Retreat

When I was diagnosed with cancer five months ago, I quit my entire life. Quit working on my book, quit Portland, quit art. I packed everything up into a single POD and moved to Dallas to be with my family for treatment and my final year on this fine earth, if I believed my oncologist's prognosis (which I don't, because fuck cancer).

Fortunately my parents had just finished building their dream lakehouse outside of Dallas where they gave me the master suite so there was room for my art desk, computer desk, and books, complete with a view of the lake. The lakehouse has a multi-colored gas fireplace, enormous kitchen with plenty of room to make a mess when baking cookies, plump leather armchairs for curling up with my Kindle, and a master shower lined in Carrera marble big enough for orgies. 

Then there's the outdoors: a brand-new dock with a table and power outlet for writing, a fire pit, a covered deck where we eat as many of our meals as possible, a gazebo, and best of all, A HAMMOCK. Sure, my brother and I bought the hammock as a present for the entire family, but I'm already the only one who has used it for more than five minutes, so it's basically mine. 

It's like living at a retreat. Friends who've visited or seen photos have said as much. I didn't think of it that way at first, but now I don't see how I couldn't, because you couldn't design a better home for a cancer patient fighting for her life and trying to heal. 

There's a flipside, however. It's so easy to see the lakehouse as a place to retreat that it's tempting to retreat all the way inside myself, with reading, writing, making art, watching tv, or sleeping. 

If it weren't for living with my parents, I'd probably never get out of bed. There have been many days when doing so felt like my big win for the day and nothing more should be expected of me aside from eating. 

Instead I get up and fake being a normal human. 

That's what it feels like--faking normalcy, when absolutely nothing about this situation is normal. No, this entire situation is fucked. Do you know what the odds are of having stage 4 lung cancer as a non-smoking 40 year old are? Less than 0.010%. Do you know what the odds are of having sarcoma in one organ, let alone five, are at 41? One in a million, according to my oncologist. I am the outlier.

So yeah, most days all I want to do is retreat safely inside myself. Hide under layers of fluffy covers and the safety of darkness. Which is exactly what I would be doing if I had continued living by myself in Portland. There's no better form of physical retreat in my opinion. Other than sex, but it's hard to get some when you're cancer-ridden (and perceived as highly fragile, as if a single thrust would render you unfit for chemo), bald, overweight, and living with your parents in a town full of Trumpers. 

Instead of staying in Portland, my parents politely demanded I move in with them (which I knew was the right move, even if I had once declared I would NEVER live in the devil's ballsack known as Texas humidity ever again). So I got rid of most of my belongings and drove the 2000 miles so I can pleasantly die in my parents' lakehouse. 

As a manic depressive, I am well versed in hiding from my problems with sleep. Sleeping is my favorite hobby, just like Hannah Horvath. As in, I sleep on a professional level--I did before I ever got cancer, when depression was my biggest problem. There's an entire semester of college I basically slept through. I know students are far more likely to party their way to C's, but that would have required my getting out of bed. 

A week ago I had a few really bad days because I went out of town without my week's container of meds. An emergency stash in my purse provided a single dosage of backups, but I still downward spiraled for a few days even once I was back to my regularly scheduled regimen of mood stabilizer, antipsychotic, antidepressant, antianxiety, and sleeping pills.

To improve my mood, m y mother suggested I go down to the dock and write. I had been talking about this for weeks but hadn't yet, in part because my oxygen levels made it difficult to make such a long walk over bumpy inclined terrain without dragging my cumbersome "portable" oxygen machine. My body, however, was doing great after my latest hospital stay where I got two bags of blood, so I made the trek out to the dock with surprising ease. Physically I almost feel normal again, as long as I don't look in the mirror at my bandanaed head.

Writing is my emotional retreat; it has been since I started journaling in college about my depression. Over the last week of beautiful cool weather, writing out on our dock, I have done some of my best blog writing about my decade-long fight and triumph over alcoholism, since my previous blog fifteen years ago ("Best of Houston" Houston Press award winning, but long defunct, I'm sorry to say).

Normally writing things like that leaves me gutted for days, but not so this time. I suppose they were stories I needed to tell so badly, as if ridding my soul of its own version of a tumor, or maybe it's because I told them in such a healing environment. Probably both.

Writing is a contradiction in retreating. On one hand, it lets you retreat into your deepest thoughts and feelings, yet on the other hand, it brings those to the forefront and forces you to face them, at least for a little while. Which for the longest time I could only do with a glass or four of wine in my hand. 

Writing lets me say things I would never say in front of another person. Those of you who have read the two posts on my alcoholism may find this hard to believe, but yes, there are still things unsaid, at least for now. Writing honestly takes nerve, and the capacity not to delete it all the next day in the light of sobriety or my better senses. 

When it came down to it, writing saved me from myself--eventually. Once I learned to accept it as both a retreat and a step forward.

Now I know it's impossible for writing to save me from a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, but it's already done wonders in healing my soul. At this rate, when I come to the end of my life, I think I'll be able to do so with a clear heart and spirit. At least I hope so.