13 - The Cloudy Future, The Recorded Past

I've been thinking a lot lately about what life's going to be like after the treatments are all over. The first thought one has, of course, is a sort of casual head-cocking at the intrigue of the idea that there could have very realistically been no (or a lot less) life after treatment. On the one hand, I'd be dead already and in my grave for circa two months now had I not come into the hospital when I did. On the other, I could very well have been facing the chemo treatments now with no guarantee they were even working, no visible results at all. That happens to a lot of people, too. Instead I got the third hand, which makes my choice of "hands" for this analogy a pretty poor one, and also is where the treatments seem to be working perfectly and I'm a couple of weeks shy of being officially declared completely cancer-free.

Each of those potentialities is a bit of a pause moment. It's the thoughts like that which comprise the perspective shift that accompanies reality/mortality checkpoint events, and they are also the hardest thing to convey to another who is not experiencing the same thing, and/or has never. I can speak the headline to you plainly enough: "Young Man Realizes His Life Could End Soon, And He Hasn't Even Ever Eaten A Crumpet Yet To Know What They Taste Like", but that doesn't actually convey the million-pointed caltrop of the experience anywhere near sufficiently. Because the headline is just the surface; it's the dozens of layers of substrata that bring the whole experience into sharp reality for each individual going through the event, and there's just not time or words or willing memory to convey it all while it's happening. So it all just drifts away, and we adventurers just look at you weeks or months or years later in response to your well-meaning questions of what it's really like, think a half a hundred things there aren't always easy accessible words for, and then throw out a blanket statement like "Well, it's just really heavy, you know? Everything changes." And you learn next to nothing really about the vast underground fungal colony dwelling invisibly beneath that seemingly-simple statement, and I get to go back to lying down and playing a video game, and everybody seems to win for the moment.

It was in anticipatory defiance of this probability that I first sat down and started writing the early entries to this blog: for no better nor more profound purpose than that I might not then have to tell the exact same story eighty times to eighty separate people, which would really be quite a cumulative interruption to any lying down and/or playing of video games I might prefer to be doing at any given eighty moments in time. It's probably easy to assume that when I first sat down I had no notion whatsoever that this blog might be visited eight thousand times (at the time of this writing; 8631, to be exact, and can you even believe that?!) by anyone, ever, anywhere, for any why. That possibility never once occurred to me. But the counterassumption is that I was originally just putting down my thoughts for my own edification, and lo and behold, people actually found it somewhat interesting for some reason, and the blog took off to a degree. That all sounds very feasible. Unfortunately, it's just not the truth. The questions I so often get are often variations of:

"So... how does that go, exactly, with your treatment schedule?"

"What's chemo like? Like, what does it feel like?"

"What was it like when you first realized, 'I have cancer'?"

So yeah... honest dishing: it was really just so I could answer these and select future questions expediently by pointing to a URL, or handing out a card. Because no matter how patient a person is (and I am terribly patient when I elect to be, at least according to my Skyrim saved game which has clocked a frankly ludicrous 362 hours of play thus far), telling a long-form personal tale about a life event to even just one new person a day, every day, begins to wear on one's patience with the joy of storytelling quickly. I'm just not narcissistic enough to actually have a desire or anything to gain from sitting and being listened to every single day as I say the same words again and again. (I am, however, just narcissistic enough that a little part of me is disappointed to be failing at being narcissistic enough for the first part.)

Packaged with the questions, masquerading as warmly well-meaning and respectably personally interested (because WE'RE SUCH GOOD FRIENDS, HARRY, like Gilderoy Lockhart throwing his arm around your shoulders and pulling you close solely because there's a camera present), comes this invisible glass ceiling to where they're no longer honestly interested if it means they have to actually independently go to a place and sit in front of a thing and type some stuff and then read for a few minutes. They'd rather hear it directly from me here and now, or meh, no thanks. Even if it took the same amount of time, even if it was the same exact words, they'd rather sit and hear me say it than sit somewhere else and have to read it on their own. I should probably take that as a complimenting backhand, really; it can't be an all-bad thing to be more interesting in person than one's words are on the page or screen, but it does land a bit perpendicular when the core reason I spent the time creating all these words in the first place was because no sane human being would ever actually have the time and energy to convey it all in person individually this many times in a row. Eight Thousand Six Hundred And Thirty One times!

