Rhena Writes

Tag: writing

  • What needs to be written?

    This is a place of personal acceptance. What happened that this place became necessary?

    Many years ago I attended an MFA program in creative nonfiction writing. I won’t go into too many details about the program. I entered in bright-eyed, engaged, and optimistic. I was going to become a WRITER and this program was going to get me there. Suffice it to say, that’s not what happened. It was only years later that I realized just how cut-throat and toxic that whole setting was.

    Here, let me share with you one experience. I wrote and submitted a piece to a workshop. It was a long piece, maybe fifty pages. I was nearing the end of my access to getting feedback on my work and I wanted to get as many eyes on my writing as I could before I would be on my own writing my thesis. The comment that I received from the professor was that it was a disaster, so disorganized that she couldn’t even read it. At the time it didn’t cross my mind that if that was the case, how did she know it was a disaster. My only solace was that there was one other student in the class who received more or less the same feedback. In fact, the professor gave us the feedback simultaneously. We were both women of Asian descent.

    After workshops, we scheduled meetings with our professors to go over the work one-on-one in more detail (or something like that). To pour salt in the wound, this professor wanted to schedule our meetings at her apartment. I think that this was supposed to be some big deal: like the professor was so gracious as to welcome students into her home. But this professor lived across town. And most students lived near the university. After I scheduled the meeting with her at the end of the workshop, she turned to schedule with the other student who had received the same “this was unreadable” comment. The other student said something along the lines of, “if you weren’t able to read it, then there’s nothing to talk about and no need for a meeting.”

    Damn. I wish I had thought enough of myself to do the same. But I didn’t. I think part of me still thought I would show up to the meeting and, I don’t know, she would have changed her mind? Or she would have read it in the meantime and had more, you know, helpful things to say? Needless to say, she didn’t. When I was younger, I was always giving the wrong people second chances.

    I must have trekked across town because I remember sitting in her apartment with a cup of tea which she had offered and I had accepted because I thought that was the right thing to do. She couldn’t find a saucer or small plate and I told her it was fine. And I remember she said, “isn’t the tea bag going to bump against your lips?” And it was such a weird concern to me. Like, if you’re so worried about that, then just find a fucking plate or bowl for me and let me make the decision. And also, “you’re so worried about my lip coming in contact with a fucking tea bag when what you should be thinking about is the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition that I’m paying for you to read my fucking pages and have something helpful to say.”

    But, honestly, I didn’t have those thoughts until much later.

    “Pretty hard to hear feedback like that?” she said to me.

    “Oh no. It’s fine.” I might have low enough self worth that I was willing to cross the entirety of this island city on the off-chance that this person who had already proven herself to be unable to do her job was going to redeem herself, but I wasn’t going to break down in her apartment. Somehow, part of me thought that maybe that’s what she was trying to do? I implicitly (and wrongly) trusted professors and teachers and assumed that there must be some sort of greater plan or lesson behind this whole interaction. There wasn’t.

    This whole incident was one of the most obviously toxic moments of my MFA program, but there were other ones. The cumulative effect of these small jabs is that I really struggled with my writing and, as a result, my self worth. I hate that these individuals had so much say in how I valued myself.

    I’d like to end this post with some sort of redemption arc for myself. But, also, it’s necessary to sit with these moments of pain and toxicity, allow them to move through before jumping into “light and love.” Not everything is linear, which would be boring anyway. Besides, maybe where I want to end this post is actually where I started it.

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  • On AI, John Henry, Likes, and Views

    I have a few pages of handwritten notes for this post and yet I struggle to make the transition from drafting in pen to typing on the computer. When my older daughter was attending school virtually, she made friends with people over google docs. It is her generation’s version of passing notes. She commented once, as she sat in our basement on her computer watching her classmate type a letter to her, live, “You can learn a lot about a person from how they type.” I remembered being in school myself and how familiar I was with my classmate’s handwriting and how much it could, in fact, reveal so much about a person. It’s a different era now. And perhaps this is in part why I struggle to convert from hand to computer. 

    I also remember a song that we learned in school. “John Henry was a steal driving man, oh lord, …” I don’t remember much else from the song except that the final line was something like, “… he laid down his hammer and he died, oh Lord, yes, he laid down his hammer and he died.” I could probably look up the rest of the lyrics and listen to the song and I’d be able to give you a fuller picture of John Henry and the song and my experience with it, but somehow, that feels like it would be a lie. I’m trying to give you the truth of what I can currently recall, which isn’t much, but it’s real.

