I’m up on the Little Red Tarot blog this week, talking about the stabby three of swords and its (sort of) positive side.
…when we numb ourselves to our own despair for the world, we cut ourselves off from our creativity as well. We bypass the emotional experiences that can unite us with like-minded others, and we stunt our ability to imagine new ways of combating what threatens to destroy us. Slowly, persistently, the three of swords is showing me how to do the work.
Find the full post here.
I have an essay up this week at The Underbelly, a new magazine sharing honest stories from breast cancer patients. It’s about boobs, body image, and why cancer doesn’t always have to be a fight.
Suddenly, I was being told I was in a battle, and the enemy was literally parts of myself. The combat would start with my traitorous boobs, and possibly other pieces would defect. I was now a pink-ribbon fighter, valiantly vanquishing my own flesh on the frontline of war.
Women are very rarely encouraged to see and know our bodies as complete, worthy units, as living creatures to unambiguously love… We learn to relate to ourselves in parts, as a collection of stubborn flaws and precarious assets. Training myself to relate differently to my body had been a battle in its own right. It’s one most women know extremely well.
I didn’t want cancer to change the way I felt about my body, to make me a divided and invaded thing.
The full piece lives here.
This post has also appeared at The Mighty.
This time last year I was, potentially, dying. (Spoiler: I didn’t!)
All of us who are alive are always potentially dying, of course, which is why hypochondria and seatbelts exist. But when you’re really sick, your narrative shifts. You’re either in a story about how you lived, or you’re in one about how you died, and for the majority of the pages you won’t know which kind of story it is.
This is a story about how I did not die, yet.
There’s an accepted communal narrative about how one should behave when one is potentially dying, especially if you’re young for it. You should be strong and cheerful, and the people around you will be appropriately inspired. You should still be sad and vulnerable sometimes, though, because you aren’t a sociopath, or if you are you should try to keep hiding it. You should talk about how you’re fighting, how you’re not going to give up, how you will be a survivor.
One of the things I learned about cancer, in that first week after I knew I had it, was that nowadays you get to be a cancer survivor whether you actually end up dying or not. The social programs you can participate in are called survivor services; your clinic and treatment information is packaged as a survivor care plan; the tips you get for handling your life during chemo are survivorship skills.
I’m the kind of smartass who generally distrusts anything with a slogan, but I actually liked being indoctrinated as a survivor. It made me feel less like I was embarking on some hellish competition with my fellow patients, in which we would either claim the title or get labelled as runners up if we, y’know, kicked it.
But let me admit something I didn’t really say while I was sick: I’m not a fighter. I didn’t fight my cancer. I didn’t always think I was going to survive. The thing I was actually always thinking was that odds were decent I wouldn’t.
subtle workings 