I was recently reminded of the fact that female humans are born with all of the eggs that they will ever produce. This means that the half of me that came from my mother was inside her when she was inside my grandmother. Wild to think about.
I was reminded about this fact of human biology when I was listening to the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Generational Trauma by Dr Mariel Buque. I highly recommend this book!
I do remember reading books. And I do remember specific books. I do remember the smooth crisp pages of, for example, Goodnight Moon. I remember sitting on the edge of the bathtub within a hand’s reach of a roll of toilet paper as I cried through certain pages of Where the Red Fern Grows (if you know, you know). And it was at a rental beach house where I similarly cried over Bridge to Terabethia. I can remember the school librarian’s particular way of turning the pages on picture books and the resonance in my dad’s chest as he read to me on the green chair in the living room. I know that it was The Trumpet of the Swan that one of my grade school teachers was reading to us when we got to go outside to listen to the story on one of the first suitable days of spring. But, for the love of me, I cannot remember the plot of the book at all. I know that I pictured the bathroom in the house I grew up in next to in the part of Stuart Little when Stuart retrieves his mother’s wedding ring.
I’m fairly certain that it was reading Stuart Little that set me off on reading The Rescuers and The Borrowers. There’s just something about tiny creatures repurposing small household items for their own purposes. I’m sure it was that particular appeal of tiny objects that made The Toy Shop Mystery and The Doll House Mystery also enchanting.
Apparently, EB White was quite popular because I definitely remember reading Charlotte’s Web. Although I think that I really only remember the details of the plot now because I’ve read it aloud to my children as an adult.
But I don’t remember one in particular book as my favorite. It’s all just as well. It’s the way I truly do not have a favorite child.
As is made apparent in yesterday’s blog post, (which was in response to the prompt to name three books which had an impact on me) I’m more widely read now that I’m an adult.
Over the past week, I also wrote about jobs that I’ve had (Would a job by any other name smell just as sweet?) and how I unplug (from said jobs or from the internet?).
The other three posts from this past week are quite short, but writing them spurred some breakthroughs for me about myself, life, mental health, and how to think about certain struggles.
The first makes the case for centering myself, loving myself, and being my own best friend.
The second is about the joy that arises when I trust my future self.
Lastly, I thought about fear which, as an anxious person, is quite a feat in and of itself. But in the writing, I discovered a personal hack for cutting fear off at the knees in Starve Fear, Feed Joy.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email like this one to subscribers. Thank you!
I’m sitting here trying to narrow it down to three books. Because after all, what book that I’ve read hasn’t had an impact on me one way or the other? Isn’t that the point of reading? To be changed by it?
I’m also sitting here thinking about choosing three books that will make me look cool, or smart, or “in the know”.
And then I’m thinking about the three books I’m currently reading on paper, e-reading, and listening to.
They are, in paper, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Shawn Wilson. I always appreciate books that take apart the so-called accepted conventions of the academic world.
On my e-reader: Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie Rendon. I’ve just started this, but Marcie Rendon is one of my favorite authors. Each time I’ve started a new book in her Cash Blackbear series, I feel as though I’m getting caught up with an old friend.
And, finally, I’m listening to Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence. I’m just getting into this book. I’ve also been working more seriously on my language learning right now and this book is the perfect companion to this kind of work — providing motivation for putting in the time and effort to something that doesn’t necessarily feel immediately useful.
Because certainly in this moment, those are the ones that have the greatest impact on me. Or perhaps it’s the last three that I completed?
Which were, on my e-reader, the Dreamblood duo logy by NK Jemison. (This includes The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun.) I wrote about this book in a previous post about dreaming. I definitely will be re-reading these in hard copy form. I find reading books I can engage more deeply with the text than on an e-reader.
In hardback book form: Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang. It’s a stunning memoir written in her mother’s voice. It made me a better parent and mother.
This is from a few months back, but Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals really made an impact on me. Specifically, it helped me make sense of what it meant to be sick with breast cancer.
