"Yikes!" some of you must be saying, recoiling slightly. "Who is this specter approaching from the mist so suddenly, by this lonesome roadside?" And I'm all like, "Whoa now. Cool it, Robert Frost."
When last we left our wandering chronicle, I had just opted to take myself to the emergency room at Augusta Health on the advice of one Dr. Blay, advice which turned out to be about as timely in the "not suddenly dying of a stroke and forever being remembered merely as the guy who was 'far too young' for them to ever have predicted it as a possibility when he died" as one can hope for. My incessant attention to internal detail, however, coupled with my active desire not to commit the mistakes of the less-attentive or more-stubborn others I have observed in my life, kept me from such a melodramatic and useless end (at least, so far). When Dr. Blay recommended I come in, I heeded him, and not just because his bedside manner and interpersonal skills were above-average; in a very real way, I was ready and waiting for news of the sharply surprising negative sort to hit, and had been for some time.
Let me tell you about the night following my twenty-sixth birthday.
One year previous I had reached a thoroughly unremarkable milestone wherein I had consistently failed to accidentally die before one quarter of a century had passed, and since some people for some reason thought that was a neat thing to have achieved I'd had a party and a birthday dinner and it was all quite lovely, if a bit pointless from my perspective. We ate and drank to celebrate my twenty-fifth, and I was probably projecting whatever reasonable facsimile of "being merry" was working for me that day. At the end of it, I fell asleep thinking little more than a few idle thoughts on the whimsy of the things some people think are (and through action upon, make) special. And probably something else about zombie survival.
A year later, I was in a very, very different place mentally and emotionally. My one great relationship, the one I'd thought I could make last, the one I wondered and then considered and then suspected and then thought and finally, most dangerously, allowed myself to
hope would be the living proof that I was not irrevocably
different and
destructive and
broken inside, had come to an end. Worse, it had come to an end because I had willfully ruined it. Worse still, it had come to an end because I had failed to realize how flawed I am and have always been underneath all of my aggressively-maintained outward fictions about who and what I was. Worst of all, it had come to an end in such a way that had done significant emotional damage to the woman I had only too late realized I truly did deeply love. And though it had been many months since this happened by the coming of my birthday, I was not even close to being over it. There was still a veritable
mountain of work to do internally, to ensure that I would
never make the same mistakes and
never hurt or break or so deeply and thoughtlessly affect another person I cared about, ever again. I made a conscious decision that I would not retreat in the face of this life-crushing loss, but that I would stay in the flames and the wreckage and make something better of myself, even if it cost me everything I currently was. And in so doing, I began my first-ever dance with the nightmare specters that dwelt within; I had begun a willful war against depression that would consume me for years to come.
 |
| All attacks from the shadows in my mind begin with a feeling of isolation. A cold familiarity. |
So birthday twenty-six rolls around, and there's the usual dinner and some friends, time spent with parents, and other such frilly tinsel whose charm derives from its pure electivity. But that night, for some reason that clicked from eight dissonant and probably irrecreatable factors of who I am and where I was at that time, I went into a silent cycle of introspective hypothetical self-reflection before I fell asleep and officially began the next solar rotation of my personal calendar.
I remember laying in bed and thinking,
It's not all as bad as it seems. This wasn't an uncommon thought for me to have during those long months (which would number about thirty in total before I finally started to feel as though I'd done my time in removing the undesired parts of my personality and made real headway in desired self-reconstruction); I tended - and still tend - to react instinctively to thoughts leading to depression by identifying and rapidly deploying their antitheses
before they could ever get their dark little clawed feet into the soil of my mind. Situational depression is a creeping sort of mental state that only incepts real illness in its latter stages... the earlier ones are weak things, easily banished by a sweep of the flashlight and a bullet from your sidearm, mentally speaking, but subtle and masquerading in their encroachment upon the inattentive or un-self-aware. The trick is to learn which of the scampering shadows are those dark seeds, and which are just thoughts in need of constructive consideration, but in either case the responsibility for vigilantly maintaining your balance in the face of the darkness is only ever entirely your own.
 |
The shadows of depression come unexpectedly, always in ambush and surprise,
and the cautious mind falls back before them... unwittingly giving them time to take root.
|
As I lay there instinctively fending off dark thoughts with flashlight and gunfire, another thought came to me which might at first read
appear like a dark one to you, but which I can assure you felt very different. It didn't come creeping or scuttling in out of the night, its long nails clicking on the floor too many inhuman times per step... instead it wandered in rather aimlessly, nosing the door open and moving past my awareness to sniff at something else on the floor, sort of obliviously and even a bit cute in an odd sort of way. This thought which had blundered, puppylike, into my mind on the twenty-sixth eve of my existence went a little something like this:
What if one day I wasn't in possession of my taken-for-granted inventory right now? Like... what if, for instance, I lost one of my hands forever?
