Rhena Writes

Category: Memoir

  • Happy Summer Solstice

    It’s a few days late, but that’s what happens sometimes. And the thing about summer solstice is that while it might mark the apex of the sun’s power, it doesn’t switch off the next day. It’s a gradual, six month long shift. So the date, June 21, is, in many ways arbitrary. Like a lot of dates and deadlines.

    On Saturday (the date of the solstice) I sat down at my computer to write a blog post. I’d already been to the farmer’s market earlier in the day. And we’d decided to make some lefse to eat with sausages and hot dogs on the grill at our local pool. It seemed a perfect way to soak up these longest hours of sunlight of the year. Years ago, we were in Norway around the time of the summer solstice. It was striking how few hours of dark there were. We weren’t quite far enough north to experience the true midnight when the sun never sets, but it was certainly difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. I realized how near-constant light made me crave the dark.

    Of course, last year, the solstice passed without me really realizing it. From what I can remember, I was at the beginning of chemotherapy treatment. The fact of the earth’s movement around the sun faded into the background. So this year, I’m grateful that I don’t need to be so hyper-focused on the granular details of getting through each treatment, each week, each day, each moment. The earth, tilted as it is on its axis, is moving around the sun. And that’s just fine by me.

    So it was that when I sat down to write a blog post on Saturday, that I already had much of the day planned out, just as I had much of my blog posting and month planned out. Somewhere in the back of my head, I was gunning for one hundred consecutive days of posting to my blog. The solstice was meant to be the 90th day of posting, which meant that I would cap off June with a celebratory post about posting to my blog for 100 days in a row. I’d already thought about how I’d write that 100th post about what I learned posting everyday: how I’d built up my confidence as a writer, how I’d learned to write through all of the internalized voices that I’d allowed to silence me. I was so close to that one hundredth day of posting. I’d already put in 89 days of work.

    And yet. When I sat down to write on Saturday, I went to open the correct tabs as had become habit, and a small voice asked, “what are you doing?”

    I just wasn’t feeling it.

    What I was feeling is that it was the weekend, my kids and husband were home, we had plans to make lefse and go to the pool to enjoy the extra minutes of sunlight.

    I had nothing to prove to anyway, least of all myself.

    Besides, I’d already done 89 days of blogging in a row. It wasn’t as if all the lessons I’d learned and momentum I’d built would just disappear because I didn’t blog on the 90th day.

    So I shut off the computer and went to spend summer solstice with my family. And it was glorious and lovely. I ended up going for two swims that day. I ate well. And enjoyed time with my kids and husband. I slept better than I had possibly in years without the aid of pharmaceuticals.

    There’s inherent tension between having goals and being in the moment. And I’m working through some of that. I fear that if I don’t set goals, then I’ll never get anything done. And I grew up in a culture where self worth is toxically intertwined with productivity. 100 looks nice on the page. And maybe it would garner more attention than 89. But it’s also arbitrary. And I’m not doing this to for attention. And now I just realized that I’m also not doing this (writing this blog, posting daily or regularly) to prove anything to anyone. I’ve already proven everything that I need to the only person I need to answer to: myself.

    And what have I proven? That I’ll always be here to take care of myself, to spend time doing things that make me feel good: to make lefse, to eat good food, to night swim with my kids, to soak up all the hours of sunlight that I can.

    As with many goals that I’ve set for myself over the years, the number one hundred is ultimately arbitrary. What isn’t arbitrary? That the earth circles the sun once a year, that once a year we get the most number of hours of sunlight in a day, and me.

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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. Thank you!

  • A Daily Journal Writing Practice

    It’s been about five years now that I’ve been keeping a handwritten journal. In the last few years I’ve become consistent with it. And in the last two years I’ve become downright religious about it, building up a habit where writing each morning has become automatic. I look forward to it.

