Priorities

“I nuked another Grandma’s Apple Pie and hung my head in shame,”

-Ben Folds

It’s funny– well, not funny “ha, ha,” but funny surreal–how thinking about dying in a less-than-abstract way changes your sense of priorities. As most people reading this will already know, death has lurked around Julie and I for the last several years, but there’s something different when you’re not considering your mortality in the sense of “everybody dies” but rather in the sense of “oh, shit, I hear a clock ticking inside my guts.”

I often joke to people that I believe that there is, in fact, a multiverse and we, as living entities, jumped from the “correct” timeline to the timeline we live in now during the night of the 2000 election. That would explain 9/11. It would explain how someone won an election but didn’t win an election. And it would explain why the world has spun out-of-control (at least from my perspective) since. I regularly mention that I miss the 90s, that I would go back if such a thing were possible, etc. But as bad as things may or may not have been, very few things have literally rocked me to the point that my perspective changed. I attribute that to a chaotic but enlightening youth; I always had this sense that I understood who I am, what I wanted to be, where I was going (generally– certainly not specifically).

I also mark my life, at least in my “head canon,” by a set of specific moments that hang with me as sort of the tent poles that lead me from place to place. I’ve been thinking about one specific tent pole recently. It was the moment I “sort of” chose my career path, and I’ve only now come to question whether or not that was a mistaken choice.

At the end of my undergraduate education, I had an eclectic but generally not marketable mix of degrees. I had an AA in Behavioral Science (which I still spell wrong on the regular) focused on Political Science with a sub-specialty in anthropology which was wasn’t a BS simply because I would have needed to take 2 more classes and didn’t want to spend the money/time and a BA in English Studies with a focus on creative writing. If anyone is doing the math in their head, the obvious plan with that degree is law school. That was what I thought I wanted to do, and I fared pretty well with my applications. I fell sort of my “dream” school (Yale– for the research qualities, not at all for the prestige), but I was accepted to enough high quality programs that I had to debate my choice. I landed on Berkeley, and I enrolled. I found an apartment. I packed my life into my old, busted up Plymouth minivan, and I pointed myself west.

When I got to town, there were a few days before I could move into my new place, but I began meeting with people. I spent several hours with someone I came to call Morpheus (yes, a Matrix reference; QAnon don’t get to take over one of my favorite movies). I call him that, and think of him as such, because he was kind, and highly intelligent, but he didn’t pull a single punch with me. We talked about my future, my plans, etc. He helped me map out what my time there, then my career after, could look like. At the end of the conversation, though, he hit me with a mind-freak (he left a “splinter in my mind”): he told me that he very much hoped I would stay, and that he’d get a chance to see me in classes, but that he wanted me to consider whether or not I’d made the right decision because “the career at the end of this, and what you’ll have to do to pay off those loans, isn’t going to be what you want at all.”

I frequently visualize (see it/be it), and I had this impression of how things would unfold. After talking with him, I had a very different vision. I spent the next day and night getting to know the neighborhood (I found a hotel across the street from my new building, so I was kind of a tourist in what would be my home for three years). It felt fine. I fit in, better than I fit in at home, honestly. But my new mental vision of life as a graduate from law school, trying to get my feet under myself, did in fact include doing things I didn’t want to do.

Here’s the thing about Phill: I’m the child of a pathological liar/abuser (that’d be pops) and a mother who was perhaps the most loving and devoted person I ever knew but who was very much a con artist when she needed to be to survive. I grew up in a family that didn’t need the passive to be aggressive, and gaslighting was the mode of the day. Because of that, if I’m not telling a story (wherein I embellish in ways that aren’t deceptive but make a yarn more fun to weave) or sparing your feelings (“yes, you totally chose the right color for that!”) I don’t lie. It’s not that I can’t. It’s been observed before that I have a great poker face, even when I’m not trying. But I choose not to be deceptive. I don’t see the point. I watched it literally ruin my father, and his duplicity kept him and me from ever having a relationship in spite of my almost relentless effort to build one all through my youth.

