understand why I so often change myself, trying to please others, and gain their approval of who I am. Right now, the fear of meeting with someone's disapproval seems so small compared to the fears I've had to face to come here and stick it out. Does the river try to please a tree? Does the bird try to please a stone? In nature, things are simply who or what they are. A tree, trying to please the river, would be ridiculous. I imagine a tree trying to edge itself over so it can place shade in a different spot. The notion is silly. But I wonder . . . isn't that what I do? What if I put all my energy and power into being me, instead of someone else's version of me?"

If I Could Press a Button

I still can't say that I'm happy I had the surgery. Not with my whole heart, anyway. Even when I say it out loud, inwardly I wince. Because yes, it's nice to not have to bother and it's also nice not to be diseased. Yet, when my therapist asks me if I ever wish I could go back to Before, my answer is, "All the time!"

Prior to the surgery, I was despairing. DESPAIRING. Life felt hopeless. It seemed an endless round of bleeding, feeling weak, not doing the things that bring me joy. I had started a new heavy period just days before surgery, and if I'd had to endure yet another round, I don't know how I would have survived. I was DESPAIRING. For months. Surgery alone doesn't just fix that kind of emotional turmoil. I claim that I never had to deal with the emotional fallout after learning I had cancer, but Charlie and Beth say I still suffered from cancer. I still suffered from the heavy and constant bleeding. I was always under such emotional and physical strain from it. It was hard to watch people swim and exercise and just walk around and go to sleep when they felt like it. I wouldn't say that I'd been depressed, but maybe on my way towards that door.

It might be confusing to some why I would choose to go back to that endless misery-- a misery that prevented me from engaging in the life I saw for myself. Why would I possibly choose that depressing existence over the one I have now? To understand that, I guess, you'd need to know that my surgery stirred up some shit. Physical pain and discomfort, I expected. I know how to handle that kind of thing. I can handle pain. The hormonal stuff, though, blindsided me. For at least three weeks, I woke up each morning with a weight on my chest. A dread. I felt isolated and confused much of the time. I traded one sadness for another, but at least the older sadness was familiar.

I don’t know why I assumed things would just improve After the hysterectomy, though I wonder if I wasn’t the only one to think so. Even people who have never had surgery assume that surgery changes shit. And while I’m always thinking about how my life has changed post-op, I rarely remember that I’d already been feeling shitty pre-op. You can’t just turn that off on a whim or because you want to or because you get your uterus cut out of your body. I’m no doctor, but it seems like It would take some time no matter what to recover from what I was feeling Before.

Now, let’s talk about After. Not even going to talk about the physical recovery because that was easy peasy in comparison. I'd just been through this major thing, both physically and especially (and unexpectedly) emotionally, and now I was just supposed to forget about it and get over it. My feelings and my pain were meaningless. Short-term. An aberrant blip on the radar. For the first time in a long time, I felt sad. I felt uncomfortable. I felt like I was going crazy. I felt unequal to the task and I needed help. And I was spending so much of my time ALONE. Actually, physically alone. And then I started feeling like I was being a burden to the people around me with my sadness and confusion and isolation. I started feeling like I should be hiding my feelings because I was being selfish and unreasonable.

I should be able to cry and moan. I should be focused on what I need to feel good, to improve my disposition, to come to terms with the huge change I just experienced. I should be allowed time. Loads of time. All the time I need, in fact, to come to terms with everything. I went through some shit. The bleeding, anemia, the restricted activities, the despair, the surgery, the pain, the hormonal imbalance, the feelings of isolation and sadness, and then now this feeling that I’m selfish and mean because I’m still not better. I’m still not over it. And you could say I’m whining or weak, and you could go fuck yourself for writing me off, for explaining away my experience. Yes, I’m whining and perhaps I’m weak. It doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to work through this, to be allowed to be not okay. I can take some time to focus on me.

Anger is a shy friend of mine. She is a friend, no doubt, but she is hesitant and flees quickly and easily. I wish she would stick around more. I wish she were more of a bad influence on me. Maybe I would be better at standing up for myself. Maybe I wouldn't feel like I was being an asshole for trying to process this last year. Maybe I wouldn't feel like an asshole for paying more attention to my own troubles. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like I have to mask my feelings and deal with this myself.

The kicker, of course, is that on the outside, my life doesn’t look much different, does it? I go to work, I buy bananas, I drink coffee, I laugh, I joke, I do considerate things for other people. I still often consider other people’s needs before my own. I still do my utmost to keep my mouth shut. I still do what I can to please other people. Despite my therapist’s good advice, I still don’t do what I should do as often as is good for me. And my lack of diligence shouldn’t at all reflect on the quality of her services, it’s just hard (and by hard, I mean hard for me). Challenging. It makes me unbelievably uncomfortable, and it forces me to face situations I’d rather avoid.

People who have gone through the same or similar experiences say that it took them a long time to process and deal with what comes after surgery. It doesn't make sense. Why should surgery—why should improving your life through surgery actually complicate your life, especially after you’ve recovered? Why shouldn’t I just feel healed and happy about it? It’s so confusing. But, okay. Long time to process. Long journey toward healing. I can do that. I have to do that. It's not like I have a choice. I can’t stay where I am right now, and I can’t go back to where I was. There’s only forward progress.

Don't you think that if I could only press a button to fix things, I would? Don't you think if I could manage to keep my shit to myself, I would? Don't you think I'd rather be happy and satisfied than confused and struggling? Why would I choose this? Why would I intentionally put myself in this position over and over again to be hurt, to come up with no answers only questions, to make myself so disgustingly uncomfortable that I wish I could just float away? I would press that button a thousand times. I would cross that street in a heartbeat. I would jaywalk, even. I would run across the five-lane highway against the light even if a cop was watching, and I am not a rule breaker. Because dealing with this in my own head is not fun. It's the least amount of fun I've had in a long time. I have cried more post-op than during the entire year of bleeding. I just want to be okay. I just want to feel grateful for having the hysterectomy and for being disease-free. I just want to be okay. 

And if I could just press that stupid fucking button, I would.