    Recently, I’ve been writing the date in Thai and Norwegian because those are two languages I’m working on learning and/ or improving. So it’s become an opportunity to learn and improve in those arenas. The hope is that after a year of doing this everyday, at least the days of the week and the months of the year are locked into my memory. I find something intensely satisfying about breaking large, seemingly impossible endeavors (such as learning a language) into smaller and smaller, very possible tasks.

    I write by hand. I also find this intensely satisfying. It slows me down but at the same time, I rarely if ever cross things out. What comes out on the page, comes out on the page. It’s unlike typing in the way. In this paragraph alone, I’ve probably hit the delete key at least two dozen times to fix errors or change words. But there’s a certain amount of acceptance that comes with writing by hand. I often just write an ellipses or even “I don’t know” or “ugh.” And that stands. I don’t really look back at the previous entries even though it would be east enough to do so. Perhaps some day I will. And I hope that what I see is how far I’ve come.

    For most of my life, I wasn’t comfortable with writing in a journal. I had a few experiences when I was younger when someone else read my journals. The reactions made me feel like it wasn’t a good idea for me to write down my thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experiences. All those missed years of those writing make me sad. But they don’t detract from the writing in my journal that I do now. In fact, it probably makes me more grateful that I have this ritual now.

    I write about what’s on my mind and things that are bothering me. And in writing about them, they bother me less. My problems feel smaller, more manageable when I can put them into words on a page. Sometimes I even come to some sort of solution or even just a new way of looking at situations.

    I get to know myself through the pages of my journal. And what I’m finding is that I’m a very reliable person, for myself at least, which is the most important thing. I return to my journal pages every morning and sometimes through the day. And I always find a steadiness. Consistency. I’m always here for myself. And even when I don’t have an answer, I listen well and deeply to myself.

  • Summer break begins

    It feels like this is the first day of summer break even though the kids have been off for school for a couple of days and even though summer doesn’t officially begin until tomorrow. I think it’s because my husband is off of work today. And this time last year, I was dealing with a new cancer diagnosis. I was so consumed by all of the appointments and details, getting through each day, I was barely aware of the seasons changing. It was a hard time.

    This summer, I’ve been able to look a little bit further forward, planning outings, swimming, taking advantage of farmer’s markets and other simple things that I completely missed last year. I started to try to plan today with my kids, going out to a museum. I was surprised that it was the kids who put the kibosh on that plan. They wanted to laze around a bit, read and maybe go up to swim at the neighborhood pool, enjoy what their own house and backyard have to offer. I realize now that part of me was feeling so guilty about all that I couldn’t do with them last summer and I was kicking off this summer by trying to compensate. As always, I over shot. Thankfully, my kids pulled me back.

    In myriad subtle ways and just in their being, they remind me that we can all be content with what’s right in front of us. We have already been given so much, there’s no need to keep striving for more beyond that.

    So instead of hoping on the metro somewhere else, my son and I made oatmeal raisin cookies. When he was first in kindergarten, I used to make them about once a week. He loved these cookies. It was such a simple pleasure and he acted as if he was starving in the desert and these were actual mana. Today is the first time he’s actually made them with me. I’m shocked by how capable he is, and how much he seems to enjoy my company. And I didn’t need to go even outside of my front door for these experiences and lessons.

  • Still learning.

    Is it a boundary setting hangover? Is it a vulnerability hangover? Is it a lack of boundaries? For all of my talk (writing) about how I’m trying to focus on myself, I still do it. I give too much of myself. I let other people make decisions about how I’m using my time and my energy. I keep putting oxygen masks on everyone else because, “What will they think of me if I’m sitting here putting my oxygen mask on when there are other people who don’t have oxygen masks on?”

    I keep forgetting the rules: What other people think of me is none of my business. And also: Do unto others what I would have done unto me. I am perfectly capable of putting on my own oxygen mask. I’d rather do it for myself than have some random passenger who thinks I need help but doesn’t have his own oxygen mask situation sorted help me.

    Here’s the thing. I’m learning.