I spent fifteen minutes or so considering this in as great of detail as I could mentally sustain, and then I fell asleep, vaguely aware that I had enacted something important.
Years later, I would be pulling into the parking lot of a hospital I hadn't anticipated coming to, actively in search of bad news for the sake of having that news once and for all. My mother would be standing on the curb anxiously, my phone call to her having summoned her from her regular day rather against my wishes... but I fully understood her need and desire to be present when I went into the ER, once I'd thought about it from outside of my already-locked-in practical perspective. We went in together, sat through a thirty-nine minute wait together, and then sat in an ER room for about seven hours while the wheels turned and the medical system began processing me. First an EKG was ordered, which I thought was a little redundant since not only had Dr. Blay
just done one on me, but he'd actually sent me along with a printout of its results which nobody acknowledged, took from me, or seemed remotely interested in. After that, they wanted to do an x-ray, which I gladly acceded to. Finally, tests were being done. Finally, I would have some bloody answers.
After the x-ray came a CT scan, an intriguing procedure wherein you get on a table and put into a rather cool-looking machine that is, simplified greatly, a ring-shaped revolving high-definition see-through camera that takes all kinds of pictures of your insides. None of this really feels like anything at all, by the by, except that in order to prepare for its results you are asked not to eat or drink anything for many hours except for the preparatory solution they give you, which I guess makes parts of you glow or stand out more in the resulting pictures, highlighting problem areas. The technicians were all friendly and I didn't have much trouble making each one laugh at least once, which is my way of both setting others and being at ease in unusual situations. Still, as I sat and then went for tests and then sat for hours more, as the hours rolled by and my father had long since arrived and then Kathleen had as well so it was the four of us all there together, I continued patiently and attentively fending off the encroachment of the dark thoughts, the worries and the woes and the what-ifs that would gnaw and attack and erode my patience, my sense of humor, my calm and confidence that I instinctively recognized was supporting the people who were with me. Even when unarmed, one is not defenseless; even with nothing at hand and having surrendered active control of one's situation as I had by checking into a hospital, one can still stay on the move, mentally.
 |
You are only ever as helpless as you elect to be. A dodge, like
a block, like a pre-emptive shot, is nonetheless harm prevented.
|
The morning after my twenty-sixth birthday, I awoke and had to go to work, to a job I hated and no longer wanted. As I stumbled from my bed, however, a thought struck me oddly, an echo from the previous night's unusual mental exercise.
What if I lost a hand... would I be forever ruined by this? I was curious, and facing a boring day, so I decided to extend my experiment. On a lark, I decided to see how it would affect my morning routine if I attempted to do
all of my normal morning routine activities using only one hand.
...I am, at times, prone to odd thoughts and, often as a direct result, activities stemming from mental exercises. Should that remain news to you. Thought I'd share it now.
So I did. I showered. I dressed. I brushed my teeth and hair, swished mouthwash, and gathered keys and wallet and good luck charms (I have several which I carry with me anytime I leave the house, just as longstanding personal quirk), and in so doing learned many eye-opening truths. I learned that it
sucks to try and put clothes like pants on using only one hand. I learned that button-up shirts take some getting used to, but that they can be deftly buttoned with only two fingers once you get the feel for it. I learned that my item distribution in my pockets (wallet - back right / lockpicks and comb - back left / keys and other tools - front left / lip balm and utility items - front right) no longer made a bit of sense to a person with only one usable hand. I learned that showering takes longer when you can't switch hands to wash opposite sides of your own familiar body. It was all very interesting.
And as a final lesson, I unfortunately also learned that spending a bunch of extra time getting ready for work makes you late for work and nobody really cares that you were doing a stupid thought experiment all by yourself. It turns out that most wage jobs are
not in fact staffed by people who appreciate the honest curiosity of the scientist.
It was the following morning when I realized that I had made an inherent error in judgment; I had, in fact, colored my experiment with unknowing prejudice from the very beginning. It was as I was about to get into the shower when I suddenly realized that I had unconsciously
chosen which hand I would theoretically lose, leaving myself my dominant hand to do everything with, my right. Fascinated by this incredible oversight (and not having to work this second day, so I wouldn't be late), I recreated the experiment again, using only my
left hand this time. And I could do practically
nothing without gargantuan struggle. I was floored, and fascinated, and floored again by just how much I'd come to take for granted in this elemental fashion, in such a very simple way.
