Flimsy

Yesterday I was getting a stack of papers ready to file when I realized that I no longer find my worth attached to how efficient, organized, or on being on top of it all I am. I asked myself, "What am I here for then?" and then promptly wanted to burst into tears.

I had no idea that I had been building my esteem on such flimsiness. I don't even know if I can explain it. I still take pride in doing a good job but there is no frantic energy attached to the outcome. Does that make sense? My worth is not wrapped up in having done my work in record time so that an invisible they can pat me on the back.

Today I visited with a friend who has also had breast cancer. When I shared with her my new realization she reached across the counter, hugged me and affirmed just why I was in my job. They were all reasons that truly matter.

Pettiness

I returned to work this week after having the summer off. I made a commitment to myself that I would not belly ache to my co workers about our boss. We've gone through quite a tough change due to downsizing in the past few years and the atmosphere took a downward spiral as a result. It's never rebounded and honestly, rightly so in some ways. Our trust was completely shattered in the company by the way they brutally let a long term employee, close to retirement age, go. But I know that after all is said and done I get to choose my attitude and I just don't want to add to a negative atmosphere. There's nothing worse than going to work where no one wants to be there.

Every day this week I have caught myself ready to push back from my desk to go tell someone, anyone about the latest happening that makes my boss the bad guy. In those moments I've prayed this prayer. Embarrassingly, I've prayed it too many times to count. Often the surrender I feel while doing so makes my eyes sting with tears. It is worth it to give up my petty momentary bitchfest designed to make myself look better at someone else's expense.

I must confess though that I have sent Dearest One several text messages that warn him I will need to vent on the way home.  Thankfully he does not encourage me to think bad about people. You know how that can go? You belly ache about someone and then they join you in the cesspool and then it feels like you have guck stuck to your skin and can't get it off. I'm grateful he knows I am venting and then can let it go.

The week has been exhausting. I am in bed at the same time a toddler goes to bed. Well, considering how much whining I've been tempted to do this week, maybe that's not so surprising.

Words To Ponder

"Fairly late in the catastrophic phase of my illness, I began to understand three facts I'd known in theory since early childhood but had barely plumbed the reality of.  They're things familiar to most adults who've bothered to watch the visible world and have sorted their findings with normal intelligence,  but abstract knowledge tend to vanish in a crisis. And from where I've been, the three facts stand at the head of any advice I'd risk conveying to a friend confronted with grave illness or other physical and psychic trauma. 

1. You're in your present calamity alone, fars as this life goes. If you want a way out, then dig it yourself, if there turns out to be any trace of a way. Nobody - least of a doctor - can rescue you now, not from the deeps of your own mind, not once they've stitched your gaping wound. 

2. Generous people - true practical saints, some of them boring as root canals - are waiting to give you everything on Earth but your main want, which is simply the person you used to be. 

3. But you're not that person now. Who'll you be tomorrow? And who do you propose to be from here to the grave, which may be hours or decades down the road?" 

~ Reynolds Price in A Whole New Life

This was such a worthwhile read. This man lived a path that I wouldn't wish on my dearest enemy. Can't wait to read more of his stuff.

 

Jesus Wept

I love me some Brene Brown:

Jesus Wept

Blessed Relief

The Sacred Wound               Meditation 22 of 53

Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. It is first an ordinary wound before it can become a sacred wound. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as “whenever you are not in control.” All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If your religion is not showing you how to transform your pain, it is junk religion. It is no surprise that a crucified man became the central symbol of Christianity. If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter—because we will be wounded. That is a given. All suffering is potentially redemptive, all wounds are potentially sacred wounds. It depends on what you do with them. Can you find God in them or not? If there isn't some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down, and the second half of our lives will, quite frankly, be small and silly. Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 25

If you go to the link in the title of this meditation it will take you to a page where I receive these daily emails from.The one above, in light of all this past year has held, spoke to me this morning. I believe that my inability to find a way to make my wound into a sacred wound was what was leading me to bitterness. I don't know if I have found any deeper meaning to it all. 

One of the insights I gained last weekend during my silent retreat was that I was holding a grudge against the surgeon for my reaction to the way things went with the mixed up pathology report and everything that happened after that. I am grateful for that insight. 