    The other day, I went for a swim. A few days later, I felt rather sore. I probably pushed myself too hard. And I can kind of remember the exact moments when I pushed myself too hard: when I wanted to get another lap or a few more strokes in when I should have actually just slowed it down a little. So the next time I went into the pool, I was a little bit better about listening to when I need to ease off a little. My body is good about telling me.

    Another day, I gave someone just a little more time than I actually had. It threw off my whole day. And it probably disrupted my sleep that night. Next time, I’ll back off a little bit more in that arena too. When I was younger, it always felt like I had endless amounts of time to give to other people. Like a cup of coffee or a beer could easily turn into two or three and then a whole afternoon or evening. When I write about it now, it sounds kind of romantic. Youthful. This kind of feeling that I had all this time.

    Maybe it’s the cliche of the mis-spent youth but that feeling of just having hours and hours, endless days? Too often I spent it on the wrong people. Not that these people who I was spending time on were bad (although some of them were) but that I wasn’t spending that time on the one person I should have been: myself.

    I’ve only learned very recently that I actually really enjoy my own company. I enjoy being by myself. Yes, of course I also enjoy being with some people, some of the time. But I enjoy being with myself all of the time.

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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!

  • Brain fog, bills, and breath.

    I would have liked to have gotten here, to blogging earlier today but I’ve been on the phone with insurance, e-mailing and leaving voicemails with cancer center billing departments. It seems that at least one place is trying to bill me a second time. I triple checked my credit card statements. Brain fog from chemotherapy is a very real thing, my doctor (whose office sent me a bill for a payment I already made) assures me. So triple checks it is. I pulled out my calendar to make sure the dates of the payments and appointments lined up, that I didn’t just mis-remember everything through the brain fog. Sure enough, they charged my credit card.

    I didn’t sleep well last night — another side effect of one of my medications, apparently — and so I really would rather have been taking a cat nap or even just reading. OK, let’s be honest, even if I’d slept well last night, I would not have wanted to have to spend my morning dealing with medical bills.

    And the other one, well, I guess it’s my fault for not reading the fine print before receiving radiation treatment. Or not asking questions like, “how much is this going to cost me?” ahead of time. I guess I have too much faith in insurance companies to do the right thing and for providers to be up front about how things are going to be billed.

    It’s exhausting. A good chunk of my time, I was on the phone just trying to get to a live person, inputting the same information over and over and then when I finally got a live person, it was someone from a pharmacy, not billing. TWICE. Plus, the line was all crackly and there was some sort of lag time in our conversation. As if we were all in 1979, trying to make an overseas phone call. And, yes, part of me did think that this was by design, that the insurance company makes all of this as unpleasant as possible, hoping that you’ll give up. And I guess eventually I did.

    This is hard. Really, really hard.

    And, yes, I can turn to my breathing and meditation and all the rest of it to get through these moments, but the bills are still there. I can’t breathe the bills away. If I’d known how expensive cancer was, I wouldn’t have asked for it. Oh, that’s right. I didn’t.

    Still, there’s something about not receiving bills until all of the treatment is done that feels kind of gross. It would have been easier to swallow had I been told that I was going to be billed this way ahead of time.

    And right now, I just kind of need to write through all of this, just get it out and into the world. I wish I could be using this time and energy to write something beautiful and creative, to escape into something else. But right now it’s more helpful to me to write something real. And to try to be grateful that I have some place to at least do that.

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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!

  • Moving on from the Daily Prompts

    For the past several months, I’ve been posting every day to this blog. They’ve all been responses to the daily prompts. It’s been immensely helpful in building a daily posting habit. And I’ve been actually quite pleased with a lot of the writing that I’ve done in response to the daily prompts.

    There was a time in the past when I would have viewed daily prompts as a sort of crutch. What I believed was that I should be generating my own writing and ideas and creativity on my own, with no assistance from beginning to end. “Real artists”, I thought “are spontaneously inspired.”

