Rhena Writes

Tag: writing

  • Has anything changed?

    Daily writing prompt
    How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
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    A few weeks ago, I had the bizarre experience of being in a very, very bougie place in DC. I’ve mentioned before here that I grew up in DC and many of my life experiences have been shaped by having observed power; by having spent a lot of time in close proximity to the very center of empire but not being a part of it. Being, rather, apart from it. In any case, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had fewer and fewer occasions to experience that world again. Which is all to say that it had been a while (and definitely since before the pandemic) that I had been in one of these “finer” corners of the DMV. It was very surreal. It was as if the pandemic never happened in that world. At least, it had that veneer. No one was in masks. There were no written signs about safety protocols. No containers of hand sanitizer out. Of course, if I had poked the surface, I’m sure I would have found changes and adaptations. Probably many of the staff lost loved ones or livelihoods or ways of life but they are probably also trained how to maintain appearances as if nothing changed. 

    I remember in the thick of the pandemic and lock-downs, watching movies or TV shows from before the pandemic and having to take a moment to remember, “Oh, yeah, we didn’t always wear masks everywhere, we didn’t always not shake hands.” I remember just watching old footage of crowded places made me feel a little uneasy. I read recently that even today, studios follow strict protocols to keep the actors from getting sick. So while they are presenting worlds and stories where the characters show no signs of there ever having been a pandemic, the key grips and food services and hair and makeup are still masked up. 

    Being in high-end DC had that feeling. I was being presented a world in which everything was care-free and easy. But behind the scenes, the people creating this world were not enjoying its ease. 

    It was head spinning when the next day, I went to take my girls to get their hair cut. I cut their hair (and my son’s and my husband’s and my parent’s) for the first year or so of the pandemic. It’s not easy work. So I was grateful when I was able to bring them back to the woman who’d been cutting their hair before the pandemic. She has her own salon attached to her house just outside the beltway in a largely immigrant community. It’s very small and worn down a bit, but we like it. During their haircuts, she was masked the whole time and when I checked in with her at the beginning, she mentioned how business hasn’t been good. It seemed to never have picked up to what it was like before the pandemic. 

    This is why I say that it feels like nothing has changed and everything has changed. Many have had no choice but to adapt in order to maintain an illusion so that others don’t have to adapt at all. 

  • The first hour of my day.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
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    My alarm goes off at 6 am. I should probably move that back to 5:55 to give myself five minutes of lazing and stretching. The soles of my feet and heels always ache and burn when I place them on the floor and take my first few steps. I’m trying to figure out what stretches or movements I can do before getting out of bed so that there’s less pain. Or else maybe just to give myself a few more moments of being awake and not suffering. I know. I know. All life is suffering. I cannot delay these moments.

    I change from my shorts into pants and then use the bathroom, clean my night guard, scrape my tongue, and brush my teeth. I check my phone to see how many hours I slept the night before. I realize now, typing this that this is a silly habit, born of a distrust of myself and my own body. I know, for example, that I did not sleep well for one long stretch last night. Yes, my watch confirmed it, but so did my body and my memory. Does the idea of my watch monitoring me in my sleep in fact disrupt my sleep? Would my sleeplessness bother me less if my phone hadn’t confirmed it? Is the technology helping or hindering me in my quest for rest? Do I need more data to answer these questions? Or do I need to trust myself more?

    I retrieve my glass of water from my nightstand and my yoga mat from the closet. I roll out the mat on whichever floor space near windows is available and set the timer for ten minutes for some meditation, light stretching, and sun salutations. I am unnecessarily attached to the idea of doing this part of my routine near the windows where I can peer out at the trees and, on some mornings, see the moon. It seems so picturesque, like something from IG accounts that I have scrolled. But the truth is that all of that is a distraction from my attempts to use this time to listen to my body and to give it what it needs. As for the moon? I do not think she cares one way or the other whether I am near a window to greet her, to admire her beauty. She is there, somewhere. And that is enough.

