My promise to blog more often is obviously not going all that well.
But I have a bit of a confession to make: sometimes I'm just not sure what to blog *about.*
Before cancer, I was a sporadic blogger at best anyway, usually only posting when some lightning bolt of inspiration hit me. Cancer was obviously a big lightning bolt and once the dust settled, it became both therapy and communication tool for me. I convinced myself that *this* would be how I could control the messaging and the narrative about what was going on with me. For the most part, it works great.
But I overlooked something important that started to bother me about a month ago. Blogging is not "real-time." Either is social media, if we're being honest. (Algorithms are not our friends!) And so here's what happens: I post a FB update or a new blog post when I'm having a bit of a down day or just have a particular challenge to overcome. Just the act of posting that alone is therapeutic and almost immediately, I start to feel better. Generally by a few hours later, I'm back to being in a good place. I'll post what is essentially a snapshot of a moment in my timeline, but I'm not living in that space - does that make sense? But of course, people often don't read those updates or even blog posts until later -- and sometimes that is DAYS or even WEEKS later and that's when they leave comments. And while it's completely irrational (ok, borderline crazy sometimes) I'll find myself feeing a little annoyed when they take the time to comment because I'm not in that place anymore. And then I remind myself that I'm being crazy. And then the whole darned cycle repeats itself again.
I talked this over with my therapist a few weeks ago and we decided that it's probably time that I return to blogging about things that aren't cancer-related. But the problem is, it's still such a looming presence in my life. Most of my in-person conversations still revolve around how my hair is doing, how I'm feeling, etc... And I have enough self-awareness to understand how tiresome that can be, but not talking about it feels like denial so sometimes it's like there's no win, you know?
More often than not, I find that people are surprised to see me functioning at all, much less understanding that I am working full-time again, traveling, and generally back to living my life as normal. Every three weeks I pause for a few hours to get some IV meds that will hopefully extend my life and then I leave there and go on with my day. Physically, there is nothing about me that hurts or feels sick. In fact, I'd argue that I'm feeling much better these days with a few meds on board that I've probably needed for a while. And getting those tumors out of my brain was a big step too. :) I remember how the morning after his open heart surgery, my dad said he couldn't believe how good he was feeling because he hadn't realized how bad he'd been feeling before. I feel that in a lot of ways.
So, that's the current update that isn't really an update at all but if I've learned anything recently, its that sometimes being boring is just fine. I do have a bit of an update on my wig situation that I will post later this weekend because it deserves its own post.
I just looked at the calendar and realized that Tuesday was the 4-month anniversary of my surgery. It's the first time I hadn't thought about it ahead of time or at least the day of. I flew home from FL that day and in retrospect, I can't think of a better way to mark that occasion.
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