    I remember learning the song in elementary school. Maybe in the gym/lunch room. Maybe in the wood floored music room/ stage, the one with the cool storage loft with the spiral staircase we weren’t allowed to go up except for special times when we were helping retrieve props, instruments, costumes, or other flotsam and jetsam. Probably both the gym and the music room. Anyway. We were a small, mostly white school in a very white section of a very Black city. Were we taught that John Henry was a hero? I guess we were singing the song that heralded him as such. But I also remember feeling very sad that he’d died at the end. It seemed as though he had worked himself to death. And even though he was also very strong and courageous and determined, did he really defeat the machine if he ended up dead anyway? It was a lot for a kid to make sense of. Even as an adult, it’s still a lot to think about.

    Apparently, the difference between the steam digging machine and John Henry was that the drill kept getting jammed up with all of the rock and stone. In other words, the machine needed to be cleared by hand. It wasn’t just that John Henry was strong, it was that he was able to think and problem solve as he went along. He used his brain, his strength, and what he had learned digging other tunnels. 

    I read once that it’s possible that John Henry was a real person. An historian found a person with the same name on a list of incarcerated men at a prison nearby where it’s believed that John Henry took on the machine. The song that I’m familiar with suggested that he worked so hard to beat the steam drill that his heart gave out. What more likely happened is that he died some time later from the cumulative effects and exposures related to digging tunnels through mountains and hillsides. Tow-may-tow. Tow-mah-tow. I guess.  

    I am not comparing myself to John Henry, but sometimes I feel like his ghost haunts my struggles as I try to move my thoughts from pen and paper to machine. I’m not trying to out-do my computer but I am aware of the existence of AI which has made me somehow even more desperate to assert my humanity from behind this screen. 

    I wrote last week about how I deleted my social media a few months ago and how it made me feel more grounded and more connected to people and in-person community. I never had comments turned on on this blog.  And last week, I turned off email notifications for likes. I stopped checking stats, likes, and views. Prior to this, I had been checking often. And I felt myself starting to bend what I would think about and therefore what I would write towards getting more likes and views. In other words, I was thinking, “how can I get more – or any – likes and views on what I’m writing” rather than just writing. I was like the steam drill, getting jammed up in the very stones and rocks I was trying to remove. 

    The first few times I checked my email after turning off the notifications, I had forgotten that I was not longer receiving them. In my forgetting, I felt a little sad for a moment. But in the next moment, I remembered and a whole world of possibility opened up. What if I’d gotten 10,000 likes? It didn’t matter whether that was the reality or not. I could imagine it and so it was true where it mattered: in my mind. 

    When I imagine John Henry, I do not see him looking over at the machine. I see him focused on his task at hand. Part of me thinks that for him, it wasn’t really even a competition. It was that the steam drill inventors stuck their contraption next to him. It was doing its thing over there and John Henry was doing his over here. The company men were the ones who wanted to have a competition. For John Henry, it was just another day on the job. I wonder if he even thought it was something he was good at. Did he know he was going to become an American folk hero? Was he imagining songs being written about him? Probably not. I think he was just here to do the work. I hope to do the same.  

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  • This is the post where I ask for tips…

    … beg for money but where I don’t come right out and just ask for it. Let’s start with a scene. Madison, Wisconsin. First warm day of spring. Class has just gotten out and so I cross library mall to State Street. The sound of a guitar reaches up and down the block around Gilman or maybe Gorham.  The scent of incense and patchouli and just a soupVon of weed is in the air, but this is not exceptional. This is just Madison. The outdoor seats are all full of people eager to enjoy the weather after a long Wisconsin winter cooped up inside. These are the moments that it felt like I could never take anything for granted.  

    Except for, I could and I was.

    When was the last time I lived someplace where I could encounter someone playing live music in public on just an average day? The city is too pricey and the suburbs where I do live don’t have that kind of culture. 

     A few months ago, my daughter and I were waiting for our order at our local filipino bakery when a man carrying a guitar and speaker approached us. I think he must have been performing out on the sidewalk before coming inside. But that area doesn’t really have a lot of foot traffic. He held out his cup to us and I put a few dollars in. “You want me to play you something?” We said sure and he warned us it was going to be loud, gesturing to the speaker he had just set down. Our halo-halo arrived before he could plug into his amp and we had to be on our way. That’s the last time I remember dropping a tip in a musicians jar. 