    I roll up my mat and set my tea to steep before I: take my medicine (trying to remember to be grateful that my morning dose is one tiny pill these days), let the dog out (and check to make sure the older children are awake and getting reading for school at the same time), and return my mat to its place in the closet. I finish making the tea (you can see my more in-depth take on this central morning ritual at this blog post: The Doctrine of Chai) and settle into my morning spot on the couch. I’ll alternate between writing and chatting with the kids and my husband and seeing them all off for the day. I’ll feed the dog at some point in there, but otherwise I’ll use that time to sip my tea and water and, most importantly, to write.

  • Damn, WordPress, you really got me deep into self reflection today, don’t you?

    Daily writing prompt
    When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
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    When I was five, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.

    My parents owned a restaurant in those days and I didn’t go to preschool. I spent a lot of time in the offices on the second floor of their business where my mom would be handling paperwork as the manager. Even once I was in Kindergarten, I usually spent parts of my summer days there.

    There wasn’t much for a kid to do at the restaurant but there was a stack of thick beige paper that my parents used to print menus and flyers on. And somehow, there usually were markers or crayons around. I went through an abstract phase: drawing long looping lines and then coloring in the shapes that emerged as the lines crossed each other. This phase could have been an entire summer or it might have lasted a few hours. Time and memory. You know how these things mix up, and especially in the mind of an abstract artist five year old.

    I do remember announcing that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. In spite of the fact that I spent so much time in my family’s place of business, I still had a five year old’s understanding of things like jobs and careers. What did I know of galleries and studios and monetization and starving? All of that was even more abstract than my looping lines.

    At times, I told my dad that I wanted to be a doctor. I planned on attending Harvard Medical School. Or so I said. I was mostly saying this type of thing to please the adults. And while “doctor” might have been closer to making grown-ups happy, “artist” was closer to making me happy. This is why what I really think I was getting at when I claimed that I wanted to be an artist is that I wanted to spend my life expressing myself and perhaps that I hoped that as an adult, there would always be space for that.

    Well, I’m not a doctor, so the need to please adults didn’t win out. But has my life otherwise turned out the way that five year old Rhena hoped? Although there have been long stretches where I haven’t, I now paint and draw semi-regularly. And as a five year old, I couldn’t write well enough to picture it as part of my future. But I’m writing now. And while it’s taken me a long time, I’m creating ever more space for self expression.

    In the meantime, my six year old son regularly announces that he IS an artist. There is no future dreaming about it. He is what he is in this moment. And I think I created space in his life for him to express himself now. So, yeah, five year old Rhena is very proud.

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    If you’d like to support this artist in living out her five-year-old dreams for herself, please visit my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! (Also, shares, likes, and poking around the other posts helps too!)

  • You lack discipline!

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s something most people don’t understand?
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    Discipline is something that most people don’t understand. And when I write “most people”, I mean me.

    The word discipline recalls a punishing authoritarianism, an asceticism that leaves little no room for joy. When I got the phrase Kung Fu Life in archaic Chinese tattooed on my arm, I wasn’t really thinking about the discipline aspect of Kung Fu. You see, discipline isn’t the most romantic of notions. At least to my mind. And then there’s the movie/ TV show trope of the Asian elder with a lot of thoughts about discipline (or lack thereof) and who is sometimes the butt of the joke, is always flat and one-dimensional, and who never gets to be heroic.

    But here I am, with this phrase that alludes to discipline in pretty permanent ink in my skin.

    Aside from the Asian elders tropes, my (mis)understanding of discipline where most of my understanding of life was first established: in the halls of elite (and elitist) institutions of higher learning very close to the very center of empire. In other words, I grew up in DC and went to mostly private schools including one Ivy League for graduate school.

    Let me tell you: power does not like discipline. It’s a paradox. You’d think that at the schools where the powerful sent their children, they’d want discipline to be taught. But it isn’t. This is because, in part, much of the power that the elites enjoy was bestowed upon them. It was inherited by their station in life. I know that this is an unpopular idea to have in the United States where a belief in meritocracy runs deep. But you’ll just have to take my word as someone who spent many formative years observing how some of institutions at the center of empire work.

