Little life buoys

Shifting the brain from “I am dying” to “I am living”

One reason (among many!) I had Tim step in last week to talk about his work as an ambassador was that I’ve been going through a dark patch, fumbling to find a way forward. I want to avoid using this space to wallow—I would rather avoid wallowing entirely—while also acknowledging where I am in this daily battle. This week I want to focus on the little life buoys that are helping to keep me afloat. These are not new to me, but I find I need constant reminders.

Movement

Losing the use of my foot was a blow, given how much I rely on exercise for mental equilibrium. It turns out I don’t have just a bad sprain, but also multiple arrachements—places where the ligaments have torn off pieces of my bone. The orthopedist toyed with the idea of a plaster cast before (thank god!) letting me keep my walking boot. When I got home from the hospital that day I lay down on the floor of my ballet/yoga/pilates room stunned with despair and wasn’t sure how I would psychologically survive the next five minutes, let alone the day, let alone what is left of my life. It scared me how quickly my mind devolved. I don’t like feeling so easily breakable.

But although it was late in the day and I was exhausted, I made myself do half an hour of pilates I could manage in my boot. That gave me just enough of a boost to get me through the evening. Since then, I have been busy discovering every single online workout for someone with an injured foot. I still wake feeling like I’m drowning, but once I am on the mat or on a chair, things begin to shift. I now do chair aerobics, chair dancing, fitness mat workouts, and weights. None of them are too hard, but they keep my muscles from atrophying. And none of them use my foot! I am so grateful to the YouTube creators who made these videos for injured yogis/athletes/dancers. They are saving my life.

Writing and Teaching

More important than this, however, has been work. As always, work drags me forward. Writing matters to me more than anything. I am so grateful to feel this way about my work, to have the daily discipline and an insatiable passion for what I do.

I was particularly fortunate this past week to teach an online workshop for the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP). I’ve raved about this organization before, when I attended the last conference in Lisbon, and I will rave about them again. Members come from all over Europe and beyond to share their teaching and writing practices with each other. It’s remarkable how differently creative writing is taught in other cultures; I am forever learning new things. https://eacwp.org/about-us/

So I was thrilled to get to teach one of the teacher training workshops, focusing on journalism tools for fiction writers. It also forced me to pull myself together, throw myself into preparations, and even dress up.

The class was huge fun. My students were professional writers and teachers from Finland, Sweden, Spain, Lisbon, England, Austria, Ireland, Brazil, and France. They were novelists, poets, nonfiction writers, screenwriters, playwrights, and memoirists, and some were also musicians or theatre artists. I was awed by their experience and accomplishments. The EACWP attracts the best people.

Afterwards, I chatted with Lorena, EACWP manager and one of my favorite people in the entire world. At the end of our chat, she reminded me to invoice her. I had forgotten that I would be paid.

“For how much?” I asked. “I don’t think I ever asked you how much.”

“No,” said Lorena, smiling, “you never did.”

While I feel that all writers and teachers should be compensated handsomely, being in the presence of Lorena and the other writers of the EACWP is such an invigorating joy that it feels like a privilege more than a job.

Companionship

“Go outside,” my cancer therapist Troy told me this week. “See what happens if you leave your house.” So I grabbed my crutches and headed to the closest square, just to see sunshine for a few moments. I have largely been a hermit. I haven’t reached out to anyone, I haven’t seen anyone. In the square, I ran into Mary and Tom, Irish friends who live here and just returned from visiting family in Australia. They immediately asked me to join them for a drink in the square and bought me a tea, and we ranted about the collapse of America. I noticed that it lifted me to interact with other people. I sometimes feel I have forgotten how to interact.

I also crutched down to see my friend Maggie, for the first time since Christmas, despite the fact she is one of my favorite people here. I feel terrible for not being in touch. I brought her a pin from Maggie’s place in London and she made me tea. Her daughter, my friend Alice who is another favorite person, stopped by so I got to see her too. I observed that seeing them and hearing about their lives helped. I just need to make the effort.