OK. This is more than three books, but books happen to be something I’m excited about. Check out my early posts with more Book Recommendations. If I wrote about them, they impacted me in some way.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
One assembly in high school was a speaker whose area of expertise was dreaming. Or at least that’s what I remember it as. He started off by asking how often the audience remembered dreams. He started off with some sort of fairly infrequent number, like a few a year and went down from there. As expected, fewer and fewer students raised their hands. By the time he got to a few dreams a week, there were a handful of us, including me still raising our hands. At that point, I was generally remembering a few dreams a night.
He explained that remembering even a single dream each night was unusual. In retrospect, having a (paid) speaker come in to give a lecture about dreaming for an assembly removed a fair amount of the magic (and power) of the dream state.
What does it mean if you dream that you break a bone? Does it matter what bone it is? Is it an omen? A portent? A sign of weakness? If I break a bone in a dream, can I break a bone in real life?
Three books that might hold the answers to these questions and more about dreaming and also might reacquaint dreaming readers with the power and magic of the dream state.
The Dreamblood duology by NK Jemisen. (Comprised of The Killing Moon and the Shadowed Sun.)
This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life by Rahul Jandial
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From an interview with Jessica Johns (with Ayesha Rascoe) on NPR.
RASCOE: So I understand you started writing this story after an instructor told you that writers should not write about their dreams. Like, that wasn’t a good thing to do. So why did that comment send you in the absolute opposite direction?
JOHNS: For Cree people, and the way I was raised, the knowledge that I have about dreams, is that they’re incredibly important. They’re a way of communicating with our ancestors. They’re a way of knowledge production. My whole life I’ve been taught to listen to my dreams and interrogate them and to, you know, know that they’re very valid forms of knowledge and forms of storytelling as well. So to have a prominent professor who has been, quote-unquote, “successful” in so many ways in the writing and publishing worlds, give this advice to a roomful of aspiring writers – and, you know, he was a white man – it really – it made me mad. I mean, I don’t think in writing there should be any hard and fast rule anyways. But I was just like, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Dreams are valid. In fact, I’m going to write a story about dreams that validate them in all their beauty and wonder and knowledge.
I hadn’t read this interview until after I read the book, but it makes sense to me now that I connected to this book in the way that I did. I’ve had similar experiences of having my culture and life experiences dismissed in a classroom or by an “expert”. Probably most people from marginalized groups have. I’m just grateful that Johns was strong enough to dismiss this comment and carry on with the work. The result is stunning.
Two passages from Bad Cree:
“‘Whenever I used to see a crow and proclaim bad luck, kokum would give me trouble,” Auntie says. ‘She said crows bring good or bad messages and I was an ass to assume.’”
“How did all of these dreams lie between us? In all our sleepovers at Kokum’s house, in our own basements, in all the hours we stayed up talking and laughing, we never talked about our dreams. How deep is this denial of ourselves that even as children playing pretend, we didn’t want to talk about them?”
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The entire mythology of the Dreamblood series is based around the power of dreaming. Check out the summary here.
I had finished Bad Cree and The Killing Moon (the first of the Dreamblood duology) and so I was focused particularly on how my dreaming state might be a place of healing. A thing that I was struggling with in my waking hours was that I was hyper fixated on mistakes that I had made in my past, moments of cringe, times I felt I had misspoken, or otherwise done something that might be construed as embarrassing. All these moments were like a rotten, pained tooth that I could not keep my tongue from poking. I asked myself what I should do in these moments.
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After The Killing Moon, I carried on with The Shadowed Sun.
Here’s a short passage describing how the “healers” in Jemisen’s created world enter into dreams to do their work:
“To heal a man, we touch his soul and teach it to crave wholeness. To hurt a man, one must teach the soul to crave its own torment.”