Tonight at Mass I had a strong feeling of consolation. Blessed relief.

What I've Been Up To

I recently spent three days in silence and solitude. Well, I didn't quite last the full three days. I caved in about three hours before my 72 hours were up. For a first try I was happy with that. Much of the time I was content to be silent and alone. There were times when I just wanted to talk to someone and I felt antsy.

The worst was when I sent Dearest One a text late at night to come make sure the noise I was hearing outside was not a bear. He concluded - after hearing the same noises outside the house later - and because the hair on the back of his neck stood up when he stepped outside - that it was more likely a cougar than a bear. Gives me the shivers to think about it.

My dog stayed with me in the holiday trailer for company - well truthfully I had my dog along so he wouldn't drive Dearest One batty in the house looking for me for three days straight - but I knew if I started talking to the dog I wouldn't shut up, so I didn't.

I found it soothing to sit and look out over our pasture and watch the birds flit between the fence posts and barbed wire. The weather was lovely and warm. A touch of mugginess with plenty of heat. Sitting in my lawn chair reading a book or just sitting and doing nothing. I soaked it up. It felt like a beautifully simple few days.

Three weeks ago today I wrote in my journal, 'the despair has lifted." I am so relieved that it's still true and that I am generally happy these days. Hopeful. Thanks be to God.

Showing Up

"And may you always remember that obstacles in the path are not obstacles, they ARE the path." ~ Jane Catherine Lotter

Yesterday I had coffee with a good friend, the one who suggested I write a lament to God at that gathering we were both at. She said she'd been quite concerned about me after that get together because I seemed so different than I used to be. She gently asked me if anyone had suggested to me the idea of consolations and desolations to me.

Unexpectedly, tears rose within me as I nodded and managed to choke out, "I hope it doesn't last forever." When she commented that I'd been very honest with my feelings throughout this cancer journey I gulped and tried to swallow my tears. I took a few minutes to try and compose myself but was unsuccessful. Through tears I said to her, "It's the most courageous thing I've done."

Crying in a coffee shop is not my idea of a good time. Being with a friend who has no desire to fix me but simply bears witness to my journey is. Those tears were the most painful ones I've experienced in a while.

At my final appointment with a specialist yesterday we talked about amalgamating my experience of this past year into who I am now. He wryly observed that life changing circumstances are just that, life changing. It would be so much easier to accept if my life changing experience seemed to be bearing good fruit. Maybe I need to let go of what good fruit looks like, too.

I returned to the practice of Centering Prayer just over a month ago. It is an internal consent to God's presence and action in my life. This week I started a month long course in Welcoming Prayer. Showing up. That's what I feel like I am doing.

Yesterday showed me that this is where I am at. I trust it is part of a bigger picture. And that desolations do not last forever. This popped into my head as I typed that:

I have always loved this song.

Waning Days Of Summer

I woke in the night and saw stars in the sky. It's been months since it's been dark enough in the night to see stars. It's lovely and bittersweet because it means winter's coming. But not today.

Doing laundry is on my to do list. Earlier I thought of my grandma and how she noted in her diary every Monday how grateful she was for her washing machine. Her wringer washing machine. Mondays and laundry were synonymous in her world. I like the predictability of that.

My priest commented yesterday that he could tell I was feeling better because it showed in my face. It's always nice to have outside confirmation of what is going on inside. I feel better for the most part. No longer feeling depressed. Spiritually I still feel stuck sometimes and I am at a loss as to what to do about that. I am headed to Adoration this week. It is a refuge for me and a laying bare of the soul.

At a meeting the other day I listened to someone just out of treatment, be completely surrendered to their God in incredibly difficult circumstances. I had to ask myself if I was completely surrendered to mine. I feel like being completely surrendered will mean spouting off pat answers that are not based on reality and I have a gagging feeling in my throat at the thought. I will be so glad when I no longer have invisible walls go up in nanoseconds. I just don't know how to get there. I think I am past having walls go up and then someone says something - thanks Jesus for some random happening - and I shut down instantly. It's not how I want to feel.

Open. I want to be open.

Anniversaries

A year ago today I had the fine needle biopsy that led eventually to my cancer diagnosis. There are a bunch of little one year dates coming up. I'm trying not to run ahead of myself but I am looking forward to being on the other side of them.