I also know myself fairly well, I think. And there are things about me that aren’t suited to being a trial lawyer who has to take whatever case he can. One is that I don’t wear a suit all that well; it’s not my thing. I feel like I’m in someone else’s skin when I wear a suit and tie. Another is that while I am fascinated by rule sets, there are laws I think are garbage, and I’d have trouble not wanting to point that out. Then, of course, there’s the not wanting to lie. How was I supposed to defend someone who was guilty?

I want to be clear, because when I came back home in my van full of my entire life, everyone but my mother thought I came home because I “couldn’t hack it.” It’s not that I couldn’t. I know I could have. Trust me, I wouldn’t lie to myself about something that doesn’t matter. I’ve endured far worse than what that career path would have led me toward, and I think I’d have actually loved the “school” part of it. I didn’t want to be the person it would have forced me to be at the end, as I’d either have found myself forced to do work I didn’t want to do or would have been soul-crushingly in debt.

Let me step back, just a moment, and explain the moment where I realized this. Hey, Reddit asshat, I’m about to do it– as some of you may know, I’m Cherokee. 😛 As a Cherokee, there are certain things I believe that other people might not. One of those is that our ancestors speak to us, and if we aren’t listening, they speak louder. All along my trip west, I’d made a point of it to look at anything/everything that had cultural relevance, and that’s a long drive through a hard part of the country, so I saw a few things. I noticed that at many points, things felt “off.” I attributed that to the fact that I was transitioning in my life, and that sort of thing feels weird. Going to college, at first, felt weird. But I was checking on my new place– a glorious studio apartment!– when I came to a dead stop in the doorway. When the ancestors hit you HARD, because you weren’t listening, it sort of imprints on you. I remember everything about this mundane moment. I remember the smell of the hallway (curry powder– strong curry powder), the feeling of the aluminum door frame under my fingers, the hum of the aging AC, the bright strands of sunlight coming from the window.

Here’s the part you can choose to believe or not: I got a “message” in that moment. It wasn’t a loud, booming voice or a vision of a ghostly figure or anything like that. The only want I can explain it is that it felt like my soul, my consciousness, was a computer and someone rebooted it. There was just the ever-so-slight fleeting moments of a panic attack (that I know well), but that passed. I didn’t say or do anything other than closing the door, locking it, and putting the key back into the mail slot where I’d found it. I took the elevator back down to my van, which was in the loading zone. I got behind the wheel. I didn’t stop until I was in Reno, Nevada. I never, even once, looked back.

When I got back to Richmond, my small but dedicated circle of friends (and Mom, obviously) tried like hell to convince me to go back, repeatedly told me they had no idea what I’d do with myself otherwise, explained that you don’t just get a job and move forward. I called IU East, in Richmond, and had four classes to adjunct before I emptied the van. I was filling out graduate applications for composition and rhetoric programs within a week. I got accepted to Miami, which was my first choice based on reputation and the fact that I could commute and hence stay in my apartment a few more years.

I realized that I wanted to help people, but that what feeds my soul is being creative and, as I am either blessed or cursed to be, I’m a wordy storyteller. As my friend and mentor TJ used to say, poets are the Michael Jordans of writing, with the elegant movement and highlights. People like us– I’m more of a creative non-fiction and occasional fictional novella guy– are the Charles Barkleys throwing elbows in the paint and grinding, grinding, grinding. I’ve been chastised for years because I write long emails. I’m THAT bitch. But I needed to be in a space where being that person made sense. The real fusion of my undergrad degrees (and life experience) wasn’t law school. It was rhetoric. It was communicating and teaching people to argue but also to deconstruct media. Also, I love games. Games have rules, too, but breaking them doesn’t mean lying and getting guilty people to walk free.

I felt pretty confident in that decision, but it came with a caveat. To be a “real” professor, to not be a second, third, or fourth class citizen, there’s this thing called “tenure.” Anyone reading this blog probably knows what that is so well that they’re groaning right now, but if you found your way here by chance and aren’t familiar with academia, tenure is the carrot on the academic stick. The reason it exists is actually more relevant to a scholar like me than it is to most: it’s security to speak truth to power even if what you’re saying isn’t popular. As a poor, fat Cherokee in a world gone mad, I say things frequently that aren’t the most popular thing in the world. But moreover, the whole point of me being ANYTHING was to show people like me that they could be the things we didn’t see ourselves as. The only success I really, truly ever wanted was to not live paycheck to paycheck, and I still mostly do that (and will, for a while, thanks to the new medical bills which are already stacking up in spite of decent insurance).