    The paradox continues. Creativity, success, and genius are considered innate in these circles. They are gifts bestowed upon a chosen few. But what discipline does is create a way in which this so-called gifts can actually be cultivated. This is an offense to power. And self discipline also requires saying “no” to certain things (we saw this in the other question of the day about setting goals). Elitism hates being told no. The closer to power one gets, the more one has to say “no” if one wants to maintain a sense of self, a sense of integrity, which is discipline’s bedfellow. Discipline is also self-control. And if it is the self that is in control, then elitism, power, empire has no chance at controlling the individual.

    Every day for the past month, before I go to bed, I’ve been writing three moments of joy or gratitude. I learned of this practice from Alex Elle. This is a discipline. I know because even in this, I sometimes phase internal resistance. It feels like one more task. But I’ve been disciplined. I’ve practiced every day and now it’s becoming automatic. It’s not just becoming automatic at the end of the day when I sit down to do the task, but during the day, I’m becoming more alert to moments of joy and gratitude so that I am starting to be able to find both in smaller and smaller things, in darker and darker times. I don’t require winning the lottery (although that would be nice) to feel joy. I can appreciate the buds emerging on the maple outside or someone’s smile or the way the sunlight hits the side of my house (that I have a house for the sunlight to hit!) or the way that Aretha Franklin sings “freeeeedom!” on “Think”.

    And so joy is the reward for that discipline.

    I’ve also been trying to be disciplined in making space and time for creativity. I paint or draw everyday — even if it’s just a little pen sketch on the side of a piece of writing. Lately, it’s been painting in drawings of insects in water color. I used to be very “precious” about this type of thing. I’d pull out all my materials and set it up just so and mix colors and all the rest. And this is also a certain type of discipline. But this production meant I wasn’t doing it as often, so I got some discipline. I promised myself I’d do it every day, even if it was just a single brush stroke. The painting I’ve done has been messy and loose. And it’s beautiful. It’s perfect in its imperfection: I’m painting outside the lines. I’m just letting the colors do their thing and the water too. And what has emerged looks so free and open and natural. It was discipline, a commitment to returning to this practice to painting that allowed me to learn and see the beauty there.

    I’ve also brought discipline to learning guitar. I do it every day for thirty minutes. It’s a struggle at times. I pretty sure that at some point in my childhood, I learned how to read music. But somehow I had to start that process all over again learning guitar. (I suspect that perhaps it has something to do with how things are taught in those institutions of higher learning that I mentioned earlier, but I digress.) But slowly, my brain is making these connections. This morning, I sent a few texts to my daughter asking her about notes and half steps and full steps. We exchanged a few texts back and forth. She knows a lot more about music than I do. And it occurred to me how music is like a whole other language and she told me how not every system of music uses the same twelve notes. This might seem pretty basic to a lot of people, but, to me, this was mind-blowing. And it changed the way I think about playing guitar. In a good way. And I was also struck by how the discipline that I bring to playing and practicing guitar, which I’ve largely experienced as fairly solitary, opened up this whole other aspect to my relationship to my daughter.

    And, of course, I try to bring discipline to my writing and, yes, even blogging. I had a doctor’s appointment today and usually that kind of wears me out for the day. And I extend myself a little grace at these times and don’t always force the writing. But I think because I’ve been disciplined about it on other days, I was actually excited to write a blog post in spite of my fatigue.

    Still, I’ll end this in order to practice discipline in one other area of my life that I’ve committed to: rest.

  • Pen, paper, and the word of Doechii

    Daily writing prompt
    How has technology changed your job?
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    I admit that one of my current struggles is taking my writing from pen and paper to the keyboard and screen. The problem is that I love my handwriting. And I love the physical sensation of putting ink on to the page of a notebook and watching the words unfurl. So much of writing is living inside my head with my own thoughts that the physical aspects of the process (the job) become magnified. As does my enjoyment of them. And my discomfort.

    When I do sit at the computer (as I am now) to write, it feels decidedly unnatural. I’m sitting upright in a chair (rather than curled up in a chair when I’m writing by hand). I never really know what to do with my wrists. And do I leave my bracelets and watch on or just kind of tuck them out of the way? Excuse me. I’m going to pause a moment here to change my pants to ones with an elastic waistband as I have suddenly become intensely aware of the stiffness of my jeans.

    Ok. Much better. But see what I mean?

