“She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak.”
-Nirvana
So I have cancer.
Yeah, I’m coming to grips with that myself, too. It was sudden, but then again I suppose most catastrophic, life-altering illnesses are. I remember my mother was on a path to something bad, but it wasn’t the thing we thought was going to take her that did. She caught Cdif randomly even though she hadn’t left the house other than to go to the doctor for YEARS, and she was gone before I’d even recovered from catching that same Cdif from her.
I’ve been back to that same hospital where she passed numerous times in the last few weeks. I’ve laid in beds (I’ve lay in beds? I lie in beds? That’s a weird grammar moment for you), stared at the same ceilings, listened to the monitors, given blood. I’ve been scanned and prodded. It’s been a bit surreal.
I’m also on leave from my job. That’s a necessity, as I’m in no shape to have the responsibility for my students and I’d do it poorly, but it’s a weird, weird feeling. I wrote an essay years about how (and I’d now say “tragically,” no offense to my job and my amazing colleagues) school was always “home” for me because home when I was young was random and sometimes a car. School was where I was good at/for something.
I’ve been thinking about a number of things since my diagnosis. I’ll be writing about those here, but I wanted to start with the thought that prompted me to start blogging again: who am I? It’s not a new question: people have asked as long as we’ve been aware of consciousness. How do we understand ourselves? What is our identity? What is MY identity? How do you understand my identity? I’ll get into a whole series of variations on this, in time. I’m positioned uniquely to talk about identity from various angles. But I’ve been thinking specifically in the last month about WHO I AM in the most sort of visceral sense.
When asked to define myself with a short list of words (it happens frequently when you do a number of identity activities and go to workshops and such on the topic), I always land on similar tropes: husband, son, teacher, storyteller, nerd. Sometimes I include “asshole,” and I’ll explain that in a future post. But I noticed something I’m sure millions of others have for the first time when considering the fact that there’s something malignant growing inside of me: I could die much, much sooner than I expected, and I might know exactly why and watch myself go. That’s fucking mortifying if you haven’t faced it before, and if you already know, hugs go out to you.
I have this tendency that I got from my mother. Hey, Reddit and Twitter troll, I’m going to call it a “Cherokee” trait, but it might no be. It might just be something Suswana did. But I bear pain– physical, sure, but more so emotional and psychological– for far longer than I should before I address it. I understand that people have to compartmentalize, and I also understand that I am not, to almost everyone in the world, special. But I also allow that being a good soldier, so to speak, to often cut into me. I give more than I should. I don’t protect myself until it’s time to actually “protect” myself. And that leads to one thing above all else: I’m rarely the authentic “me” that I understand inside, because I’m too busy being the authentic me. That sentence might not make any sense, but if it does, you’re reading it correctly.
What I mean is this: when I considered that I might be gone from this world before I got to the point where I finally got to enjoy the life I’ve been trying to build and preserve, it shocked me to realize how much I simultaneously look for joy but endure absolute bullshit. That, I think, is the human condition. But there are things I would do, that I should do, that I want(ed) to do, that I don’t do because I’m supposed to do what I do. I’m responsible. I like to think I’m kind. I like to think I’m realistic.
But I also have a strong belief in being honest, and I am at my core a storyteller. I have always wanted to share the ways that I’m different, and the ways that I see and feel and think different, not because I have any sort of ego (trust me, sharing my writing doesn’t lead to people liking me more in many, many cases), but because I know what it means to feel silent, to feel ignored, but I also by virtue of my size and the fact that I’m a bit of a firecracker when I do decide to speak I know how it feels to actually be stared at and scrutinized.
During my time in grad school, or as Julie and I still sort of think of it the dark age, I made a blog post about how I felt within that program. Funny enough, if you’re a comp/rhet scholar, you may only know who I am from having been sent a link to that post with a note about how it was “unbelievable” that a student would talk like that. I was lectured, and I was warned that I’d ruin my reputation in the field. It was a cry for help, and there was shit happening that I needed to get people who were ignoring it to look at, so the post “worked” rhetorically to get me what I needed, but the reaction to it stopped me from sharing some of my more incendiary thoughts. It… hurt.
But life goes on. Life got better. Life got worse. That’s what life does.
But one of the things I am, deep down, is someone who feels like he has something to say but rarely has the audience for it.
So I’m going home. I’m going to write a journal, but I’m going to do it in public. This time the decision is because I might not get to say some of the things I’d like to say before I lose my voice.
I don’t plan on losing this fight, but I also know what I have power over and what I don’t.