And a slightly longer one:
“What you feel is balance,” said Hanani. “Peace. Remember it. When that feeling shifts or fades, come back to this place and do what you just did. Or create a different place; it doesn’t matter. When you invoke your souname, you shed the artifice of your waking self. When you create a realm in this empty place, everything — all that you see — is you. Change it, and change yourself.”
“He took a deep breath, savoring the sensation of rightness. It amazed him that he had not noticed its absence before. Did that mean he had been slowly slipping into madness? A frightening thought, ‘I don’t understand how this works.’
“You don’t need to. No one else does.” When he looked at her in surprise, she smiled. though there was little humor in it. He had the sense that the expression was more of a reflex, ” This is dreaming, Prince. These are the realms of the gods. Only the strongest Gatherers have any hope of understanding: they are born to the Goddess’s power in a way the rest of us can only struggle to imitate. This is why they lead us — and why we have such hope for you, Avatar of Hananja.”
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And it was some time in the midst of reading all of this that I had a very specific dream. In it, I was at a vacation house and I was sitting around a table with various people from my waking life. It doesn’t really matter who they actually were because, as I realized upon waking, they were all just avatars for different parts of myself, different internalized voices. One of these avatars was sitting at the table repeating over and over to me that I had made mistakes. I knew that she was about to start listing all of them. The other people at the table knew that this was unkind behavior but they just remained silent. My dream self, the one that I had control over suddenly shouted in a very loud, clear voice almost as if it was amplified through a megaphone: “I AM HUMAN!”
Everyone else was silent. And I woke up.
And that’s how I got one of my mantras.
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I listened to This is Why You Dream, so I don’t have any specific passages to post here. One thing that stood out to me was that he affirmed that dreams are unique to the dreamer. In other words, there are no “universal” symbols in dreams. It’s all bound by context. I think that kokum (from the passage from Bad Cree above) would agree. A crow can bring a mad message or a good message after all.
So what does it mean if you break a bone in a dream? Only you know.
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I’ve been keeping better track of my dreams lately. I tuck a small notebook and pen next to me as I sleep and try to remember to jot down a few notes of remembered dreams. Sometimes, I look back at them to see what kind of self-healing I might have been doing. But this is just for fun. I trust that my mind is healing itself in dreams whether or not I’m aware of it.
A few weeks ago, I came across someone who apologized to me for a mistake that she’d made that meant a delay in me receiving services. She clearly felt really bad and was apologizing to the point that I was starting to feel bad too. Finally, I found a break in her explanations to interject:
“We are all allowed to be human.”
She visibly relaxed. “I’m going to have to remember that.”
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So back to the question: have I ever broken a bone?
Never. Not one.
Not even in a dream.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
This question puts work and home on opposing sides of a scale. What about those of us who work in our homes?
I just finished listening to the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. The subtitle is: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed by Men. I highly recommend it. I had many moments during my listening when I thought, “Oh! That’s why I’ve often felt invisible, unseen, unheard. That’s why I’ve so often felt that my needs are an unfair burden.”
I’m a stay at home mom. Once, when someone else was filling out a form on my behalf, they put “housewife.” So I guess that’s another term for what I do. In the west, we are often defined by our careers or jobs. Apparently, according to message boards and articles, one of the things that annoys many new arrivals in Washington, DC is that conversation at bars is often based around “what do you do?” The inference is “what is your job?” as opposed to what interests and passions one might have. And I suppose that I should be grateful that I’m not part of this world.
Still … stay-at-home mom, housewife … in these contexts they are loaded terms. I’m not paid for my work at home. Much of it is what we would consider “invisible” work. I myself, don’t fully grasp where one ends and the other begins. Even here, in this daily prompt question… how do I balance work and home life when they are one and the same, when they cannot be so neatly divided? How do I balance these two supposedly opposing aspects of life?
I have to see myself first and foremost. I cannot make myself visible to anyone else. The only person who can truly see me is me.
