Introvert Art Club

the moment that changed the trajectory of my life happened 5+ years ago in the middle of chemo. but it wasn't the chemo itself, it was when I realized that the chemo didn't feel particularly traumatic. instead, it felt quite ordinary, as if surviving wasn't a new concept but rather my regular habitat.

the words come stilted out of my mouth, awkward, searching. the accent wrong, a pronoun or other simply missing. but still, for my neighbor who had held the elevator, I would not stand there mute. and, now, here she is, understanding me just fine when my own mother so often refused to even try.

Take a woman who grew up feeling not good enough, who learned young to hide certain parts of herself, who understood too early the narrowness of what was considered acceptable. Then throw her into a world that hates women so much that it will take every opportunity to shame every movement she makes, every idea she thinks, every goal she dreams - while simultaneously shaming her for not doing it all anyway. Give her just enough time to armor herself fully, to allow her demons to become backseat drivers, to stuff herself deep into a dark space inside and find a facade she can live with. And then give her breast cancer.   Run her through a treatment that nobody should ever have to survive. Cut out body parts, both seen and unseen, and leave behind a patchwork of scars and misshapen flesh. Tell her to smile while you do it. And then spit her back out to be judged and riddled with side-eye for gaining weight and not moving on already. I feel so angry, all of the time, about the way this...

The end of my relationship with my mother came in the form of an email. From her.  We never had a particularly good relationship, though we both pretended otherwise, and I suppose that's how it could disintegrate in such a mundane way after an event that was more of a non-event. Or perhaps it's that our relationship had been disintegrating since day 1, so that 40 years later, it could simply stop without us having to engage in a screaming match. In her typical manipulative way, she wrote me to "let me off the hook" from ever interacting with her again. I suspect she meant me to read it and then run after her and beg her to not break it off. But by that point, I was well and truly over her inability to be straightforward. If you have something to say, then just say it; and if you say something that isn't what you actually mean, then don't be surprised if I take your words at face value instead of engaging in the sleuth work required to make assumptions about wh...

The thing I find so wild about having had cancer is that I will always be someone who had cancer. That sounds like such a "duh" statement, except that pop culture loves a storyline where you survive and everything is as it should be. Movies, TV shows - if someone has cancer and doesn't die, the story ends when they crush it and get the happily ever after. When I was declared done with active treatment, it was almost like my brain was surprised that I didn't magically revert back to who I was, that the repercussions of my treatment would endure, that my mastectomy was forever. Even four years later, I have moments when I'm like, woah, I fucking had cancer.  Nobody really spells it out for you - when you're in the whirlwind of a diagnosis and processing the shock and horror while also making monumental decisions - that you will live with those decisions for *hopefully* many years. As soon as they told me the lump wasn't just a muscle knot, I wanted it out. I...

I was fed an ad the other day that asked, in a judging ‘you don’t want to become your parents’ tone, if I was still on the internet as if it was 2007. And I thought, gee, I miss 2007 internet.  And then I thought, you know what was great about 2007 internet? Blogs. Your very own poorly-designed little corner of the internet where you could do your thing and be mostly unnoticed. As it turns out, not only does Blogger still exist, my old blogs still exist!  I had thought it’d be fun to reuse my old blog address if I still “owned” it, but I never considered that it would still be live and operating like a weird time capsule. I was going to delete it, but then Russ brought up Ken Burns and I figured, if it’s sat around collecting dust for the last 14 years already, what’s a few more? It’ll continue to live on in obscurity and I will instead start from scratch-scratch.  So, here we are. I’m going to assume that nobody is reading this, and I’m going to write accordingly. Withou...