    I have loads of handwritten poems and stories and essays and errant thoughts and musings, but until I can transfer them into my computer and send them out in the world, do they have meaning? I’d argue that, yes, they do have meaning. Very deep meanings. All that work, using seemingly outdated technology of pen and paper, has meant a great deal to me. And I’ve come to the recent realization that my job as a writer being meaningful to me and me alone is enough.

    I’m going to stop writing for a moment and think about that (in my awkward upright chair that I don’t really know how to sit in). All of those notebooks and scratchings? They reveal something. And it think it’s a life lived. Thoughts. Dare I say: a soul? It’s the cumulation of thoughts and moments and lessons and exchanges and interactions of a life and mind. But I could burn them all tomorrow, or today, and all of that would still exist. In fact, I’ve thrown out a good deal of my writing. Sometimes I’ve even burnt my writing ritualistically in moments of attempting to let go of something and perhaps to have a better understanding of the transient nature of life. Other times, I’ve just tossed out entire journals in a move or housecleaning. We can’t take it all with us.

    And servers can also go up in flames. Computers crash all the time. Even our technology cannot save us from impermanence.

    So the obvious question is why am I even writing on this computer, posting to this blog? Why use this technology that makes me physically uncomfortable when pen and paper bring me so much joy? And it’s an excellent question, one that I ask myself pretty much every day.

    The other day, I mentioned to someone that I’m a writer and she said offhandedly something along the lines of, “I guess with AI, there’s not really a need for writers anymore.” I wasn’t offended. This is the reality that writers, everybody with jobs that involve creating are up against right now. If we choose to be. The woman who was speaking is herself a visual artist and we all know that one of the first things that people did with AI when it became commonly available was to use it to render visual art and images.

    The easy answer would be that this blog, me posting to the internet regularly is a last stand against AI. But I’m not really a last-stand kind of person aside from the fact that I don’t think this is really a last-stand narrative that we’re in the middle of here. AI is just the most recent of many tools that have, in the wrong hands, been wielded against the better angels of humanity.

    When I write by hand, I am very much aware of what my body is doing and what my body is capable of. In other words, I feel very human in those moments. And when I say human, I mean all of it, the messy and the creative. I feel as though I am wading into the rivers of my source. Listen to Doechii’s track, “God”, on her album Oh The Places You’ll Go if you want more insight into what that’s like. She talks about her realization that her source is infinite and then the complementary thought that that means everyone’s source is infinite. Each person’s creativity is already limitless. Including mine. Including yours.

    And that is what pulls me out of the just “enough for me” existence. My job as a writer is to, yes, tend to my own humanity first and foremost but it’s also to tell the stories, to share the thoughts and connections, to announce, “I’m still alive and I’m a human” to whoever needs to hear it, and also and maybe even primarily to spread the word of Doechii.

  • My Secret Skill: A Prose Poem

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
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    A secret skill or ability I wish I had is to be able to just chill the eff out. No. That’s not it. I wish I could conjure joy on command. No. That’s not it either. I wish I could make a decision. Decisiveness. That’s it.

    No. I wish I could write spells. I wish I had been cataloguing spells with a feather quill in a massive leather-bound book with deckle edged paper in elegant script so that I could open the pages and recite one appropriate to any occasion. No that’s not it either.

    I wish I could fly. No. I’m afraid of heights. I’d like to be able to teleport. Fade into pixels and reappear somewhere else. Maybe even someone else. No. I love myself too much for that.

    I wish I could cure disease. Yes. That’s the one.

    Or that flowers bloomed in my footprints: forsythia and bluebells and hyacinths and all the ones, like plumeria, that I cannot name but remind me earth is my home.

    Spout fire from my mouth and hands. Eyes too. Laser beams.

    I wish for super strength so that I could bend the arc of history more quickly towards justice.

    I would like the ability to style my outfit everyday for both comfort and looks. So that I could walk down the street to a chorus of, “Who’s that?” and “damn!”

    I would like to be able to keep a neat and tidy email account, brew the perfect cup of coffee but just for the smell, extend an invitation.

    I wish I could crochet a blanket or two. Wrap you, perfect stranger, up in its softness on days like these cold and rainy ones.

    I would like my secret ability to be trust. Or maybe trustworthiness.