When I went to get my blood tested last week, my phlebotomist Laetitia held her hand over my sternum. I was radiating heat, she said. The heat of distress. “I could do some energy work on you,” she said. “If you have 20 minutes free call me. Thursday is my day off.”

While I am unsure how I feel about reiki and other energy work, I never reject a healing practice. So Laetitia came to my house last Thursday. I sat in a chair in my office while she rested her hands on parts of me and moved my energy around. How lucky am I that the nurse who draws my blood every week wants to do this for me?

I’m still longing for in-person writerly companionship. My writing friends, please consider this an open invitation to come for a little residency in our guest room.

Therapy

Your mind is rushing ahead, my cancer therapist Troy said. It’s rushing past “I’m living with uncertainty” to “I am dying.” But the fact is that you are not yet without options. There is the possibility you will qualify for a new chemo drug. There is the possibility you will develop a tumor large enough to qualify for a clinical trial (a weird hope, but a real one).

The brain does not like uncertainty. The brain thus creates certainty, which becomes reality for the brain. Emotions attached to dying then arise. Thus, I’ve been dragging myself out of bed every morning thinking I am dying, when in fact I am not yet dying. I am still fighting the cancer. I am still able to work and eat and talk.

The trick is how to pull yourself off the “I am dying” path that the brain is walking, said Troy. Ask yourself when you wake up whether thinking that I am dying or thinking that I am living will serve me. The answer seems obvious. The hard part is believing it.

At the moment, I don’t actually feel like I am dying. I get out of bed early every morning. I go straight to work. I write. I exercise. I have my mind, all of my mind. I am still living. I need to try to restrain my brain from making leaps forward, never easy. I’ve never been any good at living in the moment. My mind is always on to what needs to be done next (perhaps even especially during my erratic attempts to meditate). The only time I shift into the present is when I am writing and there is nowhere else to be but in the work.

Now

It still takes all my strength to hold the vast and suffocating blanket of despair off my head so I have room to breathe. (I know, I keep changing my metaphors). This past week was the AWP writers conference in Los Angeles. I adore this conference, and have spent some of the happiest times of my life attending. It is in a different city every year, and almost every writer I know gathers to bond and share information. I have missed the last several years due to illness, but never has it devastated me to miss it as much as it has this year. Social media, which I wish was never invented, keeps showing me all of my friends having the time of their lives, speaking on panels, bonding with each other, and getting inspiration, and I feel so left out, missing my friends, missing opportunities to make new connections and deepen old ones, feeling entirely forgotten. I wake in the middle of the night, envy eating away at my heart. AWP symbolizes everything I want right now: to be well, to be in a community, to join my creative sparks to those of others, to talk about writing, to feel like an author again.

I realize envy is unhealthy and unproductive. So once again I turn to work, to movement, to connection here. I turn my mind to the small pleasures before me: I can listen to music while I shower. I can listen to an audiobook while I fold laundry. I can eat a homemade protein ball. I get to write. I’m trying to keep my brain with me today. Here, today.

Recent reading:

I just finished reading Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which I adored. It has been a long time since I read anything that made me laugh and moved me and had a happy ending. True to its title. It was a relief to read something that wasn’t entirely focused on the traumas of the world. A welcome break.

I’ve also been reading A Marriage Sabbatical, written by Sabina Shalom, the mother of our friend here Michael Shalom. It’s hugely entertaining and delightfully of its time. Bored with being a housewife and tired of being taken for granted by her husband (frankly, if my husband said some of the things Marco said to her, I would have left the marriage completely), Sabina tallies up how much Marco would owe her for her domestic labors over the years and decides to take off on a trip around the world. She travels to England, France, Iran, Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Easter Island, and many other countries. I’ve been enjoying reading about travel in the time before mobile phones, internet, and debit cards. The only thing that annoys me is that she never eats the local food, preferring to subsist on diet protein bars and hard-boiled eggs. She consistently refuses to eat what her hosts offer, an enormous insult in most parts of the world. For me, half the fun of travel is eating things I’ve never eaten before. Otherwise, however, she’s an engaging traveler to follow. Perhaps most interesting was how she managed to reconnect with her husband once finally home again.