    Back in Madison, Catfish Stephenson, a musician who often played on State Street once told me that a big crowd is actually worse in terms of income. No one wants to step out of the crowd to throw money in. Or else everyone assumes someone else is going to do it. People just don’t know what the protocol was. Catfish always threw a few bills into his guitar case when he was first setting up and before he started to play. Get the ball rolling. Show them how it’s done. No one wants to be the first. 

    At the end of last year, I started taking guitar lessons. It’s fun. I enjoy it. I’m working on Let It Be. I’m not bad at it and I really enjoy it. It’s already paying off dividends. Just yesterday, I had a bit of a panic when I realized that a prescribed medicine I’d taken was counter-indicated for another prescribed medicine. I put a call into the answering service at the cancer center. “I’m going to go play guitar while I wait for the call,” I told my husband. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to focus enough to do my other calming activities like reading and it was raining too hard to go for a walk. 

    But it’s been two months that I’ve been working on Let It Be. Give me another month and I’ll be confident enough that I’ll be able to take it out to the sidewalk and open my guitar case for some dollar bills. But, well, it will be the only song I’ll be playing. I’m more likely to earn tips to make me stop. 

    The point being that I have an appreciation for the work, time, energy, and effort that goes into performing on the street. And I wish I had taken the time to appreciate it more when I was living in places where it was more commonplace, like Madison. 

    I hear that tipping culture has gotten out of hand these days. At least, that’s what people say. And to be honest, if my mother knew I was out here busking on these internet streets, she’d probably be pretty embarrassed. I don’t know. I don’t mind the opportunity to show my appreciation for the hard work that people are putting in. And I’ve never felt like I have to tip. It’s just a nice thing to do. 

  • Final Fire

    I spent a portion of last weekend high off of a few sunny, warm days. I directed this new energy towards organizing a little around the house and setting goals for exercising and writing on my computer in my office closet on Monday. A classic case of early spring energy. But when Monday rolled around, the forecast indicated that it wasn’t going to get out of the forties. Fifty and above is our top end cut off for fires in our wood stove. So, change of plans. Or should I? Could I enjoy a fire and also make good on all my ambitions? Could I just write on my ipad in front of the computer? Could I do a work-out in front of the stove? I could… but I didn’t want to. The glow of the screen is the very antithesis of the one emitted from a fire. I knew I couldn’t truly cultivate hygge with an iPad and exercise sweat. 

    I threw aside my plans for a “productive” day, ignored the obnoxious voice in my head saying that I was being lazy, built a tower of logs and kindling and ignited one of our homemade starters. I tucked myself into the couch for a day of alternately reading and staring into the flames. It was a lovely, luxurious, morning. 

    It was an unusually cold winter here in Maryland. One furnace went out during a cold snap so we’ve been using and relying on the wood stove a lot. We have two furnaces, so it wasn’t as dire it might seem at first glance. Using a wood stove for a heat source is this lovely balance of yin and yang energy. Cleaning the stove, chopping kindling, carrying the wood inside, and building the fire are all yang. The sitting back, admiring the fire, and resting in its warmth? That’s yin. 

    One of the cold stretches was right when I was recovering from my mastectomy. The snow fall meant the kids were home from school. Having them around helped me heal faster. (My surgeon said I didn’t look like someone who had just had surgery at my follow up.) And I’m confident that the snow alleviated some of the guilt I might have felt over taking time to rest and recover. 

    And so I’m grateful that mother nature sent us one last coldish day to enjoy a fire. But as the morning turned into afternoon, it grew warmer than I’d expected and I let the fire die out. My husband mentioned that it’s always nice to have a fire once it’s dark outside. (We’d lost electricity for about an hour on Saturday evening in the middle of dinner and we were all surprised at how much light the wood stove provided once we’d lit it in the complete darkness.) So I attempted to get it started again once the sun had set. The fire was finicky by which I mean that it smoked to the point that I had to open the sliding glass door. Eventually, though, we got to enjoy another nice flame. But it somehow seemed perfect that our last fire would be so imperfect, so troublesome in a way. It was as if mother nature was reminding me that there’s a time and season for everything, lest in my longing for beautiful fires in our woodstove, I miss her other gifts and blessings. 

    My six-year-old son was home sick a few days this week. He asked to go for a walk. We searched for signs of spring and found snow drops, crocuses, robins, and onion grass. The next day he observed that the snow drops looked different. They’d opened overnight. He held up his hand, letting three fingers droop to illustrate how they’d changed. As much as I love the fires, I also love to see what’s there when the smoke clears. 

    This is not paid advertisement, but if you are looking for a wood stove, this one is great and it’s one of the few that’s EPA approved to burn with lower particulate emissions.