    I’d like to win the attention of elves so that I can lay my tools and materials out before going to bed and in the morning, a perfect pair of shoes appear in their place.

    I would like to be able to quiet the voices, to slay the dragons, to hold and keep faith, to have the right words.

    I would like to be present to each moment. And mostly to this one. Yes. That’s it. That’s the one.

    Please consider supporting my writing, here.

  • More of this: a practice.

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you wish you could do more every day?
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    The sun, the wind, the tree outside my window are working in concert to create a moving shadow on my computer monitor base and desktop. It’s a performance, directed by Mother Nature. On the other side of the window, blades of grass shimmy and shake to the beat of the breeze. It beckons a memory from before language: light and dark, movement, rhythm. I wish I could show you more of this every day so that together, we might feel the same raw, timeless innocence.

    A few months ago, I started to take guitar lessons. I’m going to not equivocate or judge my abilities. This isn’t about that. I try to practice every day and I enjoy it, immensely. Every so often, I am able to enter that coveted flow state with guitar where I am able to focus on that one singular task, moment, note, chord, song, skill for a moment or two. Maybe even a few minutes. I enjoy the routine of the daily practice: stretch, meditate, scales, work on the assigned piece, and maybe learning a few new notes or a cord. I enjoy that each day I can see a little bit of my progress and a deepening understanding.

    I recently figured out that the tempo I play a given piece is only as fast as my slowest transition. The same way a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Rather than try to speed up the transitions that I most struggle with, I slow everything else down. This has allowed me to actually enjoy both the “easier” parts as well as the trickier ones. I can luxuriate in each note and cord, letting the easy, open notes ring a little longer. Inside those notes is where I find grace. This is where I learn that slow, fast. One is not better than the other. They just are.

    But I do not wish I could play more guitar everyday. In fact, each day, I set a timer and put down the guitar when it goes off. I do not obsessively try to “fix” whatever I’m working on. My goal is not to extend my practice to the length of the timer. My goal is to limit the time. And in doing so, I trust that there is always tomorrow’s practice. I trust my own faithfulness to the practice. I do wish that I could bring more of that trust throughout other parts of my day. Every day.

    I’m also finding time for exercise and movement each day. I do stretching and a few sun salutations when I wake up. (The moon was particularly beautiful from my kitchen window next to where I roll out my yoga mat this morning.) My dog and I enjoy a walk or two through the day. And this past month, I’ve started to integrate some Barre Empowered routines into my week. When I think about exercise, it’s something I kind of dread even though moving my body is something that I quite enjoy. And so I look for the moments of grace when I exercise too. Can I take it a little easier on myself today if I’m low on energy? Yes. Sure! I’m grateful for Maya, the founder of Barre Empowered, whose messaging is more supportive and, well, empowering than most exercise videos I’ve tried in the past.

    I don’t wish I could do more exercise everyday, but I do wish I could extend more gratitude to my body.

    I write, too, everyday. And I read, because otherwise my writing would just be a monologue rather than a conversation. Last year I read The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing (edited by Marita Golden). In his chapter, Nathan McCall said, “Yeah, I had a notebook. You could buy little things from the canteen, and I bought a notebook and started writing down what I was feeling. Prison ain’t exactly the best place to be telling somebody your deepest feelings, talking about your pain. So I was writing stuff down. And I realized that it made me feel better, whatever I said, whether it was a paragraph, whether it was a page. Sometimes I would just write and it would be disjointed and everything, but it would make me feel better, So the more it made me feel better, the more I did it. Then the more I did it, the better I became at it. Then I began to see it become a challenge to get my feelings down with the depth and preciseness that I felt.”

    My wish is that everyday I believe in the value of my words, my feelings, my stories and my writing that emerges.

    Please support my writing here.

  • I’ll take this as a sign to book my next tattoo.

    Daily writing prompt
    What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?
    View all responses

    I just got my second tattoo Tuesday this week. It’s on my right forearm, where I can see it when I’m writing. That one is the words, “it’s something to do” in my handwriting. I heard the poet Nikki Giovanni say this at the beginning of a talk. The full quote was something along the lines of, “I’m getting old. I don’t mind. It’s something to do.” I was nervous often this past year in the lead up to different procedures, surgeries, biopsies, treatments, etc… and her words often came to mind. They calmed me. She calmed me.

