Day 559: more human

Just a bit over a year ago, this was the entry in my private journal:

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every day is a drudgery waiting for something in me to completely give up and die by organ failure or overdosing pills i want it over. im tired of keeping it up. i'm tired i can’t sleep. my mind is a blank white room with no windows

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I thought I could never emerge from under that depression. Everything that I had attached to my meaning of self had been stripped away. I had nothing to give. I felt my personality had truly died, I was just an endless cavern of need, and the world felt like a constant flashbang: stunned and wide-eyed ringing but out of focus and I couldn't shake it.  Who I was poured out from under me like a bowl of sand.

And now, I can look back. I am actually looking back on that time when I couldn't see a future, as in, I am past it. I really am in total shock that I have somehow existed this long, and through all that has happened. What has actually happened is a mystery to most people that I know, save for a precious few; and even then, I'm still the only one in this body. I have written off and on throughout this thing: some of it made public through this blog, and many short ramblings of days when a few depressive words was all I could muster. But there is so much that went undocumented, and so much that I don't even remember (that may be for the best, honestly). I am astonished to find myself on the other side of these almost two years. And for that, I can only attest to the raw human spirit. I basically feel like a witness to this. I've discovered, after the fact: something in me, perhaps inherently--and it is not something that I feel I have cultivated with any real energy. Usually my energy depleted by just existing every day, and the little animal of my soul nosed around in the dark, so hungry. I had my plans, of course. Cultivate an inner universe. Let everything happen to you. I tried my best, but most of the time it felt like I was dragging my lump of a frail body behind me, aimless and stumbling. But that human spirit emerged, like the runt of the pack: weak but determined. 

And I even find myself on the other side of the last couple months, in some ways worse for wear. Thanks, winter of the soul. But my mind is continually changing; striving (I hope) towards enlightenment, or peace, or something.

So far the answer lies in what I have come to understand of the world: there is no perfection. There is no one goal, no one place where we all gather and do the peace dance forever and ever amen. There is no one right choice and one wrong choice. I am learning that life is not a linear groove drawn in the ground, stretching out in front of you. It's not clean, either, Bekah. It's so goddamn messy, and you bumble along until you find something that you can hold on to for a while. And then you let it go. Or it lets go of you.

I'm not trying to be fatalistic. But there's something about who we are throughout our lives, void of whatever we are holding on to, or whatever is holding on to us. Human imagination: the raw human spirit that can think beyond the hole you're in. It's one step to conjure the million possibilities. The next step is choosing and doing. As far as I can see, the next rung on this ladder out of here is human agency: the capacity to act in the world. I believe it has the most to do with who we are, on a basic level, even more than what you actually "do". I’m interested in the person who is making these things happen. It’s something independent of who you know, what you have, what projects you are involved in, what you do for work. True freedom is being able to be who you are, where you are. And maybe if I can find that freedom, it will allow me to make a difference, somewhere somehow in a small way. When I think about what I am actually “accomplishing” in “the world” right now, I start to feel bad about myself. I don’t have a job, it’s been months since I’ve had a real creative project, I'm sick a lot, my body is a shitball, I don’t see people that often, I don’t go on vacations, I don’t have a career I don’t have a house I don’t have a boyfriend I don’t have a dog I don’t have a wittle bundle of joy I don’t have a five year plan, and my room is a mess. I’m not saving people.  The causes for which I feel deeply are plugging along without me. I don’t have a field, I don’t have a plow.

But I am sensing, over everything else, the importance of being an authentic human being on this hilarious rock flying through a dark universe. And that feels more real and enduring than any other one thing.

My not having most of that list above doesn’t bother me too much. It's not my goal in life to get married and have babies. For some people, that may be their most prized wish, and I am not hating on that at all. I find what ends up bothering me the most is the missing out on things that I wish that I was apart of. I want to do things that matter, I want to make art that reminds people they are human. I want to be a part of the movement to start saving this planet. I want to have a garden, I want to be flexible and strong. I want to feel beautiful. I want to be happy.

But none of those things will make me happy. Maybe the act of moving towards them will. Putting in the time and the energy. But maybe being a true human all the way through my life will. Finding the something in me that carries through all these hard things, that endures through jobs, hard conversations, relationships, health problems, trauma. Simplifying the society-made and self-perpetuated pressure on me to be something, and focusing on being Someone.

Sometimes people ask me how I am different now, and I have been asking myself that too. Now, on the almost other-side of cancer as a young person, how has it changed me? Well, I feel a sense of my self that wasn’t completely present before cancer. It’s hard to make that sound anything but corny, but I really mean it. 

I’ve spent a long time referring to pre- and post-cancer Bekah as different people, mostly because the difference is depressing and I long for the old me. Sometimes in my mind I see this dichotomy: Pre-cancer Bekah was strong and flexible multi-tasking never-sick I-don't-need-you-to-lift-that-for-me dancing-and-cartwheeling girl. Post-cancer Bekah is flabby boney blotchy-skinned less-spunky rubber-band-muscled somewhat-bald can’t-stand-for-more-than-an-hour lonely chemo-brained sad girl. But I have been trying to stop doing that, because ultimately, it’s detrimental to progress. So I'm practicing autonomy from the ‘I used to be’s. Those comparisons suck. They paint a picture of two different people: one better than the other, but I’m still the same person. And it ignores the things that have grown: my ability to handle being alone, my deeper understanding of human trauma and how we deal with it, my personal coping mechanisms and skills, my ability to slow down, and how I relate to people and the dynamics of relationships. I have learned that everyone, no matter what age, is still learning something. And again, it sounds super corny, but I have gained an understanding of myself that I didn’t have before; a baseline calm has emerged. I have a sense of who I am that endures through my whole life, regardless of good times or hardship. And I carry all that's happened to me, but it isn't all of who I am. It’s not a perfect picture, I’m not a superhero gandhi. But I feel like my interactions with the world have shifted: I see myself differently, and I see the world differently. I am more in tune with myself and I feel more peaceful, in general. I can look back, and forward, and I see this whole thing more clearly--even the fact that I can’t see it all. I feel like I understand the point, more than I did. At least, today. This doesn’t mean I don’t get agitated, because I do. I get both rightfully and wrongfully agitated: at love and injustice and at dirty dishes and bad hair days. I’m still a human. No, I’m more of a human now, I think. I am more human. 

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Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,

and some days I feel I have wings.

-mary oliver