both sides now

Photo by George Kedenburg III on Unsplash

I am trying to find a new way of being in the world, but I keep worrying about my lymph nodes. For years, the wisest people—Fr. Greg Boyle, my therapists, my Instagram Explore page (okay, it is not the wisest or a person)—have preached Living In The Moment. Or rather, they have talked about it, but they haven't preached, because I don't like preachers. 

Fr. Greg said, This—this here is heaven. 

I thought, I will try to live in the moment in the future.

The Future seemed like a kind of heaven. If I earned it, through good works and the right kind of disordered eating, I could live there unencumbered. The future would hold promises of More Future. But first I needed to be granted a pass, and that pass would look like normal-range lab results all down the page. 

Maybe I've told this story before (I worry that retelling stories is a sign of brain metastasis, but it might also be proof that I need to tell myself the same stories over and over until I listen to them). There was a woman in my Facebook adoption group. I don't remember her name (because brain metastasis?). I'll call her Linda. She had breast cancer, and a few years later it came back. Brain metastasis. I didn't like her very much. She was bossy and right-wing and loudly Christian. She had to get radiation on her head, strapped into one of those haunting custom-molded masks and slid into a machine like a tray of frozen chicken nuggets. She posted about radiation in our group. One of her older kids was going to prom. There was some drama about the dress. She posted about that, too. She had all kinds of opinions and was worried her kid wouldn't have a good prom.

I remember thinking, All that energy wasted on a prom dress when you're dying. 

I was a little bit embarrassed for her. I thought she was naive, not knowing what was important and what wasn't. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but I had these thoughts about Linda and so many other people who were Sweating The Small Stuff (And It's All Small Stuff). Something like, How cute they are, moving through the world like they aren't dying. How stupid they are, not spending one hundred percent of their time crying, or Writing Profound Thoughts. 

Reader, I didn't know they were brave. I didn't know all the things they had to push through to get to caring about a prom dress.

When my friend Molly was dying, she wrote that she wanted to use her time to buy lingerie and lipstick. Last night I dreamed I found a cache of free lipstick. I put on a shimmery gold color that didn't suit me at all.

Another friend mentioned Molly recently, and referenced how important online friendships can be. I agree that online friendships are real friendships, and it was a kind thing—that my friend read my book and remembered Molly. But I wanted to say: I knew Molly in person. For a short time, yes, but I sat across from her while she ate eggs. I saw her body before she got extremely skinny. Before either of us knew she was dying. I saw her reconstructed boobs peeking out of a tank top. She was gorgeous, and Michelle Williams will play her in a movie about her life, and it's perfect casting.

Last night I tried to comfort myself by noticing that, sure, maybe my armpits—the tangle of muscle and lymph nodes beneath the stubbly skin—did not feel perfectly smooth, but neither did my neck. There were two distinct, hard bumps in my neck, and I didn't think they were cancer, did I? But then I started thinking maybe they were. I googled. I'd promised myself no googling this week, and then I did it anyway. I opened my memoir manuscript and searched for "neck" to confirm that I had been worried about my neck bumps way back in 2011; yes, I had. But what if these were different neck bumps?

Obsession, meet compulsion.

I hate my brain and I cherish it. I hope it stays this regular kind of miserable and not a cancer kind of miserable for a long, long, long time. You hear that, universe?

Google told me that calcified lymph nodes, which can occur after infections (and I have had plenty of snotty viruses drain through my neck over the years), are a thing. But cancer is a thing too, and it sounds like they feel the same. 

My friend Nicole's grandma, in the throes of dementia, thought her breast cancer—in remission for decades—had returned. Cancer and not-cancer, feeling the same. I think that might be as bad as having cancer, except sometimes I forget about the physical suffering part of cancer. That's my early-stage privilege showing.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

The body keeps the score, and the score ranges from 6.7 to 7.1, but I don't know the units. Or other people's scores. The body is a finely tuned instrument, but it plays to a metronome I can't hear. A pulsar in the constellation Cetus? The drums my friend's boyfriend pounded in the high school marching band? My own heartbeat? My heart is beating fast right now, like it does at the doctor's office. Which always feels like a courtroom, with less wood paneling.

Back to this new way of being: What if I didn't wait for permission to feel good? To feel pleasure and love? My former boss told me there's a Chinese phrase that translates to "Eat the frog." Do the thing you don't want to do first. But the list of things I don't want to do is infinite. I told her that I don't think "Eat the frog" is good advice for me.

One of my therapists told me I didn't have to strive to feel good. I could just try to feel medium-bad instead of horrible. A small weight lifted. Lately, I've been telling myself I need to do one nice thing every day. Usually it involves the kids. If I only have to do one nice thing, I don't have to fight off every nightmare thought, I just have to postpone them until a little bit later. (Ann Patchett deals with her fear of her pilot husband crashing this way: I will worry he is dead, but not for another five minutes.) (At first I wrote Susan Orlean. Brain metastasis?)

I guess this is what meditation types mean when they talk about noticing the thought and letting it drift. I am so reluctant to admit they were right, that mean bossy Linda was right. But I couldn't have gotten to any of this their way. This is my way, and I'm mad that it's taken so long, but also that's the point: It's not like "Waste your life, then have a breakthrough." More like "Realize your life contained the good and the bad all along, because that is the only kind of life." 

Right now I'm reading Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us by Jennifer Finney Boylan, who became famous for her memoir She's Not There, about her gender transition in the early 2000s. She's in her late sixties now, looking back at periods of time she once framed as Before and After, Suffering and Celebrating. But also, she says, the boy times were not all bad, were not all suffering, as confused as they were. She quotes the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now," so good and sad, a song about maturity.

Photo by David Ballew on Unsplash

C.C. walked into the bedroom just now, and I wanted to start crying—I have been crying off and on—and I have to admit another thing I don't want to admit: That seeking reassurance is a kind of test, not so unlike the loyalty tests Dash has been orchestrating for us recently: Will you love me at my worst? Will you remind me I'm not The Worst?

She got some hangers out of the closet and left. 

I want to try out this new way of being: Let life suck half the time. Maybe even 75 percent of the time. Find the good bits. Go after them fiercely. What writer Jen Pastiloff calls Beauty Hunting. I think I could do this, if the unthinkable (that I think about constantly) happened. I want to let the universe know that just because I think I could doesn't mean I want to. (Oh, the tendency toward narrative, the stupid belief that people only die when they are self-actualized, and that the flip of this must be that emotional growth would usher in death.) I want the luxury of immaturity! But I guess that's the whole thing: It is always all the things.

Friday night, I was desperate for company. Wednesday and Thursday nights were a storm of fights with Dash over YouTube and food. He screamed and hit, and then we repaired. But we needed a vibe shift. I invited ourselves over to dinner at Holly and Joel's house. Their son Wendell gave Joey a light-up toy that had a dinosaur head on one end and a thing that made a constellation of stars on the ceiling on the other end. Neil Young played on their stereo. Wendell turned out the lights, and Joey made stars on the ceiling and on my hand. 

This is heaven. I could feel it, for a minute. It was so, so short.