My journey through cancer has come past the part where moments of drama and intrigue, fear, and sickness draw out every moment and it has moved into a strange sort of normality. And yet, this normality is one where the central frame has shifted. I am no longer the same person that I was even a number of weeks ago.
It’s like getting hit by a wave. For moments, the sensations of the water, the momentum overwhelms you. You are dragged under the water, there is a struggle for life, for orientation to what was solid ground but ground that has changed into something fundamentally different. Once the crest has passed, where are we but in water? There is a new sense of motion, of buoyancy, of striving for something, perhaps solid ground, perhaps just movement forward.
I have begun to think about thinking, about the way I perceive my own life. It involves a turning of my eye, not inward per se but to the liminal edges of perception to look straight on at the images that fill the spaces where I cannot, could not, see. There is a blind spot in the vision of the eye, where the brain fills in images of what is expected to be seen. Sometimes, in this peripheral frame, we can see fantastical things, just flitting outside the edges of our vision.
Perception itself seems like this, with vast grey territories that become filled with the expected and it makes me think: what do I expect from this life? What do I think the people around me mean, what are the why’s of my relationships with others?
I think about strange things, like how I create more garbage when I am sick and I how I have to develop a relationship with trash in order to avoid being drowned by it, by papers, and bits of plastic, and pill bottles. They clutter my life and I think about the natural movement of letting go, of it being painless and wondering what it might feel like to be able to let something roll off of the end of my palm onto the ground without worrying what it was poisoning.
I wonder about the people in my life and their limits, their limits coming into contact with my limits, my inability to open up my emotions in a plain way and what kinds of bonds this creates. I feel the pressure to understand how I am supposed to react, to look into the limits of my own vision as though I would find a map there of the terrain of illness, that would take me along a path to a destination. It says, “on this day you should feel sad”, ”now, you should question your mortality, make amends, say what you never felt the need to say before.”
I’m not sure I have entirely made it past the disorientation of the wave, I don’t yet know what water is or how to swim in it. I find myself to be a body, tossed into a new physics and I don’t quite have the ability to even know that there is something new to know. That limit too, is just beyond the edges, in that place where my mind and its processes create a seam to bind the seen and unseen.
In that place, where we can’t see. I wonder how much I may control what becomes of the spaces of my own blindness. In the chinks between things I wonder if there isn’t a world beyond the banal expectations of what I think I should see, a perhaps undiscovered country, where I am different, where there are possibilities I had never before considered, where healing may lie.
I am coming to understand this illness in a very different way from the narratives I have encountered of it. Don’t get me wrong, I feel terrible in a lot of ways, nauseaus, depressed, anxious, but one thing I don’t feel is a desire to fight this illness. I don’t see this journey as a battle like it’s often expressed. I think about it as an invitation. I am choosing to walk down this path, to see where it leads me, to see who I become.
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