By the time I am we will have celebrated the wedding of only daughter and the birth of our first grandchild (it's a boy!) I am incredibly grateful to be here to witness these milestones.

A Simple Human Act

This bit from this book caused an acute sob to rise from within me:

"We traveled to Boston to see a specialist, at the time the only person in North America who was doing research on my particular disease, and he terrified us by speculating - irresponsibly, it now seems to me - that my symptoms suggested that he cancer might already have caused amyloidosis in my heart:  a death sentence.

That was the cloud I was walking under early one bright winter morning, maybe a week after the exchange of emails with the preacher, when I heard my name. I turned around to see him half running down the street toward me as he tried to pull a flannel shirt on over his T-shirt, careful not to trip over his untied shoes. I was in no mood to chat, especially not to an enthusiastic preacher, and all my thoughts were hostile. But I stopped, we had a kind of introduction as he tied his shoes, and then he asked if he could walk me to the train station. Those days are a blur to me, but I remember two things from that morning very clearly. I remember Matt straining to find some language that would be true to his own faith and calling and at the same time adequate to the tragedy and faithlessness - the tragedy of faithlessness - that he perceived in me. And I remember when we parted there was an awkward moment when the severity of my situation and our unfamiliarity with each other left us with no words, and in a gesture that I'm sure was completely unconscious, he placed his hand over his heart for just a second as a flicker of empathetic anguish crossed his face. It sliced right through me. It cut through the cloud I was living in and let the plain day pour its balm upon me. It was, I am sure, one of those moments when we enact and reflect a mercy and mystery that are greater than we are, when the void of God and the love of God, incomprehensible pain and the peace that passeth understanding, come together in a simple human act. We stood for a minute in the aftermath, not talking, and then went our suddenly less separate ways."

 

Greater Than You

I have had this quote from this book taped to my wall for several years now:

``What makes for an authentic personal story is that the hero is not you; the heroes are the people who put up with or helped you or accompanied you along the way. The star of the story is not you; the star is something greater than you.``

Ouch.

 

The Ways We Comfort

More from this book:

"Part of the overall plan seems to be that no matter how sad, wounded, neurotic, or needy we are, that may be exactly what some other person needs us to be at that time. We don't know the ways we comfort and save each other, not only in spite of our wounds, but also in some cases, because of them.  No one is likely to be more sympathetic to an alcoholic than another alcoholic. No one is likely to have more compassion than the person, guided by love, who needs compassion him or herself. That is why we must never judge. That is why we must always look for the good in the other."

 

To Give Up Misery

From a recently read deeply compelling book who is quoting another author:

"To give up a misery....is to deprive the ego of one of its main sources of nourishment.....In order to feel meaningful, the old self must always be either dramatically weak and miserable, or dramatically strong and unselfish, busily helping the weak and miserable and deciding what is right for them...the "new self," on the other hand, will, when in misery, ask for help with simple acceptance and willingness to let go no matter how empty he may feel; or....he will give of himself without any sense of being thereby increased in significance." 

 

Grace

This past weekend one of the women from this conversation spied me at a community event and immediately came and sat beside me. The first thing out of her mouth was how she had mulled our last conversation over in her head and wanted to apologize to me. It was a very grace filled moment. We had a good conversation about pat answers and I was able to share honestly with her how difficult that conversation had been for me. She was a model of graciousness and humility to me. Her sincerity and generosity of spirit touched me. She had not one iota of defensiveness about her. It humbled me.

Then I listened as she shared with me how her Catholic raised son-in-law wasn't a Christian when he married into the family but was saved now, praise God. Oh, Lordy. I just listened and stayed quiet, finding the good in this young man's growing faith.

There is always so much to learn.

Give Time A Chance

I had a long talk with an old friend yesterday. Someone who has seen her share of sorrows. She told me sometimes there are no answers. No way to make sense of tragedies, of life's circumstances. Somehow I heard her, believed her and my resistance faded. Tonight I prayed one of Anne Lamott's prayers, "help me, help me, help me."

When I last saw my grief counsellor and was feeling angst about not knowing how this experience of cancer has changed me he said, "you are in the process of integrating that experience into who you are now. It takes time." My friend commented today that time itself was a cross. That to be able to give time a chance to do its work was hard.