I’ve been sitting with this question for most of this morning now. I’ve gone back and forth and written and erased and did a little internet research on how “balances” work. I did this all in the name of trying to write myself and my lived experiences into this question. I wanted to have a bold and life-affirming statement or point to conclude this whole post.
In my head, I can see a delicate set of shiny scales where daily tasks are gently laid on one plate and then the other, sometimes tipping slightly one way or the other. With a gentle, “oops!”, some breathing exercises, a vacation, some mental health days off, the scale is lovingly set back into balance. But this image doesn’t work for me. The only image I could come up with was a balance being continually crushed under the weight of tasks that are both “work” and “home”.
So I’m at a loss now.
I guess that, frankly, I’m really tired of trying to make myself seen in a world that simply doesn’t see me. I’m tired of the questions, daily prompts, whatever that exclude me. I’ve lived so much of my life trying to shoe-horn myself into these types of questions and situations. This way of being has gotten me absolutely nowhere. So I’m not going to try to do it here.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support.
Book recommendation: Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirators Guide to an Antiracist Future by Myisha T Hill and A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
“What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze. … In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of.” Toni Morrison
To be clear, I am not Black. If you are interested in an essay about the white gaze (and Toni Morrison’s quote above) by a Black writer, please refer to this essay by Tracy Michae’l Lewis-Giggets. What I am is a writer who has much to learn about writing without the white gaze. I’m recommending two books that I recently read and that taught me about two different ways to deal with the white gaze as a writer. Because sadly, one thing that white is going to do is gaze and it’s something that all people who create (which I believe is all of us) are going to have to deal with at some point.
I was a little apprehensive about reading Heal Your Way Forward. Clearly. It sat on my shelf for months. This (alongside many other books that had been on my shelves unread) was one of the reasons I started my randomized book selection process. I had my daughter wrap my (almost 60) unread books in newspaper and label each with a number. She also wrote the numbers on small scraps of paper which I keep in a box next to the books. Each time I finish a book, I select a number from the box at random and unwrap and read the corresponding book.
Without this system, perhaps it would have been several more months until I picked up Heal Your Way Forward. I realize now that my apprehension was based on previous experiences in spaces which claimed to be anti-racist but were scolding and abrasive. Even in these spaces, whiteness was assumed and in those even brief moments of assumptions, anything not white was erased. The same old hierarchies came into play.
But it is precisely these moments of erasing and of being erased that Myisha T. Hill’s work heals. She does this, in part, by holding a mirror up to the white gaze so that it can see itself for what it truly is. In other words, Heal Your Way Forward invites readers to self reflect.
One moment from her book that I think about regularly since reading it a few months ago is when she writes about the feeling of having to be the “smartest” (or other superlative) in the room in order to survive. It was a lightbulb moment for me. I realized how much I had often I’ve unwittingly played these games of competition. But Hill’s framing of this also allowed me to to forgive myself for so thoughtlessly engaging in these larger systems and, more importantly, to be able to see that there are more ways to exist in the world than just the ones created by white supremacy.
My other lightbulb moment came in Hill’s analysis of the fairy tail Snow White. She showed me how the narratives that prop up white supremacy are pervasive and the messages are often hidden in seemingly innocuous places. The white gaze demands that we continually affirm that it is the fairest of them all. Heal Your Way reminded me that, as a writer, my stories and words which affirm me are inherently important and valuable simply because they are. The fact that my stories refuse to tell the white gaze what it begs to read is just the icing on the cake.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s book was another one that I picked up and read a little bit of some time ago and then, for reasons I cannot clearly remember, I put it down and didn’t pick it up again until it came up on my randomized reading selection system. For a long time, I struggled to read anything at all. My brain was burnt out at least two fronts. The first was, in retrospect, because I had read so much in graduate school. It wasn’t just reading, but it was that I was reading what was chosen by professors. I had little time to read for myself and what I wanted to read. Not only was the book selection dictated by the professors, but I also felt as if I had to read them in a certain, specific way. When we discussed books, more often than not, it was clear that the professors already had some ideas which they felt were correct about the texts. And sometimes we were meant to kind of parrot what they wanted to hear. And, yes, this is all tied up in this whole idea of having to be the “smartest” person in the room in order to survive as Myisha T. Hill discusses in her book.