And through the execution of this experiment, this sourceless and random thought exercise, I had thoroughly circumvented the shadows of my own depression again for a time. Learning how amazingly fortunate I was simply to have the use of both hands, completely out of any confining context, had been more than just a random birthday thought experiment: it had been a functioning engine by which I remembered how many things there are to be grateful for above and beyond my loneliness and loss of relationship, sense of self, and the daunting task of all the self-reconstruction I still had ahead of me. Without really intending to, I'd found an amazing cache of firepower with which I could overwhelm any rising shadows for weeks, perhaps months to come.
Three years later, I sat in a small room with my anxious parents and so-worried-she-just-looked-sick best friend, cheerfully chatting with them and with anyone else who dropped by to pass the time. I understood that there were things happening which most people would fear; academically, I understood that I myself could even be afraid right now and everybody would really be sort of okay with that. And with so many hours on my hands, I had ample time to run every mental diagnostic I have at my considerable disposal. I honestly looked inward in every way I knew how to try and discover why I was, in fact, still so very calm. The closest guess I had at the time was that I was having no trouble maintaining my calm because I had not been given any specific bad news just yet. And until I did receive any, my purpose was quite clear: so long as it was inexplicably costing me so little to summon or maintain, why not project my
aura of calm outward to encompass those I loved, who sat so near anyway and were so increasingly worry-stricken?
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Here's a photo of me that my Dad took in the hospital ER that day.
My paws were a little cold, but they brought me a blanket eventually.
|
So I did. I spent hours at it. I wove tales, I told jokes, I smiled and sat easily in the hospital recliner. I engaged Kathleen each time she attempted to fall dangerously silent for more than ten minutes running, counting the seconds to 600 on one of my lower mental levels over and over again and resetting as needed. I made them smile, and then laugh, with regularity. And while I kept my surface busy doing that, my lower mind whirred with activity, considering every potential outcome to the rapidly approaching (comparatively speaking, from the perspective of someone who had first noticed the lump in his neck over two weeks prior at this point) "big reveal" of what exactly this all was. I viewed and then reviewed every diagnostic outcome I could conceive of, and then ran a few I had no evidence for just to be safe, and then reviewed the results of each one again. And beneath all of those rapidly shifting archival layers of my mind one nigh-bottom layer stayed perfectly still, waiting catlike for the millimeter waver or tremor that would signify that my calm was slipping or ceramic to begin with, ready to shatter under unexpected strain. That part of my mind would catch the pieces should such occur, or shut everything else down. Yet its vigilance turned out to be unnecessary, for reasons I still don't completely understand; my calm was not manufactured nor porcelain in construction, but solid steel of my own unique make. I wanted to know why. And I wasn't about to let my guard down until I did.
The ever-present shadows of doubt and despair are unpredictable in this fashion, you see; sometimes it throws little thoughts at you in great numbers, wearing you down over time in that creeping fashion. Other times, it springs terror on you, insecurity and doubt that naturally cause your weak parts to quail in despair in response, and even if/when you get ahold of yourself, even if it's but a
split second later, you are left with the cold feeling of
that armor-eating fear having just washed over you and the brand new doubt-of-the-moment of knowing it can get to you anytime, anywhere, and soak your innermost supports in gasoline. Nobody, and I mean
nobody, is immune to all self-inflicted instances of dark terror, when it eschews the small stuff and rushes at you in the silence of the night like a screaming black whirlwind, all teeth and nightmare fuel.
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And your light feels a mere pinprick against the terrifying power of the demon
darkness swelling into immensity inside your mind.
|
But you stand.
You stand, or you
fall, goddammit, and if you've already made the decision that you
will not fall short of being
driven physically to the ground beyond all of your willpower,
you stand in the face of that fear no matter what it throws at you. And you keep thinking. You keep
moving. Because even when the dark sneaks up on you, and the doubt rises like a mile-high wave to overwhelm puny you in a crush and you clutch your pillow and one silent shudder and perhaps a single audible sob slips out... you still have your wits. And you can
keep moving.
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| And by that you again defeat depression, even at its most terrible, for a night. |
But the trap of it is, it's all rearguard action in the end.