    Also, not a paid ad, but if you are looking for fireplace and wood stove installers and maintenance in the DMV, I cannot say enough about Traditions Chimney Sweeps.

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  • Untethering from Social Media

    I deleted Facebook years ago and Twitter a few after that. A few weeks ago, I the last of my social media apps: the mostly image-based Instagram and their partner text-based Threads. Social media, the whole of the internet, is, I believe, mostly a gift to the world. But my brain, my whole person was formed before the internet, much less social media, existed. In other words, I’m not equipped for handling it. My mind simply doesn’t move fast enough to keep up and, in attempting to, I was doing damage. It was as if I was lining up on the track next to Florence Griffith Joyner each and every day and expecting myself to keep up. My hamstrings – nay my whole body would have taken a beating if I ever even dreams of going up against Flo Jo but, more importantly, my self-esteem would have been obliterated. And it was. 

    I wasn’t too keen on the idea of deleting social media. The other day, my six-year-old son was staring out of the car window into the massive sky above. “Mom,” he said, “I don’t like to think about the universe.” I told him I get that. He confirmed that it’s the vastness that makes him feel small. It’s dark and lonely out there in the universe. I was so used to having and being on social media that I thought that deleting it would untether me from the earth and send me out there into the universe, alone, cold, and in the dark. 

    When I first came across posts on social media by patients in cancer treatment, it made me feel less alone.  Somehow, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t really looking for it, I’d come across people posting about their experiences with cancer. There was even a woman preparing for her mastectomy at around the same time that I was. I wasn’t alone. 

    Perhaps you can see where this is going. As soon as I clicked on a couple of cancer posts, the algorithm latched on. Soon, a good portion of my feed was cancer. And I couldn’t help myself but read and click. I’d try to close the app and just the c-word alone would catch my eye. I felt an obligation to consume it all. 

    One of the prayers that I had when I was going through treatment was this: that my suffering makes someone else’s a little less. There are certain aspects of Catholicism that are engrained in me and that’s one of them: offer it up. Offer up your suffering so that it has meaning if not for you, then at least for someone else. For the most part, I was thinking about my daughters in those moments, praying that somehow me going through all of these trials would save them from a similar fate. In the early days of my treatment, the genocide in Palestine was dire and so my prayers were also for mothers there. In my moments of pain rooted in my own body attacking my breasts, all mothers and children and their bonds and their bodies and suffering all became mixed together. 

    And some of that responsibility and connection carried over to my fellow cancer patients on social media. Somehow, it was my duty to keep reading all of these threads. But reading, engaging them seemed to created more until everything was cancer content. It’s about as much fun as it sounds. 

    This was all in the midst of me, in-person, going with some regularity to a literal cancer center where I would sit in waiting rooms nearly full with other people who possibly also had cancer. And at one appointment, my doctor mentioned (without violating HIPPA) that he’d been recently seeing more of the type of cancer that I have. Later, as I moved into the recurrence prevention phase, he mentioned that he had a patient in a very similar situation to me. At the very least, it’s possible that the doctor was able to use some of what he learned treating me to better care for the other woman. 

    These are connections that I couldn’t get on social media. 

    And so it was that I had it all wrong. When I finally cut the tether, I didn’t float out into the vast, cold universe. Rather, I floated back down to very real, solid, warm earth. 

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  • Book Rec: On Thriving by Brandi Sellers Jackson

    Over the past year, I’ve been on a lot of difference medications, more than I think I’ve ever been on at one time in my life. I’ve spend part of three of the last four mornings trying to deal with my latest prescription: getting it filled, getting it paid for (yes, I have private insurance but apparently they don’t cover everything), and getting the instructions for taking it. Turns out, one of the drugs requires an EKG before starting and follow up ones after you’ve been on it for a while so now I’m trying to figure out how to get a copy of my last EKG to the prescribing doctor.

    But Oh Lord! the only thing more painful than trying to untwist the knots that comprise our health care system is writing about it. So I won’t. Instead, I’ll write about the prescriptions that I’ve received from bibliotherapist Emely Rumble (aka Literapy). How grateful I am that her lists of suggested readings don’t require an EKG or hours on the phone trying to get them filled!