Shortly after graduate school, I was working for a small newspaper and part of my job was to read books and write short blurbs about them. The stakes didn’t feel as high as they did when I was in graduate school, but, still, I was reading several books a week sometimes which I did not choose and I had to then write about them in a way that I perhaps would not have written about them had I not had to do it for my job. And so I remember when I finally felt I had the freedom to choose what I wanted to read for myself, I was a little overwhelmed. And a little lost. It was as if I had lost the ability to enjoy or learn from a book on my own terms. At times, even though I was picking what I wanted to read, when I wanted to read it, and even how I wanted to read it, I would get anxious. It was as if at any moment, someone could pop out of a corner demanding a one-page response paper or 150 words on why everyone should read this book immediately.
And so I suspect that perhaps the first time I picked up A Little Devil in America, I might have been still suffering from reading burn-out. So I’m glad I didn’t push it and read through that anxiety anyway. I’m quite sure I would have missed out on a beautiful experience. I would have missed the forest for the trees. Or maybe the trees for the forest. Either way, I would have missed something.
The second time I picked up A Little Devil in America, I was dealing with another sort of burn-out. A few weeks before, I’d finally disconnected from the last of social media. But my brain was still over-stimulated and enflamed from all of the rapid scrolling and images and ideas and thoughts coming at it. My attention span was shot. My brain didn’t trust itself. It had relied for so long on the input of fast moving images and ideas that it didn’t know how to rest. And maybe part of me thought that if I returned to social media, maybe that would soothe my over active brain, give it something to focus on, something to consume. Fortunately, I picked up A Little Devil in America instead.
Because the thing about this book is that Abdurraqib references a good number of still images, movie and video clips, and music, which is a lot of what my brain had burnt out on and was still, in a way, craving. And yet presents all of these in written words (obviously) AND with the historical and human context that my brain-on-social-media had been missing. His words were a balm that soothed my fiery brain. I had no urge to go out and watch the videos he was referencing, so vivid were his descriptions and profound were the information and analysis that he shared.
I’m thinking in particular of Abdurraqib’s retelling of Ben Vereen’s performance at the 1981 inaugural gala which is number 15 in his list 16 ways of looking at black face. I could have predicted that the network did Vareen dirty by not airing his entire performance as they had agreed beforehand. What I could not have known or figured out on my own was the content and context of his whole performance. He similarly includes Whitney Houston’s story, humanizing her in ways that the headlines (of which I have vague childhood memories) never did. His description of Merry Clayton’s performance on The Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter had me listening to that track over and over just for that one break in her voice on that third “rape murder”. More importantly, it sent me in search of her solo albums. I was not disappointed. Again and again, Abdurraqib gives Black artists their due. One way in which he ignores the white gaze is by assuming Blackness. He does not explain those cultural touchpoint, histories, and language that might need to be explained to a white audience.
I’m going to be honest. This essay/ post took me a very, very long time to write. Just as with these books, I kept picking it up and putting it down, frittering and fretting about. Every time I sat down to write, something else would come up. Or, actually, I’d let something else come up. I struggled to get into the flow. I worried about “getting it right”. All of these delays and struggles are, of course, ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real. And I know that this resistance that I feel is in large part because I have allowed the white gaze to haunt me. In part this is because I have experienced little else as both a writer and a reader. That is, until I’ve started to wrest control over both my reading life and writing life away from these ghostly, judging apparitions. Fortunately for me, Works like Heal Your Way Forward and A Little Devil in America are like holy water and a blessed crucifix, scaring away the white gaze like the false shadow that it is.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support.