Delays, dodges, deflections; in military terms, you're just
maneuvering endlessly against an enemy that cannot be directly fought. Depression weighs on you over time, and its advantage is ultimately the only one it will ever need to eventually destroy you: it is relentless in its pursuit, and inexhaustible in its materiel. You either alter your life's circumstances and cut it off at the source, or you face it and fight it and struggle not to drown in the blackened sea of it every night the moment you are alone again.
So I spent
years of self-reconstruction fighting off the armies of the dark side of the same coin (
self-doubt, self-deception, self-indetermination, pervading sense of failure, lack of palpable soul-accomplishment, unemployment, measurable poverty, crushing guilt over everything I've ever done to hurt anyone, ever) while I did my goddamn work inside my mind to ensure that when the time came around again
I would be a better man than the one who had so carelessly destroyed his only love. And during this time, I stayed locked in stasis socially. I turned down some dates, and visibly pursued unavailable women otherwise, counting on failure while still feeling like I was doing
something and not just shutting down, away, entirely (besides, I was still a young man; my body would never fully tolerate any motion to stop pursuing sex in
some form or other). I sought no deep connection, and actively recoiled from some hints at forming one here or there. I became afraid of sexual intercourse with anybody. I had no fuel with which to kindle my passion for writing. I spent half a year unable to find work of any kind, dragging myself and my best friend deeper and deeper into debt with every passing week. Then I could barely stomach any of the jobs I
could find, and when I'd found the one that I liked no more than the rest but which provided the most money I'd ever made before in my life, with Rosetta Stone, within a year I found myself laid off and sinking once more into the mire of everything I had taken onto myself and everything I had never asked for, all at once. And then came another solid year of unemployment.
 |
It is always there, lurking. Looming. Always. The dark can never be destroyed,
only defeated. Yet that can be enough.
|
But I fought. I held it off. I
maneuvered endlessly in the face of infinite enemies. I trained my mind not to give in, to always stay vigilant in the face of the shadows. I repeated to myself again and again that the truest threat wasn't the one that would break me in one smashing blow, but the slow subtle silent sapping from underground that would quietly have drained my will to keep fighting, to keep
believing that I was meant for more than just having lost one love and then sinking into poverty and misery and soul starvation and ultimate
cosmic inconsequence forever and ever more.
I fought for myself, and for Kathleen, who must never know how weak I was becoming and fearing I would still yet become in the face of this eternal internal war.
I held the goddamn line, alone.
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| Using what light I had left, or could find. For three years, I held. |
After seven hours in that hospital chair, after three tests and every joke I could think of to tell or make out of anything and everything nearby, the emergency room doctor came in and told me, my parents, and my non-biological little sister that they had found a ten-centimeter mass in my chest and several distinctly enlarged lymph nodes, one cluster of which was protruding quite ostentatiously out of the right side of my neck and had been for weeks.
He told me that I had cancer.
Everyone in the room froze, except me. I can't swear to it, as I was processing rather a lot at that moment, but I believe it is possible that I may have even very slightly smiled a bit in response. If I did not in fact do so, I assure you that I could have; the emotion that I was feeling at the moment was, completely unexpectedly,
relief.
Let me break off here to connect my two tales this evening. Following my twenty-sixth birthday I had begun what would come to be a new private birthday tradition moving forward: a period of reflection upon some life-altering disaster or turnaround that had not yet happened and probably wouldn't. About fifteen minutes of my life each year, at the apex
of that year, never more. I've never since seen any need or desire to perform any other live experiments like my mock-sacrificing a hand two mornings in a row. However, it is notable (though I now consider it less poignant than I did at first, or than you might think) that the exercise on the night of my twenty-seventh birthday was to spend a quarter hour in consideration of the possibility that I might one day get cancer (or any other terminal illness). So you see, at the time of this diagnosis, it is technically true that I had actually
considered this scenario before, for fifteen minutes nearly two years ago. Granted, all of my assumptions and conclusions were rather off-center and proven wrong by now... I envisioned, for instance, being substantially older when this occurred, and also imagined an entire treatment regimen and recovery period which was essentially isolated and supportless, having never once correctly considered that the barriers between myself feeling incurably
different and thus disconnected from everyone else, could ever come down the way they have. I thought that should anything of this sort occur, I would be off on my own someplace, and have to be brave for everyone else while fighting the majority (or entirety) of the actual battle inside, to myself and by myself, as I always have before and always feared I would have to forever. I have never been so delighted to be completely wrong about anything in my life, Walking Buddy. I mean that as sincerely as I've ever meant anything.
So you see, despite everything, despite all the weight, despite what should have been enormous mental and emotional fatigue from being kept on the edge of my metaphorical seat for hours and, for that matter, weeks and, for
that matter,
years in the grander scheme of things... I felt relieved. Because finally, I knew what it had all been for.