    Of course, now I realize the ridiculousness of this way of thinking. Inspiration can come from anywhere and that includes daily prompts (even ones that are AI generated). More often than not, having the prompts pushed me into the flow state that I needed in order to write.

    They ushered me to this point of being able to push myself into that desired flow state on a day to day basis.

    Here’s the other thing. I realized that part of why I was using the daily prompts is that it connected my blog to other readers. The result was that I got views and even likes. I’ve written a big game about how I’m not in this for the likes or even for the views and yet here I was, responding to the daily prompts each day in part to get the views and likes. I’ve gotten pretty good at linking the daily prompts to whatever I wanted to write about anyway, whatever happened to be on my mind. Even today, the question is about retirement and it would be easy enough to think about this as a “retirement” from daily prompts.

    But I’m not going to do that.

    I still believe, perhaps even more fervently now, that inspiration can come from anywhere. But I’ve also decided that this blog is my own space, to do with it as I please, to express myself as I’d like to, to write about what’s on my mind and what my interests are. That is inspiration enough. I am my own inspiration. I’m glad I had these daily prompts to get me here. And also glad that I’m ready to take off on my own.

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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!

  • This one.

    Daily writing prompt
    Describe one of your favorite moments.
    View all responses

    Or this one.

    It keeps crossing my mind today to get on the computer to post to this blog and in the same moment, that keeps slipping away towards something more… more what? Just something more.

    Which is good. To be immersed in each moment in this way.

    And just now, I noticed that the late afternoon glow of the nearly solstice sun is so particular. And how this moment of sunlight will not be like this for a whole other year. But even then, the cloud cover will be different and the shade from nearby trees will be more or less depending on what kind of year they’ve had.

    And so I decided that perhaps I needed to write this down as my favorite moment. But by the time I had arrived at my desk, it had all changed. And so this had become my new favorite moment. And even so the sun continues it’s shifting through the sky. It mirrors a longing that I feel and yet cannot explain. A longing for this moment.

  • I unlocked more truth and made myself visible.

    Daily writing prompt
    What notable things happened today?
    View all responses

    It’s still morning here. But I already had a perspective-changing moment. I don’t need to go into the details of what happened. The germane point is that I experienced a moment in which it was very clear that the only other person who was in the same space as me did not (or perhaps could not) see or notice me. I was invisible.

    This moment brought up all sorts of feelings. Initially, I was frustrated, angry, and annoyed. Part of me wanted to shout, “Hey! I’m right here!” But I had things I needed to get done so kept calm and carried on.

    But, as these things do, the moment kept returning to my mind. There’s something to be learned from this. And so I’ve been sitting with it at moments. I wrote about it in my journal. And now I’m writing about it here.

    Being invisible actually felt quite familiar, as something that I’ve experienced regularly in the past. And that’s because it is something that I’ve experienced often in the past. But I didn’t really have the words to name that feeling. Now I do. Examining this moment from today allowed me to articulate what had happened to me in many previous moments. “Oh! I was invisible all those other times too!” It feels very good to be able to name and thereby validate those other times that I’d been rendered invisible.

    But this morning’s moment of invisibility stood out because even though it was a familiar feeling, it wasn’t familiar from recent times. In other words, I’ve been able to build up my life and myself such that I am rarely rendered invisible these days. How so? I see myself. It’s actually that simple.

    And there was something else to be learned from this moment this morning. The other person (who did not see me) and I were sharing physical space (although this other person did not seem to be aware of that). I think that there have been times in my life when I have been invisible and my response has been to try to render myself visible by taking up more physical space; when the physical realm has been my primary place of interacting with the world. The physical/ bodily world has been the primary space for making myself visible.

    But as I sat with this moment, I realized that physical body-space is only one third of the story of human experience. I also have a mind and a spirit. And perhaps these moments when I am invisible in the physical worlds are small reminders from my mind and spirit that my body — and how it is seen or not seen — is not the end of my story. In fact, it’s not even a narrative thread in the story of my body. The story of my body is the story of my body, not how it is seen or not seen by other people.