“For how else can the self become whole save by making self into its own new religion?” Audre Lorde, New York City, 1970
This is the quote I wrote on one of the first pages of (one of) my 2025 journal/ notebook. It’s a hard question to internalize into a mind and soul full of demands to be selfLESS. It begs the question: How can one be less oneself? Or more importantly, why would one want to be less than oneself?
I do not.
How does one make self into its own new religion?
I wrote a bit about this here in this blog post: Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!
And I wrote a bit about how important Audre Lorde’s writing has been to me here in this blog post: Tomorrow, I Will Learn to Whether I Will Become an Archer.
Yesterday, I wrote about my holidays and posted rather late in the day. I’m reposting it here because it’s connected to this quote about making the self into its own new religion. Celebrate This Breath and Then the Next.
I’m sitting here trying to figure out how I can write a longer post on this topic. Why? There on no word counts here. This post will not be graded or assessed in any way. There’s no one watching over what I write and telling me “not enough!” Well, except for me.
So I have to dig deeper. What do I want? Do I want to have a longer post? Do I have more to write about this topic at the moment? I must be quiet and listen to that deep, deep inner voice: the self. What do I want? What do I need? I need rest. I’d really like to read a little bit. I’m in the middle of two books that I’m really enjoying right now. And I’m rather hungry, so I’d like to get some food. And I’d like to get a few sentences written in a few other projects. I’d like to play the guitar. And I will do all of those things at some point today. None of these things feel like they are particularly selfish, even though they place my self (my needs and wants) at the center. And nowhere is my deeper self asking me to write more in this post. So I won’t.
Looking back to how I was before I had cancer, I would say that what made me nervous was everything. What makes me nervous a year post diagnosis? Nothing.
That answer is obviously too absolute for reality. But it’s a starting point.
I first learned the phrase “running piglet” from the book Chinese Medicine for the Mind: A Science-Backed Guide to Improving Mental Health with Traditional Chinese Medicine by Nina Cheng. “Running piglet defines a sudden rushing sensation that ascends to the chest and throat and a panicky feeling.” (P.89.) This very clearly describes how I experience nervousness or anxiety. The book even has an illustration of a distressed person with three yellow piglets in their stomach, ready to scamper upwards and into a pink trail leading up to the throat at any moment. I find this image to be very helpful in that it both contradicts the idea that nervousness is “all in my head” but also that it makes it seem so concrete and innocuous. I have little piglets running in my gut. I can deal with that. It was also a comfort to know that Chinese Medicine had a phrase and image that directly described what I was feeling. Meaning, in other words, that it was common enough to merit such a phrase. My chi might have been as chaotic as porcine babies but at least I wasn’t the only one.
Perhaps if I lived in China, I would have visited an herbalist to help me getting my chi under control. But here, in the United States, instead, I got cancer. I know that this is a scientifically inaccurate way of looking at what’s happened to me over the last year. But I’m a writer, not a scientist. And I’m a human. I’ve needed to find the story that would best bring wholeness and unity to my person: body, mind and soul. So here it is.
Those little pigs were trauma and nerves and unexpressed, well, everything that I had been living with. They’d been gathering in my stomach over many decades. From time to time, I’d be able to settle and quiet them by getting them drunk, or overfeeding them, or distracting them in myriad ways like overworking or overworrying. But the little pigs were still there, unexpressed, unacknowledged and just aching at the chance to run all through my body, disrupting the flow and balance of my chi.
In the western scientific way of thinking about cancer, it’s considered a disfunction of the body. My cells were growing out of control. Somehow my genes were expressing themselves poorly or incorrectly. Which, honestly, shouldn’t come as a surprise in a western world where honest self expression and communication is discouraged. I know I’ve often felt disconnected from my body. I am not I’m getting anything particularly bold or unknown when I say that women’s bodies (and specifically Asian women’s bodies and biracial bodies) are continuously objectified in our culture. It takes its toll on us mentally and physically.