    The artist Bibi Abelle drew this one. She’s local and does single needle tattooing. Her work is beautiful. I’d read in an article that she also had cancer. It’s comforting to be in the presence of someone who you don’t have to explain things to, especially when that person is doing something as intimate as drawing on your body.

    The tattoo didn’t involve a whole lot of planning. I wrote the words on a piece of paper with the pen she had out for me to sign the consent form. I didn’t even pull out my favorite (if you know you know) pens that I had in my purse. I was a little nervous. No. I think actually it was excitement. I’m finally in a place where I’m able to differentiate between the two. And maybe my hand shook a little as I wrote. But part of my promise to myself was just to write it, tattoo it. One and done. Extend myself grace. Whatever came out of my hand on to that piece of paper was going to be tattooed on me. Bibi did give me some options of different sizes and we discussed it. She said, “bigger is always better when it comes to tattoos.” So I went with a slightly bigger size. It seemed apt also as my eyesight is getting worse and it would be easier for me to see it and read it. Part of this whole experience was to accept my imperfections and to let go of trying to make everything perfect. That was achieved.

    As my daughter pointed out when I showed her my new tattoo, “It’s also the answer to the question, ‘why did you get a tattoo?”

    My first tattoo was only about ten or so days before my second and also inspired by Nikki Giovanni, who had the words Thug Life tattooed on her left forearm. I’ve read that she was inspired by Tu-Pac’s tattoo across his abdomen. Mine is the words, “Kung Fu Life” in archaic Chinese. Here are the themes that I pulled from Nikki Giovanni’s tattoo: reclaiming words that contain entire codes, lives, meanings, philosophies, and ways of being but have been weaponized against us and people who look like us.

    It was designed by Candy Wang who’s based in the other Washington (I’m near DC) so I was looking for someone local to do the tattooing. I found Ariyana Suvar who is about thirty minutes from me in Clarksburg, MD. The truth is that in the back of my head, I was also looking for someone who could do a large chest tattoo where my breast used to be. I’m not getting reconstruction. A tattoo just seems a lot more fun? Beautiful? Unique? Meaningful? Collaborative? All of the above. Ariyana and I first video chatted. One of the first things she asked is, “Are you Thai?” I think my jaw dropped because she quickly said, “I saw your last name on your email.” She then explained that she uses Suvar for convenience but that her actual last name is also a longer Thai one. Relatable. Not only are we both negotiating using our long Thai last names in spaces that aren’t generally very open to that sort of thing, but it turns out that one set of her grandparents are also from China and immigrated to Thailand just like mine. In spite of how countries might try to contain and control their borders, migration isn’t that unusual in most parts of the world. But if you can see that something bigger was at work here to place me in her tattoo studio to get my archaic Chinese characters on my arm, then you get it.

    Do you know what it’s like to spend most of your life having to “explain” (ie justify) your family’s history in almost every space you enter? Do you know what it’s like to, on the other extreme, have that same history be ignored in almost every other space you enter?

    At that same appointment, Ariyana started designing my chest piece. Turns out, I’m going to have to put it off until after summer is over because (cancer) reasons. I do not have the words to explain what it means to have someone, an artist, look at your changed and scarred body and see potential.

    This morning, I was thinking about writing a blog post today. It was really bothering me, this question of: what am I going to write today? I’m trying (see “it’s something to do” tattoo experience above) to be in the moment with all things, but perhaps most especially with my writing. I’m trying to shut out all the voices that demand perfection and meaning and beauty and profundity in every word and sentence and paragraph, the voices that tell me that the only way to write is to brainstorm and outline and draft and revise and edit and on and on and on and anything less is not worthy of being seen by anyone else.

    I am working on trust. I am working on trusting that if I show up to my notebook or computer, something will come. The thing that’s needed will be come. It’s in the returning. It’s in the faithfulness. It’s in trusting that I have practiced this, this putting on words on the page over and over.

    And so it was, that I came to my computer. And there was the question of the day. The thing that had already been on my mind.