    I got to enjoy a lunchtime talk by Emely Rumble in The Sanctuary (just another reminder of all of the amazing benefits of being a member of this virtual community for women of color) last year and her excitement about books and connecting people to just the right reading was infectious (see what I did there?). Emely has her own book titled Bibliotherapy in the Bronx coming out in the spring. I was inspired by her comments about how she had to push for the title of her book. I’ve read that some publishers don’t like to have place names in titles because… well, I think it’s just because publishers are going to have their elitist ideas about a lot of things and assume readers and buyers are the same way. As someone who loves to read about what it’s like to grow up and live in specific neighborhoods and as someone who can relate to a feeling of pride about the place you come from, I’m drawn to her title. I’ll for sure be getting a copy in April. In the meantime, she has loads of resources on her website for people interested in bibliotherapy, including book prescriptions.

    I found my current read On Thriving by Brandi Sellerz-Jackson on one of Emely’s lists. The subtitle is “Harnessing Joy Through Life’s Great Labors.” My first thought when I see the word “labor” is that I want to stay far away from it. I mean, labor is work and, honestly, I’m not looking for more work. Sellers-Jackson’s four great labors are relationship, mental health, grief, and being othered. I realized that these are labors that I’m already going through by the very nature of being human. And who couldn’t use a little guidance on “harnessing joy” through all of that? Certainly not me. And Sellers-Jackson proves to be a gifted guide. Her stories are not only beautifully told, but deeply personal in a way that cracked open my own vulnerabilities as I was reading.

    A couple of quotes that struck me:

    “[Self intimacy] is knowing and deciphering our voice as our own apart from others and those around us, finding it at its youthful genesis and unearthing it even when it is buried deep within the silt.” (P.17.)

    “[We] will find ways to be the most intelligent person in the room, not because we necessarily want to be, but because if we are, we can protect ourselves from those who possess the potential to cause harm.” (23.)

    Phew! These were just two sentences of many dozens that made me pause for a moment to realize, “she just unlocked some truths that I’ve known but never been able to acknowledge or express for myself.”Bibliotherapy indeed!

  • Another Moment

    What emerges from a moment of silence? from stillness? What words need to be written right now?

    These are the questions that I’m asking right now. I know that there is an inner voice, deep inside of me that has been silenced and covered over by chaos. I spent a good portion of the morning on the phone with the pharmacy, my insurance, a pharmaceutical company, trying to get my latest prescription filled without having to fork over $120 each month. I felt like the ball in the old pinball machines slamming between those pop bumpers. By the end of the morning, the “notes” section of my weekly planner was filled with numbers and vague notes, none of which had anything to do with healing. Three or so of those minutes were spent listening to various messages, menus, and selecting options before I realized that I’d mis-dialed (I’d replaced the 888 with 800 because I apparently never left the 80s behind). It wasn’t until after I responded “yes” to the voice asking “can you hear me?” that I realized that the whole thing had been a recording. I’d been primed to talk about medicine and the scammers on the other end were prepared with an offer of a free medical alert device. As I hung up, I inwardly cringed for their real targets: those perhaps slightly older than me who also misdialed.

    So, yes, this is all part of the chaos that I have to dig through to get to some sort of silence. The stillness.

    I’m trying to establish some new habits and routines. This morning was my first time doing some stretches on my kitchen floor. The sun wasn’t up yet and so the lights, dim as I’d kept them, were reflecting off the glass of the windows, so that the pendants hanging from the ceiling seemed to be overlapping with the tree branches outside. I think that this will make me grateful for the next time I look directly at that tree, unhindered by the reflections.

    And that’s a bit of what I mean about the chaos layering over the silence, the stillness. I’d like to be able to hear the trees. But there’s so much noise.

    I set a timer when I stretch. Ten minutes. There’s no preset sequence. I just try to listen to what my body wants and needs. Move where it needs to go. Ten minutes is incredibly long when my body is in charge.

    I decided at some point that this would be a blog entry where I would just sit down, set a timer, and write what’s on my mind. That’s what this is then. I’m trying to …

  • Knitting and Cancer

    “You can sit and knit while receiving your infusion.” The physician’s assistant who conducted my chemotherapy orientation (yes, just like for freshman newly arrived on campus but with fewer ice breakers) made the whole process seem almost pleasant. And I was, in fact, a knitter, the type of knitter abbreviates “works in progress” to WIPs and, at the time, had no less than three WIPs in various, extremely cute project bags and one yarn stash large enough to require a big bin. But it had been months, maybe even a whole year or so since I had knitted. I had let that particular hobby drift to the wayside. I didn’t really think that cancer treatment would be the time that I was going to pick it up again.

