Category Archives: Personal Ramblings

Five years out from almost dying and I spend my lunch breaks crying, worried I’m not enough for anyone because I’m not good enough for a job. Five years ago I thought I might die and I fought so I wouldn’t. Fought ER admission staff, nurses, eyes rolled in my face and concerning blood clots I had thoughtfully collected in plastic bags tossed into the waste bin with ‘oh neat that’s a biggie’ from an MD. Today I cried on my lunch break because of a slack message. I’m no fucking warrior, I’m no pitiable weakling. I just don’t know how to square the circle of myself into everything required to live a life in this current world. It’s becoming harder to hide the trauma brain with checklists and reminders and alarms, harder to keep up with a pace set pre-covid and one I never agreed to, harder to manage the ADHD with caffeine and weed, harder to quash the anxiety with 0.5mg of Ativan (only ten at a time and the monologue of trauma must be repeated for continued access).

The concerns I carefully bag up and carry around with me like the ring to rule them all are pulling in ways no one can see but I feel so deeply it’s physically painful. I have nowhere to put them down because covid is over, according to industry. Nowhere to rest because the survivors who don’t go back to work just kinda die, according to my oncologist. And we all need money to simply eat, so- how’s the career going? What about your side hustle, have you monetized your Instagram yet? Big props to those team members who choose to work while sick, we just love you and appreciate it so much. Rest up as you need to, but only the newly legally required 5 days for covid and aren’t we lucky to have gotten more sick days out of a pandemic? No, they can’t be used to care for a family member, use your vacation days for that. You should have hustled harder, never quitted harder if you wanted to take real vacations and have any real rest. Coffee is for closers, loser.

Five years ago I was slammed directly into a brick wall of systemic medical red tape, literally bleeding to death in front of doctors telling me to come back if it gets worse with a horrified look when they saw how much blood had soaked through the paper covering on the exam table because they instructed me to take off my adult diaper while waiting half an hour to be seen. Blood dripping from my toe, having ran down my leg, if it gets worse…wondering just how much worse it has to get before I am helped. Now, years later I see the systemic response to covid trickling through industry and drip-drip-dripping on all our heads as we’re told not to worry, it’s not raining- it’s just blood. Those people that died were weak anyway– the red tape is a feature, not a bug.

Being flung back to that moment from catching site of blood on my sheets from an over-scratched mosquito bite and continuing on with my day, like a fucking warrior. Crying into my keyboard because I couldn’t handle a simple task, like a pitiable weakling. Because at the end of the day, it’s all a business, baby– that you can’t ever catch up is a feature, not a bug.

It feels really good to be around people who know nothing of my illness- to just be a random chatty stranger with an adorable dog, traipsing the world with a smile scowl or smirk depending on my mood. I am not an ill person to be pitied nor the brave warrior who overcame it all- the entire sliding scale between those binaries is cruel. I just am. Scars remain mysterious and not reminders of the harm done to my body. Oversharing is a mere quirk and not an annoyance- the sliding scales feel less sharp here. I move through the places I visit in disguises of a functional human and the woman who makes the bed but only in the room that is not hers. The person who has enough clean underwear for the journey, but pile of hoarder-smelling pants and socks etc piled in a second bedroom an entire space paid for to hold the consequences of impulse shopping. No half filled journals, no longing for meaning, no worries mate. Depositing little images of myself as I want to be into the corners of the world.

Last night the moon woke me up rising over the water. It was almost daylight level brightness, just a cloudy or murky daylight. It reflected on the ocean in the long glittering shaft of light that remained in the same place despite the shifting water – the light has no time for waves, the tide, or splashing fish munching on the water surface bugs. It just is. It’s just there, creating an impossible pathway out of my tent across the water to where the coyotes are howling at the rising rock in the sky, reflecting back the beams of the sun. Here, the moon and I can be our best reflections and refractions of the suns light. We can see the road ahead of us, but we already know we are prepared and we have enough clean underwear, at least for this trip. It is not a fantasy, these ideal versions – we know it’s not, because we have deposited little and big images of ourselves throughout our worlds. The moon imposing and impossible and lighting a pathway taken only by the reflected and refracted light of the burning sun – the cold stoic moon imagining the pathways that exist only for itself and me, ignoring the trivial matters such as fish and hoarder-smelling pants and socks etc.

How fragile feeling it is to sit on the rocks between the sky and the forest and the sea. The shattered crab shells from seagull feasts, the tiny pimple crustaceans on the oyster shells, the hawk soaring above, the ocean lapping at the mountains, the air moving trees to the rhythm of the earths rotation, the ants crawling across the wooden deck, the dog laying at my feet. The macro. The micro.

Dana shakes my hand as I crunch the little pimply crustaceans under my boots. I lie and tell him I’m travelling with my husband. I do not go on the forest path he shows me. I am instantly aware of the coyote spray in my fanny pack, and my head says to me: “so wild and free you are, unable to even trust a handshake on the beach” and yet I know that I’ve been a cloud before and I will be again- giant and heavy and massive but floating above it all, all the Danas and the men of the world are specks of matter, floating in the dirt and water. I’ve been the seagull and will be again, tilting my head back for full throated racket, my whole body straining to laugh as loudly as I can. I have been the seagulls feast and I will be again: broken, emptied, fuel for others. I have been the macro and the micro. I have been the mountains and the sky and the sea, and I will be again. Dana points to the forest trail and I calculate it all: the man, the coyote spray, my fanny pack- how accessible is it? How vulnerable am I? Now, here, in the body of a woman I am not the clouds or the mountains or the crab or the seagull. I am alone on a rocky beach wishing to be far from the things of man, only to have one stick his hand out with a friendly hello and a handshake.