But you know what is also true underneath all of that surface-level objectification and mistrust of the human body? My body is incredible. My mind had been completely cut off from understanding my body and yet it still managed to take care of itself. To take care of me.
The cancer was my body, after all.
My body was creating cancer cells to mop up all those running pigs that were disrupting my chi and balance and life. All that trauma and unexpressed emotion had been running rampant for too long and my body had enough. The cancer gathered it all up and dumped it into my breast. Why there? One of the first things I said after my diagnosis was, “at least I’m done with using my breasts.” I’d already used them to nurse my babies. It’s not coincidence that my breasts have always been the most objectified part of my body.
When I first had my mastectomy (which was unilateral), I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I would look with only one breast. I had already made the decision that I didn’t want to have reconstruction. More surgery and then the maintenance involved just seemed like, well, a lot to deal with. I did end up buying a few tops and a bathing suit that would de-emphasize the lopsidedness of my chest. And I’m still not one hundred percent happy with my bra situation. (I was offered to go to get fitted for a prosthetic but I wasn’t interested.) Still, I was kind of fiddling around with what shirts to wear. But the more I looked in the mirror and got used to how I look with one breast, the less and less concerned about it I’ve been. I realized that what was going on what that I was considering things like what top to wear to de-emphasize my lopsidedness because I was concerned that my body might make other people uncomfortable. Imagine that? I just went through one of the toughest years of my life, and I’m STILL overly fixated on what my body does to other people. Dang. Such is the power of misogyny. Fortunately, as soon as I realized that this was part of my thinking, I was able to shift it. Because the truth is: I’m a total badass and I have the scars and body to show it.
There are other aspects of cancer that have helped me cope with nervousness over the past year. Leading up to my surgery, I was very anxious and nervous. By going through it, though, I learned to ways to deal with that. Talk about it. Write through it. Return to focusing on my breath. I gained a mantra coming out of surgery: I am alive. And perhaps most of all, I learned the incredible power of my body and that I can trust it to take care of me. I’d long thought that the mind-body relationship was unidirectional, with the mind controlling the body. I woke up from surgery marveling that it’s a two-way street.
So am I really done with being nervous? Of course not. Each emotion along the whole spectrum serves its purpose. Just yesterday, the piglets woke in my belly as I watched my son run precariously close to the edge of the water at the Baltimore Harbor. But the sound of my voice calling his name lulled them back to sleep. se to the edge of the water at the Baltimore Harbor. But the sound of my voice calling his name lulled them back to sleep.
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I try to not get wound up in the first place. Sometimes this means recognizing what I can and cannot control. It means that I try to have touch-points through the day when I can check in with myself.
When I am getting wound up, I try to figure out a way to unwind myself as soon as possible. How? Moving, breathing, creating, eating, resting. I might go for a walk or just stretch a little, dance or shake it out. Check in with my breath. Sometimes I write in my journal. Practice the guitar. Listen to some music. Light a candle. Read a book or a poem.
I recognize that it’s not the day that’s demanding, it’s myself that’s demanding of me. The demands I make of myself are completely in my control.
I affirm myself. In every moment, every day, I’m one hundred percent confident that I did my very best because that’s what I tell myself. I have various phrases that I can go to if I’m having a hard time unwinding. I am alive. I am human. One I learned from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley: I am no one’s savior. I am no one’s burden.
Yesterday, I had various activities outside of the house. It might be have been a day that could be considered demanding. In the past, I likely would have come home and spent the evening fixating on how I did through the day and likely judging myself not too kindly. Maybe I was late arriving at different places. Maybe I didn’t get enough exercise. Maybe I was too chatty or not chatty enough; too helpful or not helpful enough. Oh! I shouldn’t have said that. Or maybe I should have said this. That person probably thinks I’m unkind or weird. I didn’t get enough reading done or clean the kitchen. With each thought, I’d wind myself up tighter and tighter.
Instead, I wrote in my journal that I was really proud of myself for doing my best. And it’s true.