I noticed when this long time friend commented that I seemed to be doing good and preceded her words with, 'don't get mad at me' that I still have some resistance to admitting it. It comes from feeling like I am being disloyal to or diminishing the journey to just be happy. But really, she's right, I am doing good.

Possible All-Rightness

Nine months ago, on a Monday like today, I had my mastectomy. I want to write something far more dramatic than that such as  they cut off my breast, the bastards. The cancer was gone already by then, carved out in the lumpectomy. The margins were barely clear so they recommended that more tissue be taken. However, the mastectomy was my choice, on the advice of my geneticist,  in order to avoid radiation.

How hard it is to own my choice.
I want to point fingers other directions.

Visiting with a childhood friend last week, one with whom I later raised my shirt to show her my scar, my hand involuntarily went to my missing breast when I told her, "I miss my breast." I have lost count of how many times my hand has flown to my chest when I speak those words.

I was told that at nine months post mastectomy my scar would be my scar forever. It's taking all the faith I can muster to believe that my invisible scars are not permanent. Yesterday it came to me that I am trying to hurry the process, impatient with what is. Scared that my inability to trust in God's goodness is permanent. Trying not to beat myself up with thoughts of  you could be somewhere else on the journey if you just tried harder.

Reading this book yesterday I came across this sentence:

"And then Father's death pushed me right out of the slippery world of human control, and I had no choice but to try to open myself to the darkness and horror in order to search for a hope of finding a possible all-rightness on the other side."

And so here I am.

PS. I am participating in this challenge so you'll be hearing more from me this week.

Toward A Strange Land

I came home from a week's holiday last night to three new books waiting for me in the mail. You can't get a better homecoming than that! I started reading one of them and turning down corners of pages to remember where I wanted to highlight. Every time I turn down the corner of a page I think of my grade three teacher and how she would be frowning at me.

The first thing I wanted to highlight was this:

"When we get right down to it, none of us wants to remain where we are. We are not awake until there stirs in us the possibility of what we can become. Then, and only then, can we begin a journey and belong to the migrant people of God."
                                     ~ Elizabeth O'Connor in Search For Silence

And more:

It was at length the same to me
Fettered or fetterless to be,
  I learned to love despair.
And thus when they appeared at last,
And all my bonds aside were cast,
These heavy walls to me had grown
A hermitage -- and all my own!
And half I felt as they were come
To tear me from a second home:
               ---------------
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are: - even I
Regained my freedom with a sigh.
                              ~ George Gordon, Lord Byron
                                  "The Prisoner of Chillon"

"It is a strange and frightening discovery to find that the sacrificial life that Jesus is talking about is the giving up of our chains -- to discover that what binds us is also what gives us comfort and a measure of feeling safe. Change, while it has promise, will take from us something we have found sweet. The image we have of ourselves may keep us from wholeness, but it has some very satisfying compensations. There are dividends in being known as the one for whom nothing ever works out. It is never easy to lose the paradise of one's innocence and to have to struggle with growing up and being held accountable for one's own life.  There are all kinds of anxieties in having to leave the land one knows and be on one's way toward a strange land. No wonder Jesus comments so often on the people who look and look, but see nothing; and hear and hear, but do not understand. If we really saw and really heard, we might turn to him and become involved with a migrant people who may have no place to lay their heads when night comes."
                                                              ~ p. 39 The Search For Silence

Such a biting thing, truth is.

I'm pondering what my chains are and if I'm willing/ready to give them up.

There is a part of me that feels embarrassed for where this journey of the last nine months has taken me and then for writing about it so publicly. That's my ego taking a kicking there. Which is humbling and good. Among other things I was under the illusion that bitterness was beyond me.

I know that where I find myself is not where I want to stay. 

As Anne Lamott writes in Traveling Mercies, "Don't forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this."

Thanks be to God.

 

Vulnerability Rises

I recommitted to doing centering prayer and sticking with it through the long haul. Normally I eventually feel too vulnerable and I flee until I try again. Rereading this book helped me see that sticking  it out would be the better option. For the past week or so I've spent twenty minutes daily in silence. Much like writing morning pages I can only have the same thoughts go through my head for so long before I am forced to look them square in the face. For a few days now I've had the uncomfortable feeling that something has been off in my attitude in general for a while. Today I was able to attach a word to it: bitterness. Lord have mercy.

