Rhena Writes

Tag: health

  • 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!

  • 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!

  • Good is God (all the time) and YHWH is breath.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
    View all responses

    A good life is a series of good moments, one after the other, strung together like pearls on a necklace. What makes a moment “good”?

    Being present to myself is a decent starting place to a good moment.

    Is it only good moments that are worthy of a spot on this necklace of life? Or, when I look back on each moment, will some shimmer more brightly than others? Can I consider the dull and tarnished moments as “good” as the others? Yes, I can.

    Because in all of those moments — even the dull, mistake-riddled ones — I was myself.

    Being present to this moment, to myself in this moment, means not looking back at the previous moments with self judgement — not weighing out and judging one as being “good” and another as being “bad.” Those moments existed. And I existed in those moments. That is enough.

    I this moment, I am sitting at my computer, attempting to answer this question. When my mind wanders off in flights of fancy, I pull it back to my breath.

    My breath is always with me. As long as I’m alive. And so I can always return to it. A good breath is any breath at all because it means that I’m alive. A breath is a moment. And a breath is the sound YHWH, which means that “I am” is on every breath. And that means that God is on every breath. And God and good are really the same words. And all breaths are good and therefore all moments are good moments. And a good life is just a series of good moments strung together like pearls on a necklace. And so it is that this is a good life. And so it is that the breath is the most important thing needed to live a good life. Breathe.

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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!

  • On spoons and hurts; words and truth. (A Prose Poem sort of a thing.)

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you have any collections?
    View all responses

    I once knew someone who collected small decorative spoons. Apparently this was a thing that people did. Or maybe still do. At least, that’s what I was led to believe when I expressed my confusion when I learned of this spoon collection. Apparently, many places, or at least the places where this person had been, sell these spoons as souvenirs.

    I think perhaps they kept their spoons in a velvet-lined box. I’m actually not sure if they showed me such a box or if I just made that up. My understanding is that the spoons were not used for anything. They were just kept. Maybe this person and his family (I think the spoon collecting was something of a group project for them) pulled them out every so often to clean them and reminisce about where they had acquired each spoon. And maybe that is purpose enough. Maybe some objects spark memories, conversations even connection.

    Anyway I’ve never collected spoons.

    I do have horrible habit of collecting hurts. You know, things that have been said or done to me that have been unfair or mean. I squirrel them away in my heart and then every so often pull them out to shine them and examine them so that I learn their every shape and crag. That way I can place them in juuuust the right spot in this wall that I’m building. At least such a collection has a practical purpose. That wall is high and strong. I am safe inside where I can keep an even more useful collection: bits and pieces of information about myself, moments of solid happiness and contentment, bright and shiny truths.

    I collect words and sentences, compile them into their velvet boxes, maybe give them a good shake. What words and images will I pull out from my collection this time? Will they be true?

    Maybe they will inspire me to tap out a bit of mortar or even a whole rock from the wall of hurts. I’ll slip the words out through the hole. They’ll glisten and shimmer, a sort of flashlight morse code. I-M-H-E-R-E they will spell out. I’m 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. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Those who ignored, disregarded,counted me out

    Daily writing prompt
    Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
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    Many upon a many a time … I was sharing something that I was excited and passionate about. Many upon a many a time, I was ignored. Or disregarded. Or told I was wrong and told that I’d never get it right. Maybe there was laughter, the cold kind. Sometimes there was a simple turning away. Sometimes there was a red pen, the words, “no it doesn’t”, an interruption.

    I’m not going to pretend that those moments didn’t hurt. They did. A chilly shot of the realization that this person couldn’t give me what I needed in that moment. But brief hurts were necessary to learn what I needed, to learn how to ease the pain or, better, replace it with joy. I had to learn how to warm myself up.

    Now I’ve learned that it’s those people who missed out.

    I learned, from them, how to care for myself, how to validate myself. And perhaps most importantly: how to see myself.

    The idea that “I can’t rely on anyone else” sounds cynical without the follow up of, “I can rely on myself.” And that’s what I’ve learned to be able to do. It’s not just relying on myself for material needs but for emotional needs too. I can’t harbor ill will towards these people. It was their actions that revealed to me just how awesome I am, after all.

    One day last, I was in the waiting room of the cancer center not too long after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I knew that a mastectomy was possibly in the cards for me. Another woman, a bit older than me, walked past me to her seat and I noticed that she had one breast. The top she was wearing made it very obvious: it was a stretchy knit with horizontal stripes. In other words, she wasn’t doing anything to disguise her mastectomy. She looked healthy and strong. She looked like she was just going about her daily business.

    Over the months since then, I’ve thought about that woman often. And I still feel, at times, a little bit uncomfortable with my new body. I worry that I’m going to make other people uncomfortable or that someone is going to ask me questions that I don’t feel prepared to answer. Still, I have to go out in the world. And so I think about that woman in the waiting room and how I didn’t even have to exchange words with her. Just her presence, being out in the world without apology makes me feel like I can do it too.

    Today, as I was walking my son to school, I noticed another woman doing a double take when she saw my chest. I started to reach for my shirt to straighten it out and make it less obvious. But then I remembered the woman in the waiting room, just going about her business and also that I had more important things, like chatting with my son to do. Thinking about the woman who was surprised by my uneven chest as I was walking home, I thought that the look on her face probably mirrored mine when I saw the woman wearing the striped shirt in the waiting room. And so I decided that perhaps the woman who was looking at my chest this morning maybe also was recently diagnosed or has a loved one who was diagnosed. Maybe me being out in the world without a breast reconstruction, without really trying to hide my lopsidedness, looking relatively healthy and strong … maybe my presence gave her a little spark of hope in a dark time. Just as the woman in the waiting room passed her candle flame on to me, I hope that I’m able to pass it on to other women.