    I just googled the phrase, “Invisible Man” because this experience made me think about re-reading Ralph Ellison’s novel. Of course, a good portion of what came up on the first page of this search was about the 2020 horror movie. There’s some layer of irony in that. Oh, and trust that I did get sucked into the horror film trailers. And will probably end up watching it at some point. No judgment (of myself or anyone) there. It’s telling that the book is rendered invisible by the movie. IYKYK.

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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!

  • My favorite season is the one I’m in.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is your favorite season of year? Why?
    View all responses

    So, right now, that means spring is my favorite season. In Maryland it already feels a bit more like summer, hot and humid, the constant threat of thunderstorms, even though we are still ten days or so away from the summer solstice. The minutes of sunlight are still piling up on each side of the day. School is still in session, but the community pools are open. It would be easy for me to get caught up in either looking forward towards summer break or backwards to the cooler days of spring during this time of transition. But I’m putting a great deal of effort into being in the season I’m in — weatherwise and otherwise.

    I learned a lesson about this just yesterday in my guitar lesson. I’ve been working the same piece of music for a while now — maybe as long as two or three months? — I’m not really sure. In any case, it’s been a challenging piece and the last few lessons, my teacher has worked with me with the same few trouble spots for a few weeks now. At the end of the lesson, she’s sent me off with some thoughts on how to work on those few measures. So at each practice, I will follow her suggestions and work on those few measures, practicing them over and over. And there certainly has been some improvement.

    And yesterday she called me out. “You’ve been working on these other parts of the piece, haven’t you?” indicating the lines and measures that we hadn’t started working on during my lessons yet.

    I laughed and wondered, “How did she know?“

    I confessed that I had been. She also teaches my daughter and she told me that I’m just like her. There’s probably some truth to that. But when I talked to my daughter about it, she said that she has some favorite parts to pieces of music that she just really enjoys playing and so she plays those parts over and over.

    That’s not what’s going on for me.

    As I explained to my guitar teacher, I have it in my head that there’s some sort of deadline or like a “test” at the end and I start to get worried that I’m not going to have covered or practiced that part of the piece.

    I know. There is no deadline. And that’s also exactly what I said to my teacher. “You’re type A,” she said.

    We both had a bit of a laugh over the whole thing. The whole thing forced to me to examine and articulate some of these ridiculous thoughts and ideas that underlie how I’ve been approaching practicing guitar. And it also made me realize that I present as a Type A personality. And I realize that this is a survival/ defense mechanism that I built up in school and probably in life in general. It’s that I always feel like if I’m not three steps ahead, then I’m three steps behind and slipping even faster.

    But in my heart of hearts, that’s not who I really am. It’s just how I’ve been presenting myself. It’s a coping strategy. I practiced those other sections of the music because I was worried I’d somehow be called upon to know the whole piece and I wouldn’t be prepared.

    All of this for an activity that I’m partaking in supposedly “for fun.”

    In the meantime, the few measures that my teacher suggested I practice aren’t really getting that much better. And the whole thing isn’t really that much fun. Or, at least, it’s definitely not as much fun as it could be if I just trusted the process. Just focus on the parts that my teacher told me to. No need to be a super student, to know the whole thing ahead of the class (by the way, there is no class, these are private lessons). I’ve been cramming all of the music into each week, each practice. And in this way of thinking, I’ve ended up not really knowing any of the music that well. I haven’t been giving each line, each measure, each note its space and time.

    I’d like to be able to tell you that since this lesson and commensurate change in attitude, I’ve picked up the guitar and the whole thing has come together. That’s not true. This isn’t some neat little lesson with a change of attitude and a happy reward at the end. In fact, I haven’t even picked up the guitar since yesterday’s lesson. In part because that’s part of the lesson too. I’m doing all of this for fun so I don’t need to practice just to “prove” something to myself. And I also don’t need to “over practice”. I practice once a day for thirty to forty-five minutes. When I’m done, I’m done, I move on to something else. I don’t fixate and obsess and try to perfect it all.