    I love knitting. There’s a certain satisfaction of language fluency in reading and successfully following a pattern. And there’s the return to a WIP again and again, the gradual progress.  I love, of course, to finish a piece and then to give it to someone knowing that I already squeezed maximum enjoyment in the making. Any further happiness on the part of the recipient is mere extravagance. There’s also a human connection: not just between me and the person I’m giving it to, but between me and the shepherds, the spinners, and the dyers too. Perhaps most of all there’s the connection to the pattern maker, who spent countless hours converting the image in their head into yarn and then paper words for me to read and then reverse the process. I don’t personally know any pattern makers. But I know pattern makers. Know what I mean?  What a remarkable thing: to be able to spend weeks inside someone else’s head without every having met them. In science fiction, there’s often some sort of machine (in Star Trek it’s a transporter) that dematerializes an object and then rematerializes them somewhere else. Sometimes knitting is like that. 

    A few weeks after my orientation, I was sitting in my oncologist’s office with my husband for a pre-treament check-in with my doctor and his trusty medical transcriber. My eyes were closed and I was rubbing my fingers across my forehead. All I could think was complete darkness. Just blank. It was probably only seconds but it felt like minutes of just… nothing. Somewhere at the back of my brain, I felt there was a word or maybe a question that I was trying to retrieve. I felt the doctor and my husband waiting. The medical transcribers fingers poised on his keyboard. Finally, the doctor’s voice cut through. 

    “Are you having trouble recalling words?” he asked. 

    “Ya’ think?!?!” I wanted to reply back, but while the snark was there, the language to convey it was gone. 

    “Yeah,” I said. “I think I had a question, but now I can’t think of it.”

    The doctor reassured me that this is normal and that words would come back. What could I do but believe him?

    As it had been explained to me, chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells. Ideally, this means that it wipes out cancerous cells. Realistically, hair follicles, the digestive tract, skin and immune cells can all be collateral damage. In my own way of thinking about it, while on chemotherapy, my brain also wasn’t able to form new neurons. This is how I explained the language loss to myself. Or maybe it was the stress of the whole situation. Or that my known information was being overwritten by new cancer patient vocabulary: HER negative, dexamethasone, neuropathy, taxane, and a dozen other that I realize now I never actually learned. Somewhere along the way, I decided to leave it to the doctors and nurses. My own language became much more rudimentary: sleep, pain, eat, poop. At times, I was an infant once again. I could feel people around me internally cheering when they could illicit a smile or laugh from me, just like they do with babies. 

    I never did bring any knitting projects with me to chemotherapy treatments. Knitting is a relaxing pastime but it is also an act of resistance. It is all the things that modern, western society and capitalism looks down upon: feminine, slow, collective, inherited knowledge, sustainable, creative and nourishing. In our culture, it takes time, energy, and focus to maintain those types of activities. So does cancer treatment. The second months of my chemo involved Benedryl, which would usually make me sleepy, and ice packs on my hands to help prevent nerve damage to my extremities. I couldn’t have knit even if I’d had the energy to open up my WIPs and figure out where I’d left off. Besides, in the midst of all of this, it was impossible to prioritize knitting. All those years of learning and doing and making, I shoved it all to the back corner of my brain. Would I ever return to it? It didn’t matter. 

    But no, there’s more to it than this. I just admitted that my language abilities are greatly diminished. And yet here I am, writing and asking you to trust me that this is all going somewhere in spite of my reduced capacities in the very medium in which we are currently communicating. Am I an unreliable narrator then? Are we all? Here. Let’s go back. I trusted the doctors to know the words necessary to eradicate the cancer. Now, I need to trust myself that I have the words to tell this story. It’s not an easy thing, trust. 

    Spoiler alert: I’m knitting again. This fall, I made a charming green hat for my charming nephew. (I’d drawn his name in our family gift giving.) It’s been a pleasant little surprise each time I’ve picked up my knitting these days. It’s so easy! I remember all of it, each of the little steps from balling the yarn to casting on, checking gauge to reading a pattern. And where I’ve forgotten, there’s someone on-line or a book with the necessary information. How did this happen that I can still do all of this? I was recently doing an Old Norwegian cast on and it felt so natural that I wondered whether my ancestors from there weren’t gently working through my bones. 

    The question that I had in the doctor’s office popped into my head one day. I’d wanted to ask if he thought I needed to start on the antibiotics he was prescribing right away or just have them on hand in case of infection. It turns out that he’d already explained that and my husband was there, paying attention where I could not; his brain forming neural connections while my own cells were otherwise occupied. 

    And here we are, at the end of this post, ready to bind off, having sustained each other’s attention against all the odds and distractions. And still here.