in coming through a period of illness and emerging into a moment of still motion, my life feels much like the scene contained inside of a snow globe, engaged in a giddy upending of order. i am feeling myself as a stable piece of scenery looking out onto a scene that has ruffled a complacency, an uneasy comfort with matter thrown into a liquid sky like so many bits of plastic snow, and here i am entering into the fourth month past chemotherapy, to what is alluded to as a period of recovery. this an inevitable accounting of a process, a reflection of a reflection, a coming to know and understand and put into its place an experience of facing not death per se, but life.
in my contemplation of my illness--unbidden and loud--i come to understand more of the process of death-in-life which has presented me with a new option for living but living in a way that is at once familiar and foreign. what was laid out on medical beds, under hands, with ribcage penetrated by metal, my interior external, my body laid bare for inspection and alteration, was a body gone awry. i needed to be righted and yet, the process of righting my body brings me to pain, to harm, to kill something that inside of me and that is created by me, but not a part of me.
i wonder if it is possible to go through chemotherapy without it killing something inside of you that is not cancer? for me, it was the barrier that stood between me and the world. it is this which i have been in the process of recreating during this period of recovery.
to be constantly in medical care is to become at some points, a landscape that is being navigated and interpreted, witnessed and assessed, dissected and managed. how does a personality exist within and underneath this examination and remain intact? i argue that one cannot remain separate in this process and this has been the most traumatic aspect of my illness to date, the forced confrontation with my physical connection to the world as a site of contact that i was not permitted to negotiate, one that was inflicted upon me.
the particular form of cancer that i contracted has been correlated with other immuno-conditions to which were subsequently correlated with instances of childhood neglect, health consequences to trauma and so, my connection with the world has been central to all of my illnesses, the wound that was created at this site, central to physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dysfunction. i have been attempting to heal this wound for decades. adding cancer to my already long list of complaints seems unfair, but it has a logic to it, my world connection becoming itself malignant, a source of illness unto itself.
i am in an active process of rebuilding a healthy separateness from the world after having been rendered dependent against my will. in this process, i became subject to a number of foreign feeling interactions. forced into vulnerability, literally relying on strangers for life. the most profound was in experiencing care, really for the first time in my life. certainly, it was the first time i failed to have the energy to protect myself from it.
having cancer was the most intensely human experience i could have imagined and i now understand more deeply the metaphor of the veil; the fuzzy ideological coating that allows us to comfortably navigate the world has been peeled away. i feel a slow-motion panic attack just trying to take it all in. has life really been like this the whole time?
the most staggering implication of this experience is the realization that i have always been worthy of care, innately, as is everyone else. everyone is innately deserving of care.
anything that gets in the way of your tether to life, must be sacrificed as a means of survival, things like authenticity because it is ultimately expendable, whereas the loss of ground means death. as a person who experienced neglect and abuse, it necessitated a fracture, of accepting myself as at fault, for being flawed. i literally sacrificed my self-image to survive.
coming to the realization of how broken my family actually was, has been like the shockwave of a massive bomb. it continues to shock me, to realize how profoundly harmed i have been and how little i deserved it.
i lost that rosy glow somewhere when i wondered if i was going to suffocate in the middle of throwing up, feeling my body distort itself as though trying to implode. i started to figure out that i was worth something and i felt the first tentative movements towards real connection.
the mask of my dissociation and the barrier of being who i thought i had to be as opposed to who i really am, made it difficult to feel like any of my relationships were actually real. i couldn't be myself because it felt inconvenient and unwelcome to be me. it all amounts to building up a scab that covers the world, that removes you from feelings of authenticity and connection and also from the judgment and standards of others.
i'm looking around and we are beginning to open up compassionate death to those considered to have untreatable forms of mental illness before we have opened access to adequate housing, disability funding, or even access to food and clean water. to exist in poverty, consumed by mental and physical illness with no seeming end, how could you not feel scabbed over, deadened in some fundamental way? in this way, being brought back to life feels in itself a bit like a trauma, to have to realize the true extent of my suffering.
to feel care after being treated with carelessness, it burns you. i have to ask what it could have been like for my mother to be accepted, to be welcomed in, to be helped. it makes me feel guilty to be able to access this now when my mother never could and perhaps never will, this feeling of being a legitimate, when so many of the people that i have loved do not, invisible, inhuman, despised, ill beyond repair.
what then does it mean to live and what is it that has died? in grasping at some semblance of humanity, i am able to participate in my job, to form relationships and to begin to rebuild myself in my own image, in the felt reality of what i truly am having now understood that i never deserved any of it. how could we let it get to this place? why has my suffering been so invisible? why did it take the death of my bodily systems to receive the care i needed?
when you feel desperate and broken, people don't want to be in proximity with you. you get pushed into this place of being effectively invisible, your suffering doesn't seem to warrant care, the social systems you get entangled with like welfare and disability funding only serve to slowly erode your dignity while keeping you at the threshold of subsistence. it is under this lens that i have returned to the world, with blindfold off.
if i was worth it all along, how could everyone have left me to suffer like that, to starve, and have my body slowly turn against itself, only stepping in at the moment before death to turn it around and hand me back to myself? why did it need to get so bad before i got help and why do all the people i have left behind have to continue to suffer, truly believing that they deserve no comfort, care, touch, or tenderness?
the world, i have discovered, is both tender and vile. to fall on the side of forgiveness, you are given a life, but you have to leave behind the people who remain broken, hoping that someone will be able to help them like they helped you. i have to put one foot in front of the other and walk away from the world i came from, knowing that the awful things that people i loved did to me, were never deserved but have been allowed to proliferate and continue in a place of blindness and darkness that can breed unabated because there is no sense of collective care, where there is no gentle net to catch us.
i have survived due to tenacity, i suppose, but i have had my life shortened due to the experiences i went through. i have survived this illness but i can feel the toll it has taken on my body.
even before i got sick, the trauma kept me in bed, keeping me separate. it is only now that i have been forced to choose connection or death, that i have begun to unpack the wound that kept me separate from the world. but i am left wondering at the need to move forward in the company of those who didn't grow up with me. i am part of a new community, leaving behind the ones who harmed me. i think to myself still about the cruelty of having to move forward without them.
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