This was my thing, my beast to fight. And fight it I would.
...
Cancer. The medical creeping darkness, the inward shadow that grows into and consumes your other cells, converting them against your will and often without your knowledge until its head start is absolute, and fatal.
Cancer. The physical depression. The cellular despair. A biological manifestation of dread itself, coalesced.
And I
knew how to fight despair. I'd been training on it for years, in the silence of my mind. Do you understand??
My enemy had a name now. A physical form. I could stand and face it as a man, and continue the battle I had fought in private, in secret, in silence and self-imposed solitude for hours into days into weeks into months, dozens of months on end. And in the end... it would
end. One way or the other.
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| I have your name now, you shadowy fuck. And I can see you in the light. |
I felt no fear. I felt... catharsis. Whatever its purpose had been, however much it had or had not meant, the long cold war was over. Blessedly over. I had survived to make it through, and from that long fight I had amassed new powers, mental and emotional capabilities I could never have dreamed of needing more urgently than I would right now. I was not unprepared; instead I was oddly,
uniquely equipped. My incredible, impossible incorrigible inconceivable mind was
exactly the tool that could stand firm in the face of this new development, and with that realization came the lifting of a weight so profound, so firmly set and immense in its existence that I had long since believed it to be a part of the earth itself:
I was not broken. I was not incorrectly made. I am not purposeless. This...
I can do.
My parents were frozen in fear and dismay. Kathleen was shocked into silence and what I recognized as paralytic reaction to the clanging of too many alarm bells in her mind. But not me.
I was armed already. Unbound at last.
I was free.
 |
| And my enemy would cower before the power of the light at my command. |
The darkness you have within you is always against you. It's always out to bring you down, to take over more of your mind than it has right to or need of. It's darkness, it's just doing what darkness does. There is no place for hate; hating anything only makes
you darker, after all, and fearing it is tantamount to handing it the axe to attack you with of your own volition. The darkness has only the power you give it, and I have learned all I need to know to keep from giving it any I do not wish it to have. There may be nothing I can do to prevent the spread of cancer within my body; even if I survive this bout I am dealing with now, chemotherapy itself has a great chance of causing further cancer in me decades from now. I may find myself facing this same foe again. None of that matters a bit.
The only true death was the one I was moving inexorably toward during the past three years of my life, sliding and scrabbling against a slope with no purchase, counting myself lucky on any day when I, kicking desperately for grip, could go to sleep again no further down than I'd woken that morning. Gaining nothing, only ever losing, and having to find what honor I could in the endless retreating war before my own depression and darkness within. A life of meaningless holding patterns. A life of cheap food and counting quarters. A life of staring at the blank page and wondering where I'd left the goddamned key to the engine. A life of living in regret and guilt and eventual despair, that ended without ever having made a single wave in the world at large. None of the words I long to speak through the megaphone ever spoken. None of the hundred stories that grow and flourish within my mind ever set down to the page. None of the deep love I wish to give to a remarkable woman one day ever allowed to flower, take form, take flight.
Soul death. We of finite lifespan, we are beaten if we are held in place for too long, and the
despair was running out the clock on me. Sneaking, squirming, slithering thing that it is, it had me there for awhile. But I've got the jump on it all now, don't I? Nobody ever counted on the fact that I actually
get stronger when struck, did they? Everything that I've weathered over years of my life, years I feared were empty and wasted chunks of my prime, was in a moment reversed and made the perfect preparation for the demon I am facing now.
I am greater than the trial before me, because I do not need to live forever to have lived a life of meaning, not now. And a life of meaning is the only win there is.
Let's call it a night for now, Walking Buddy. Please pardon my intensity during this period; I hope that I was able to impart some of the fire in my soul into yours at moments here, and didn't instead surprise or cause you to recoil from my heat. These matters are close to my heart, and our story is rapidly rushing to reach the present day as we proceed. When next we take a wander, I'll pick things up starting with my admittance to the hospital that same night, where my biopsy procedures, treatment schedule, and eventual survival plan in general were to be determined. But first, we'll spend some time talking about that first night, and what it was like to be alone for all of the long lonesome hours of a night with all of these revelations floating about in one's head.
In the meantime... take care of yourself. Find your light, and hold it close.
We are each the hero we have to will the believe that we can be, and I know what I am capable of only to the extent that I know what it means to stand against the dark with everything I have.
Never let go of your light.
- Gabriel, Warrior of Light