    And that, friends, is why I’m off to book my next tattoo with Bibi, one in which I’ll show up at her studio at the appointed time and we’ll just see what comes up, what we decide needs to be put on my body in that moment and that time. And that, friends, is Kung Fu Life.

    If you’d like to contribute to these and future tattoos, please click here.

  • Is a port just a port?

    I could feel something happening on my lower abdomen, close to my pelvis. I saw the blue paper a few inches from my face and lights and blurry shapes through the clearish plastic to my right. Nothing else. I heard the voices of the nurses and techs talking to each other and some music. I’m fine I told myself. This is just paper and plastic. I turned my head upward slightly to look at the opening to the paper and plastic just above where I was lying on the operating table. What if I push this whole thing off of me? I thought. Would I be able to? Can I even move my body? There is enough air, I reminded myself. Soon, I’ll have a sedative in my IV and this will all be fine, I thought. But what if I don’t make it that long? What if they’ve forgotten about me? Calming words started to escape from my brain, fleeing alongside logic. I heard a slightly louder voice from the other side of the room.

    “Are you just getting nervous over there?” Joy, the nurse, asked. Is she talking to me? How did she know? Words were still floating somewhere outside of my head and body, flitting about out there with its buddy logic, having abandoned feeling to be on her own inside my body.

    “Are you feeling nervous there?” Joy asked again. Oh! Maybe she is watching a screen. Maybe the screen tells her my heart rate and my respiration too. Maybe Joy is an empath. Maybe both and all of this is true.

    “I’m just feeling a little claustrophobic,” I croak from the operating table, trying to gauge how loud I needed to be in order to be heard through the paper and plastic sterile shield. Hands were quickly enlarging the opening, rolling the paper from above my head to eye level. My hot breath escaped and cooler air touched my face.

    “Something is on my body. I don’t know what it is,” I tried to explain the feeling of lying on a table and not knowing what’s being done to your body. But words were still on the lamb.

    A voice: “We use your body like it’s a table.” I shouldn’t be comforted by this, but somehow I was. It was the straightforwardness of it. This is your body. We are using it. For this purpose. And somehow it was comforting even though no one could see my face nor any of my skin even really (wrapped, as it is, in warmed blankets) save for the six or so square inches of my left chest, below my collar bone where the port has been situated ever since it was installed in a similar operating room at a different hospital eight or so months ago.

    One of the nurses leaned down so that he was eye level to me. “If you need something like that, you can tell us,” and he offered to take my glasses. I was grateful that he phrased his help and care in this way. He didn’t question why I didn’t say something, just offered.

    I thought that maybe I could hear the doctor who I met in the prep area an hour or so before enter the room. I could feel the IV in my left arm being fussed and fiddled with. It wasn’t painful and I knew that Joy was likely getting ready to push the sedative into my body and I could begin to anticipate the not caring. And then, perhaps, the greatest comfort, more so than having the drape pulled back so I could breathe, is when Joy said in her very serious voice, “nobody touches this patient until she is sedated.”

    Joy gets it.

    Another beat passed and I felt the cool liquid enter my vein. Soon, a bitter taste filled the back of my throat.

    “I can taste it,” I announced. Apparently, my words found and opening and returned back into my brain. So did logic.

    “That’s the sign of a good IV,” Joy assured me. “This next one is going to burn a little.” But already I didn’t care. Or maybe I almost wanted the burn, knowing that what would follow would be complete not caring. I barely even noticed when the doctor injected the numbing agent. Still, Joy assured me, “this is the worst part.”

    I thought I heard someone at some point say something like, “I’m sure the chemotherapy is the worst part.” And then clarified, “that’s some nasty stuff they give them.” Or something like that. But maybe I dreamt that part. In a way, I feel proud that I endured something that even a medical professional (and one who is currently cutting into my skin no less) acknowledges as awful.

    I could feel slight tugging at moments. And then someone held the port where I could see it. It was a purple triangular hunk of titanium bobbing a bit at the end of the thin, white plastic tube and covered in droplets of blood. My blood.

    “See?” Joy said. “It’s out.”

    “Can I take it to show my kids?” I asked her, still sedated.

    “No, my dear,” she responded. “This is biohazard.”

    “Yeah. I’ll just draw it for them,” I answer.

