A bit of truth about my attitude

A lot of my attitude is just me being a brat. I refuse to be miserable out of sheer stubbornness, wilfulness, teenage rebellion. I’m rebelling against sadness because life is telling me to be sad, and I don’t like being told what to do.  I am being very positive and happy, but sometimes those emotions are actually stemming from a place of anger. This is not that unexpected. The more bad things happen in life, the more determined I am not to become part of those bad things. Everything that has happened to me in the past few years has started a fire in me, but I will not let it scorch me into a creature of bitterness. Once you have a fire in your soul, you can choose how it burns. You can let it destroy, or you can use it to shed light. 

In the stormy night

In the stormy night,  a beating shrieking tree

Spitting leaves and wailing scratching branches

In the morning she will be still again.

In this same way your anger will not consume you

You too have deep roots that you cannot destroy

Sometimes it’s okay to

Scream with the wind

Real talk

The summer that I was nineteen my body decided to kill itself for no reason, and had to be talked out of the notion with massive amounts of poison and burning. That was the beginning of my cancer journey, and the end of the illusion that I had a dependable, solid bodily form with which to journey through this life. Our bodies, in fact, are so fragile that they can start killing themselves for no reason at all, just a mutation on a chromosome. We like to think we control the inevitable physical breakdown, but we can’t. It will happen in it’s own way and time, and the souls inside can’t do much about it. Chances are I won’t die from this cancer, but for a few months it was killing me, and I had no idea. This is terror, but it is also freedom, because I have realized that I am bigger than my body. I cannot be contained within it. Its faults are not my faults, and its demise will not be mine. I believe this. Sometimes, on stormy nights or perfectly still mornings, I believe this so fiercely it hurts, as if I am straining to become the ocean, and my fingers are entirely too small to hold the world.

We forget

We forget

It’s what we do

We're busy

We set ourselves about our daily business

And it seems that our business is mainly in forgetting

that we are miracles

that we are created and capable of creating

The gift of existence is so incomprehensible

and our curse is just as big

to forget that so easily.

If I have to hurt

If I have to hurt

I pick fire not frost

I refuse the bitter bruised numb decay

I’d rather burn away

The dead parts inside of me

If you fucking make me hurt

It better fucking count

no deadened creeping soggy pain

I will burn

I will blaze

I will be cleared away

for fresh and fertile ground

Set me on fire

I pick light and screaming

I pick running and heaving

I will not waste anything I get

Including your fucking pain

My eyes and ears are strong

My ears and eyes are strong

But I’m having problems with my tongue

Which, if you think about it,

Makes the other skills pointless

This world has no use for the voiceless

Dark Humor and Cancer (and Harry Potter)

I have cancer. My best friend regularly insults my cells for their incompetence at reproducing properly. My family is delighted by my new resemblance to a baby with my shiny bald head and makes endless jokes about it. When I finished throwing up this year’s Thanksgiving dinner, the first thing my mom said was “I used your loofah to clean up, I hope that’s okay” to my cousin.  This dark humor might scandalize an outsider. Most recently, my dad and I were giggling in the ER when I couldn’t stop gagging during a strep test to determine the cause of my fever. I could see the nurses’ disapproval above their hospital masks. This is no time for merriment! You are sick! Act like it! Oh, please. I’m not giving the cancer the satisfaction of my panic. I will giggle. And it will be fine.

My response to “You can’t say that!” is why not? You should, what, respect the cancer? Cancer has no respect from me.  Laughing openly about something is kind of like spitting in its face. I’m not going to let cancer jokes offend me, I’m going to offend the cancer with jokes. As my guru Hermione Granger once said, fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself. When you bring humor into the situation you take away some of the fear. Riddikulus*.

I think this mindset can best be summed up (in Harry Potter terms) by the Weasley twins’ giant colorful U-No-Poo display in Diagon Alley even in the midst of the fear and darkness of the outside world. Because laughing is better than crying, because it is during the hard times that you need laughter the most, and as a “f**k you” to whatever is scaring you, Voldemort or cancer.

(I understand that this post is maybe hard to understand if you haven’t read Harry Potter. For which I’m sorry, but you should also be sorry because why have you not read Harry Potter? It will make your life better.)

Laughing about hard things doesn’t mean that I don’t take them seriously or that they don’t still hurt. Cancer can take a lot of things from me- it can take me away from my friends and studies, it can leech away my muscle tone and my mental clarity. But I will be damned if I let it take my spirit. I will not let it corrode my personality, and I will not let it take away my humor. I can’t control much about this whole process. But I can choose to laugh. As my other guru, Anne of Green Gables, said: “Life is worth living as long as there’s a laugh in it.”

So if you see me in the street, instead of being terrified of offending me or saying the wrong thing (which most people are around cancer patients), make a joke about my bald head. I promise it will be way more refreshing than pity. There is something so sweet in my friends and family’s refusal to treat me any differently because I have cancer. Cancer doesn’t need to be made into something sacred, something to tread lightly around. Cancer has enough power as it is. It needs jokes and eye rolls and lightheartedness and light. This philosophy may not be true for every cancer patient or person going through a hard time, but it is for me. So until next time, mischief managed.

*Riddikulus is the spell that dispenses boggarts, evil creatures that prey on fear. It is cast through laughter. Seriously, go read (or re-read) Harry Potter.