    And so we carry on. One light at a 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. 

  • A map towards myself

    Daily writing prompt
    What gives you direction in life?
    View all responses

    I am a cartographer, constantly looking for the streets and paths, coastlines and rock formations that both define me and are markers to the paths into a deeper understanding of myself. All roads lead to me and I’m currently bouncing between three often intersecting passageways on my journey to myself: body, mind, and spirit.

    Body: I listen to my body. Here’s how. I lie or sit in relative stillness or whatever type of stillness my body is asking for. I focus on my breath. The depth. The texture. The smoothness or bumpiness. I do this without judgment. My breath communicates a lot to me about the state of my body. Where is there tension? I center my body.

    Here’s an example from my morning walk with my dog of prioritizing my body. It’s very hot here right now. In spite of my light clothes and my hat and it still being relatively early in the day, I was sweating and uncomfortable as I walked along the sunny sidewalk to the nearby park. I was looking forward to walking through the cool freshly cut grass in a shady spot of the field. There was a couple already at the park with their dog off leash. Past mornings, when I have seen an off-leash dog in the park, I have gone another way even if that other way is less comfortable or convenient for me. But today, my body was insistent, craving the shady spot on the field, so I continued on. I listened to my body. There was no run in with the other dog or her owner’s. My dog and I got to enjoy the cool air of the part of the field lined with trees. The people there watched me the entire time I was walking through the field, but I just kept doing what I was doing. And here’s what I learned: I am allowed to take up space with my body. I am allowed to enjoy a walk through the park. And I can trust myself and my body.

    Mind: My mind is curious. I keep it engaged with reading and learning. And lately, I’ve been learning more about my mind by engaging more actively with my sleeping dreams. Here’s how I do it.

    1. I prime my mind both during the day and right before I go to sleep, telling myself that I am going to remember my dreams.
    2. I keep a notebook and pen next to my bed.
    3. When I wake up — whether that’s in the middle of the night — or in the morning, I jot down a few notes about any dreams that I remember.
    4. Later in the day, I use the notes to write a more detailed description of the dream. I focus on both the images and the feelings. And then I free write about what the dream is revealing to me about me. It’s both a very informative and liberating practice. And it turns out, I’m pretty fascinating.

    There are variations to this practice including priming myself to lucid dream (in other words to realizing that I’m dreaming and to consciously control the dream) and to posing a question or a problem to my dream self. It’s pretty remarkable the answers and the solutions that have come up in my dreaming state.

    Spirit: My body has created life and now I offer my spirit opportunities to be creative too. I write. I make music. I create art. I create moments and myself too. I daydream. And I return to my body, my breath, my dreams. Yes, I know that those are pathways I’ve mentioned above under “body” and “mind”. But these three parts are always connected, like a three-legged stool creating a solid base for the center of 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. My writing is offered freely here and I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • Running piglets and cancer

    Daily writing prompt
    What makes you nervous?
    View all responses

    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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    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. 

  • To rest or not to rest.

    Daily writing prompt
    Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
    View all responses

    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.

  • The stranger within.

    Daily writing prompt
    Describe a random encounter with a stranger that stuck out positively to you.
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    When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I had to be transported from the hospital to the radiation center for treatment. The people who transported me usually sat with me while I waited to see the doctor or to receive the treatment. Needless to say, the people who were driving me places were strangers to me. But I had a few encounters with them that stuck out to me.

    The first was a younger woman who had driven the ambulance-like vehicle. She asked me what kind of cancer I had as we were waiting outside of the radiation room. After I answered her, she started telling me about how her mother had breast cancer too. I had just received the diagnosis and still had no idea what my treatment plan would be. She talked about the chemotherapy her mother went through and she said that the one thing was to try to eat whatever I can to keep my strength up through the treatments. The fact that she took the time to share with me her advice and to share with me a story of someone on the other side of their experience with breast cancer gave me hope. And through my treatment, I kept her words in mind about keeping my strength up. Because the advice came from a patient (through her daughter) it was probably more powerful than even what the doctors and nurses said. And I remembered them when the chemotherapy made everything tasteless.

    Another transportation person made me laugh out loud, great belly laughs that left me breathless right when I needed that. He also shared this wild story about when he was in the marines. It involved a very specific type of beer that is only made and sold in Wisconsin. It happened to be one of my favorite beers when I lived there. Our encounter was very, very brief, but we connected on such a niche subject that it made it feel somehow preordained. It made the world seem small, the specifics of my life not all that unique after all. And that’s exactly what I needed to feel in that moment.

    One other young man who helped my transport also had a very short interaction with him. He asked me almost right away, “Are you a teacher?” It was such a pointed question, that I started racking my brain, “Was this a former student?” No, he wasn’t. By way of explanation he said I just seemed like a teacher. I took it as a compliment and I think he meant it as such. Later on, one of the women who cleaned the hospital rooms and I got to chatting. She talked about some of her recent difficulties. “I’m usually shy, but you have a good energy.” Both of these comments were also what I needed to hear in those moments. Mostly because everyone I’d been seeing saw me primarily as a patient and I was beginning to see myself just as a patient. I had months (years?) of interactions ahead of me where I would be reduced to “patient”. Both of these interactions with strangers reminded me that I’m human first. They told me that even in this role as a patient and in these medical settings, I was more than just someone to be helped, that my presence or energy could also help someone else. I guess you could say that in a way, these interactions empowered me to see myself as more than a patient.

    Lastly, dear reader, you too are a stranger to me. And yet, here you are, reading my words. And maybe I am becoming something less of a stranger to you. Just as I am becoming less of a stranger to myself.

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    Likes, shares, reblogs are welcome and help us all become less strange to one another! (As do tips … Thanks!)