    “Just draw a line with a triangle at the end.”

    I thought I could hear bits of conversation. The surgeon and the nurse discussed the scar from when the port was installed. “If she scars, she scars,” the doctor said. I could feel the stitches going in. The right side of my chest, where my breast was removed a few months back, is entirely numb. No nerves there anymore. And I’m finally used to the odd way it feels to touch the skin and have no sensation.

    And like that, the surgeon was done and gone. Ten minutes they told me. Someone finished bandaging me up and then they took the “after” x-ray showing nothing to pair with the “before” x ray of the triangular port in place.

    When the port was first placed, it was uncomfortable and at times even painful. Still, it was better than the alternative of the chemo medicines burning the veins in my arms as they entered my body through an IV. And the discomfort didn’t last forever. At times, I even forgot I had a port, although I never really wanted to touch it, so disconcerting was the feeling of that bump of metal under my skin. I say that at times I would forget it was there, but those moments were brief. I wondered how much my body and mind had adapted to having this in me without me even realizing. After my chemotherapy treatments were complete, I still had to have the port flushed at least every six weeks. Tracking this, scheduling the flushes, getting to the office, all of that took a large amount of mental space. I wondered too, if my body was expending energy to accommodate my port in ways that I wasn’t aware. Would I feel different after having it out?

    It’s been two days now and I don’t know how different I feel. Is my energy flowing more smoothly on that side of my body? Maybe. I’ll give it some time. I’m still healing.

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  • Are you only one?

    For about a year in my twenties, I lived and taught in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 in Mae Hong Son, Thailand near the Burmese border. I lived in a house built by hand of wood and bamboo with a thatched-leaf roof. I loved by house. In the camp, I was often asked, “are you only one?” At first, I did not understand the question. But eventually I realized that “only one” meant “alone” and I discerned that the asked was also usually asking after both my physical state and my emotional one. Are you alone, yes, but also: “do you feel lonely?” During the beginning of my stay there, I did, indeed, live by myself in my two bedroom house. As a result, I was often physically without another person in the same shared space.

    But I very rarely felt lonely.

    This was, in part, due to the nature of the space there. The next closest houses were a good distance away from me, but because the houses were all made of bamboo and wood, I could usually hear my neighbors. We were also on the edge of a jungle, in a fairly remote area and so there was little white noise. No street traffic. No air conditioners. For a few hours on some evenings, there was a generator that would run the lights so that students could study, but even that wasn’t all the time. In the cities of North America where I’d lived prior to that, the ambient noise covered over sounds of life. In the camp, the primary sounds were of life: people talking and chopping wood, roosters crowing and pigs grunting. I could hear the bamboo floors bending as my neighbors walked on them or even shifted in their sleep.

    I think that maybe a reason my students and co-workers often asked if I was “only one” and my that meant “lonely” is that I must have radiated some sort of American-ness that was unfamiliar to them. In this community — as with many around the world I assume — togetherness was central to existence. How strange and off-putting my American pseudo-independence must have been! I cannot remember specifically, but I must have inadvertently pushed away bids at connection directed at me.

    I remember hearing at some point that if you come across an injured or sick baby animal in the wild, you aren’t supposed to touch it. The theory goes that your human scent will mark the animal and frighten away the mother who will then leave the baby to die rather than care for it. I feel as though, having been raised here, I was marked by some sort of American-ness that, in a strange reversal, covered over my human-ness. Fortunately, my students and the rest of the community didn’t leave me to die. I think that they were pretty quickly able to smell through whatever it was that I carried on myself. Or perhaps the well water washed it away. Either way, eventually some students moved into my house. The “only one” questions became less frequent as I was so rarely without companions.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness and being “only one” lately. I’ve read that America is facing an epidemic of loneliness and that it’s suspected that this is maybe in part due to people more often engaging with their phones rather than connecting with humans in-person. I don’t know about all of that. For me personally, being tethered to my phone makes me feel more lonely. When I am able to step away from my phone, I feel less lonely even when I am physically alone. I suspect that having lived in a community like the one in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 inoculated me against feeling lonely even now all these many years later and in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. Such that even when I’m only one, I’m never really only one.