    So what does this have to do with my favorite season?

    Like I said, my favorite season is the one I’m in. And being able to say that means that I don’t spend a lot of time looking forwards or looking backwards at the other seasons, which will inevitably come in their due time. Just as those other parts of the music will get their due focus and attention in their time. In the meantime, I’ll just live in the moment, the season, the measure, the notes I’m in.

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    It’s Wednesday, which means that I’m going to include a brief summary of what I’ve been blogging about in this past week.

    Let’s begin with last Thursday where I answered the prompt about my dream chocolate bar, which ended up being an impossible one because what’s the point of dreaming if it doesn’t transcend reality?

    Friday was my shortest post yet about why I wouldn’t change my name.

    Next up, I revealed who I spend most of my time with. (MY answer was unsurprising.)

    I wrote about what I need to live a good life. And, again, not a surprising answer.

    My tagline in a list poem: Rhena, more than this poem.

    Lastly, yesterday I wrote about what luxury I couldn’t live without.

    A bit of silence. And then a discussion of why I shouldn’t actually feel awkward about speaking aloud by myself.

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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!

  • Of course I remember life before the internet!

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you remember life before the internet?
    View all responses

    As a kid playing outside in the yard, I had a pretty vivid imagination. I don’t remember the specifics of what I imagined, but I do recall mixing potions, that one specific tree was my house, and a tree stump was a friend’s house. I could spend a lot of time outside, alone, just entertaining myself and at the same time learning about the world.

    Still, even with my vivid childhood imagination, I don’t think that I could have ever imagined a future in which the internet was a thing.

    Even in high school, when I first heard about the internet, I don’t think I really understood what it was. I was on the school newspaper. I remember many late nights at the printers where we had to bring printed copies of the paper and lay them all out by hand. Of course, we had computers and software to lay it out (maybe abode?), but the final print and review had to be done by hand. Sometimes this meant that if we found a mistake very late in the process, we’d have to figure out a way to correct it with the pages we had with us and an exacto knife. Sometimes we were there until 2 or 3 in the morning. In retrospect, it was pure folly on my part that I put that much time and energy into it.

    Later on, in college, I remember we had a class in which we made a website. I still didn’t quite understand what I was doing or what it would mean. I just remember a least one instructor being quite excited about the potential of the internet for education. As I was creating this webpage, though, the way I understood it was just an alternative way to feed students information. And that the consumption of that information was rather passive.

    Of course, today, I’m sitting at my computer at this very moment creating, as it were, content for passive consumption. But what I’m thinking about now is that I’m not creating this content and engaging in this process for students to consume and learn from. This is for me. And, for me, it’s not passive at all.

    My kids, of course, have a completely different relationship to the internet. They’ve never not had it. I look at how technology is used in education now and I think to myself that even if I wanted to get back into teaching, I’d never be able to catch up.

    And that just is part of my ambivalent relationship with the internet. Just this morning, I was feeling really fatigued. I thought that maybe it was I was still feeling the effects of radiation treatment. So I ended up googling a bit. Regrettably. Because of course, it’s just going to be confirmation bias. Because of course people still get fatigued a month after finishing radiation. It’s regrettable because I wish I had just listened to my own body, taken a minute or two to think about what I’ve been going through recently and then just laid down to rest.

    Sometimes I look up directions to places that I’ve been dozens or even hundreds of times. I just don’t trust my own sense of space and direction anymore.

    And that’s a part of my current relationship with the internet right now — I allow it to do a good chunk of my thinking for me. And the result is that I don’t use those parts of my brain enough — my mental maps, my ability to check in with and understand what’s going on with my body, my feeling of competency and confidence in my own knowledge. Those are just a couple of examples.

    So, yes, I remember life before the internet. I’m grateful that that, in a world where the internet is not a constant presence, that pre-internet life is still part of me.

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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!