Plenty Of Opinion

"If Angelina Jolie was here right now I'd punch her in the face. Who is she, with all her money, to parade around what she did?"

I'm a bit startled by the aggressiveness of her tone. We're strangers sitting together at a friend's anniversary celebration. The happenstance of place cards set across the table from one another. When the topic of breast cancer came up this is what she said to me. Lord have mercy.

I sat there and thought about Ms. Jolie's mother and aunt who died from cancer. I thought about when my geneticist said I would have had cancer again had my BRCA 1 & 2 test came back positive. I thought about the worry that Angelina might have experienced waiting for her test results and then the stress of trying to decide what to do.

I thought about how we are in situations where we have no life experience but plenty of opinion. That about sums up most of my life so I am guilty of it as well. It wasn't until I realized that my opinion was just that, an opinion, not fact, that I stopped trying to shove what I thought down other people's throats. It`s a vulnerable feeling to hold my beliefs in an open palm instead of clutched tight to my chest.

For many years I walked away from conversations thinking the other person was so stupid for thinking the way they did and patting myself on the back for showing them the error of their thinking. I wrote letters to friends and family telling them exactly what I thought of their behaviour, too. Lord have mercy.

Dearest One had no idea of this side of me until after we were married. Five days afterwards to be exact. Squirreled away in a hotel room with a bunch of other people, trying to empty a Texas mickey I asked a travelling salesman if he cheated on his wife while he was away from home. It wouldn't have mattered what he'd answered, I wouldn't have believed him because I was so sure I was right about everything, even the behaviour of strangers I'd just met.

I'm only thinking about this in retrospect of that conversation about Angelina Jolie. Up until I started typing this post I was still sitting in judgement of her. I still want to sit in judgement of her. But I need to remember I've been just like her -probably worse -  and am still capable of it, too. I want to think I am better because I practice restraint of tongue and pen. Most of the time. That`s the catch though, isn't it. Funny how I want to let myself off the hook for behaviour I see in others and condemn them for harshly. Well, not funny at all. Lord have mercy.

I told her that I thought Angelina brought an awareness to the disease that was good. I didn't apologize for having an opposite opinion nor did I get angry and snippy in voicing it. I just stated how I saw it and left it at that. I had a moment of feeling uncomfortable but it passed. Then she had a moment of feeling uncomfortable when I didn't back down and it passed. When we started talking again it was about other, less volatile, subjects.

The Other Side

My dining room table is full of my computer stuff because I've been painting my office this week. What started out as wanting a new desk soon morphed into new desk, new chair, new paint, new flooring. It will be a first for me to have a room to call my own and decorated to my liking. I painted the walls a soothing blue denim colour with white trim. It looks lovely. It is a very tiny room that is like a cocoon to me.

The weather has been hot for a good while and I have enjoyed the heat. So grateful that it is summer after a very long drawn out winter and cold spring. Dearest One and I have been enjoying sitting around our fire pit in the evenings which is my favourite summer activity.

I had my bone scan earlier this week. After pointed questions from the technician part way through the scan about where all I was in pain I was tempted to start worrying about test results. I reminded myself that all I knew was that I was having a bone scan. Full stop. Worry could wait until there was something concrete to worry about. Which might be never. The doctor is on holidays and by the time he will be back I will be away on holidays so it will be weeks before I know the results. A friend of mine who had cancer eons ago told me it would take at least a year before I stopped fretting every time I had a new pain.

I was going to write that the one thing I do better than before is be present. However the fretting about test results is not exactly being in the present, is it? And yet I am much more present than I was. A few nights ago my father-in-law was speaking to me - yelling really because he is deaf - and I was nudged in my spirit to be present to him. How much better the world would be if we could be present to one another. To do it means to forget about  myself for the moment.

I saw my spiritual director this week. He lives several hours away and the drive was a nice change. It was a good appointment. As I left I thanked him for bearing witness to my journey. Much like you all do, too. Thank you for hanging in there as I work my way through this period of my life. I wonder what it will look like when I'm on the other side of this.