Getting tenure with my academic pedigree should have been easy. It hasn’t been. At all. I started my career with six years that weren’t even tenure-track. Then, after joining the ranks of the eligible, the pandemic happened, as did a department that isn’t as familiar with what scholars like me do as an English department would be, and while at this point I just have to agree to disagree with them, they found my research to be “not as strong of a case,” in spite of having published two books, several chapters in other books, and I will admit only one journal article, though not for lack of trying. Publishing journal articles from 2019-2024 has been a bit of a problem for everyone since the pandemic turned the lives of all the editorial staff and reviewers as upside down as it did everyone else. I also had a major illness, lost my mother and father-in-law (and four– yes four– pets) in the stretch from 2021-2023, and I sort of had some other stuff going on professionally.

At any rate, tenure became the Sword of Damocles hovering over my head. It was the biggest stress in my life for years. It was so bad, at one point, I broke down and asked my mentors and chair to help me with relieving the stress. Nothing really broke. Meanwhile, I wrote most of a third book, but as I was finishing that, this past fall, I started getting violently sick. My body was talking to me again. I was focused on the wrong thing, again.

Now I have cancer. I’m about to start chemotherapy.

I still want tenure. Don’t get me wrong. It still matters. My career still is my career, or at least I hope it is. But even as I was starting to face this cancer diagnosis, I was attempting to put classes online, to adjust my writing schedule to finish my book on time (on new time; I had planned to finish it by December, but all the bouts of vomiting threw me into chaos; my new plan was ironically to have the book done the day my chemo starts, 4/15). The doctors told me “you need to slow down. You’re going to need to focus on this, you’re going to need to rest. You’re going to need to heal.”

When I was looking at just surgery, it looked like that time to heal was going to lead me into the early summer, and I was begrudgingly accepting of that. I could still get my book done before my tenure review (in the fall). I could pick up a summer class or two if they fill, to defray the bills.

Then the PET scan showed that this cancer is worse than I thought, than I’d hoped. And now there’s chemotherapy that’s going to leave me feeling perpetually drained (and more, it sounds like), something that I’ll survive and that will somehow be fine but is going to SUCK. And that might be two months. It might be six months. And when it has done what needs to happen inside me, there will be surgery. Then more chemotherapy.

I don’t know how I’ll feel, or how I’ll react, to the chemo, but the realization that this is now a serious, serious condition sort of displaced any sense of worrying about my career. I could very realistically die from this way before I had intended to die. And yes, any smartasses reading this, I know I’m fat. I’m not entirely unhealthy, but I could stand to drop some weight. I hear you. But I’m officially in the “I don’t know” zone. The prognosis isn’t a death sentence. There’s a really good chance the chemo shrinks the lymph nodes, the surgery gets all of it out of me, then the second round of chemo leaves me in remission (a word I now seek– the new goal, the next hurdle, the true tenure, the final boss).

But I might lose this year of my life in terms of doing anything other than writing reflective blog posts, reading, playing games and having myself dosed with chemicals and sliced up. I’m okay with that. I really am. The first thing I realized, that it took me a couple of weeks to verbalize but which I said while crying through clenched teeth, is that I absolutely do not want to leave Julie “alone in this rotten fucking world.” I’ll do whatever it takes to stay around with a smile on my face.

But priorities– they change fast. The tenure case I was obsessed with making the best possible argument from, that I was low-key furious daily that my department seems to think is not rock solid, I could care less about it for now. If what I did can’t speak for itself, that’s life. I’ll cope with a negative decision if that’s coming. It won’t kill me.

Cancer might kill me.

The one new thing I’ve learned, in the month-and-a-half I’ve known I had cancer, is this: you can feel like you’re comfortable with the idea of death, that you’d be fine if you died tomorrow. The second you find out it might REALLY be tomorrow, or sometime soon, the only thing you want is to not die. Not just yet. It’s not time to be done.

It also makes you wonder why you cared so much about what other people thought, or why you let the pursuit of a job rip into you. You’re not your career. You’re your life. Live it.

Take it from me. You might wake up one day and be told that you could be a ticking clock.