I’ve been thinking about rest a lot this week. Maybe it’s because the kids are on spring break and I feel like this is my opportunity to also take a rest. I’m conflicted between going out and doing and sitting around and not doing. I’m plagued by the idea that I might use my time poorly. And I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that in the society I live in we have little control over our time. When given the “freedom” to decide how to use it, I am paralyzed with indecision.
And this might be because I don’t really know what rest is for me, yet.
I find the idea of resting so that I can be more “productive” to be terribly off-putting. I don’t want to live for productivity. And, yet, on the other hand, living in a permanent state of rest is also unappealing. The other day, I read someone’s piece of advice for going through cancer treatment: to stay active during the day so that sleep comes more easily at night. And while I’ve experienced the truth to this, I find myself getting trapped on this mental hamster wheel, going around in a rest and productivity circle. I find myself at times floating out in space wondering: how much is enough activity? How much is enough productivity? How much sleep is enough? Too much?
For a time, I’ve been relying heavily on my watch and phone to tell me these things. I gave up the sleep monitoring when I realized that wearing my watch (and knowing it was monitoring me) was making me sleep less well. I threw caution (or perhaps the need to have hard and fast sleep numbers) and stopped wearing it at night. I think I’ve been sleeping better.
I still rely on it heavily to monitor my daily steps and my activity (you know, those primary-colored rings to close in a burst of fire works when you meet your daily goal). I’ve reached a crucial crossroads where I’ve been meeting my goals every day for well over a month now. Do I increase the goals or, again, throw a bit of caution to the wind and decide to just trust how I feel, trust my body to tell me when I’ve had too much or not enough?
My body happens to be a trifecta of identities that cause me to struggle to listen to it and to trust it: a woman, racially marginalized, and, now, a cancer patient. With all three, the society and culture I live in is often telling me about my body, trying to control it (more successfully than I’d like to admit) or the other extreme of completely ignoring it. And so it is that perhaps I rely on those little rings closing than I need to. And perhaps I spent a little too much time (meaning any time at all) on the internet trying to figure out my own body and how to take care of it.
So back to spring break. We didn’t make any big plans even though I didn’t know I’d be in radiation treatment until a few weeks before it started. I also didn’t know how exhausting the treatments would be. Still, I’m trying to stay active. One of the funny things about radiation treatment is that you’re just lying on this table for the twenty minutes to forty minutes that it takes to complete it. It looks like rest. But it isn’t restful at all. The machine is whirring and humming and moving around you, the radiation techs are drawing on you, sometimes shifting your body a bit, but mostly they’re in the other room operating the machine. The position is awkward, the table is hard (in spite of the extra thick, cushiony sweatpants I’ve been wearing), and the whole thing is more mentally tiring than I give it credit. I’m trying to stay on top of taking care of my skin and sometimes a sore throat or just some discomfort in the area arises afterwards. Yeah, it’s not the worst of things, but it’s still not restful or fun by any means.
So I guess that one lesson I’ve learned from going through it is just that rest can look myriad different ways to different people and in different times in our lives.
The other day, I decided I had enough energy to go with my daughter to a Smithsonian museum one afternoon. It was a lot of walking and my feet were exhausted. But it was also, I don’t know, restful in a way. I got to turn off the part worrying part of my brain and just enjoy my daughter’s company and her excitement about history. I didn’t have to be a cancer patient. I didn’t have to make any real plans or major decisions. I did buy a book (George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy) and some chocolate before we headed home. And I closed all my rings, easily.
The next day, I got to sit on the couch and read the book, which was stunning. And although I wouldn’t always say that reading has always been restful to me, it was very restful to read Asian American history.
But I think that ultimately the aspect of these days of spring break that have been most restful have been that I’ve just let go and trusted. I didn’t feel like I had to make anything happen (exercise or trips or even time to rest and recover from radiation). I just let things happen. And the end result has been that I’ve been able to rest and (dare I say it?) be productive too.
Rhena Writes 