The problem with that notion anyway is that there are no shorthand answers to the questions I am commonly asked. And many people have this unusual moment of quickly-masked hesitant disappointment when I reply to one with "That's a good question, and I actually wrote a blog post addressing that"; whether they elect to admit it or not, I immediately correctly identified this as an almost laughable-when-undressed impulse on behalf of the asker. Namely, I have inadvertently encountered the upper edge of how interested they were in actually learning the answer to the question they have asked me to spend my time and energy answering. Peel away the layers of politeness and curiosity and the stranger strata of social convention demanding that they be just this interested and just that perfect level of sympathetic, and you uncover a truth so completely believable and really just so perfectly modern human that you almost can't help but laugh at it.

They don't want to have to read about it.

Like, literally that. And nothing more or less. Just that fact. They want to know what it's all like enough that they'll ask me for my time and sit and listen to me talk about it, because active social interaction is entertaining and I guess I can perhaps be as well at times... but tell them that I have already taken the personal time and expended my precious limited energy to write down a detailed and descriptive, still-fully-personal answer to just that question and so many people get this ever-so-brief look of mild consternation on their faces. Like I'm assigning them homework, or something. I don't know what else to do, except laugh a little to myself inside. Incredulous laughter, mind you, the kind where I just can't really wrap my head entirely around the way people are at times, but laughter all the same. Because the unveiled truth is that we've just uncomfortably revealed the turning point to which they aren't actually interested anymore; if they can't have the details and information conveyed in a manner which is sufficiently lively and entertaining as well as informative, then they're actually content to simply take a step back and return to just being distantly glad I'm doing okay, and looking forward to hearing the all-clear weeks down the road. I've even had select family members fall into this tactic where I am concerned, some after weeks of pretending otherwise until they just got tired, or caught me in one bad mood, or in some other way dropped the facade. That insufferable, enviable freedom that everybody else gets which I and my parents do not, where they can just disengage and go do other things for awhile, and when they come back I'll be better and they'll have successfully dodged the undesirable problem I've become. In a better mood. Easier to deal with. Having more energy, and thus more able to be entertaining for them, or at least not all depressing and complicated. And every time I realize someone has done that thing, even inadvertently, even when it couldn't be helped and they were just busy and even when I'm honest enough with myself to freely admit that I wouldn't have wanted them hanging around anyway... this dark part of my mind still hates them a little, for having that freedom I do not to change the channel during the goddamn commercials and then just pop back in when the boring/heavy/complicated/uncomfortable parts to watch are all painlessly over with. It's not a justified feeling. It isn't even remotely fair, since it's essentially little more than petulantly, silently wishing the experience of cancer and the odyssey of treatment on another person, and I don't allow myself the leeway to experience it often, but it does exist. Involuntarily, it does. And the only time I don't feel bad about it is when I recognize that the person has chosen to decomplicate themselves in the moment by disconnecting from me on purpose, and for no other purpose than that they're tired from pretending to be better people/friends/family than they realized it would take actual energy and thought to be.

Those people can go engage in self-intercourse.

So go ahead. Tell me that silent "ah, shit, I have to read?" response isn't vaguely offensive, and honestly a little depressing. On the one hand (here we go again; maybe by now I've learned to only do this in two-example scenarios) I've just revealed that the person has this tangible, too-accessible limit to how much of a crap they give about me. On the other, I catch myself feeling like I'm somehow the pushy one, making people read stuff just to find out how I'm doing, when the truth is so far to the opposite it's barely funny. Like there aren't twenty out of twenty-one days during my chemo cycles where I'd have given anything not to have to see and answer to and perform for anyone at all, but they just kept on showing up in one form or another and my choices were to either face their worry and actively quiet their fears by projecting strength and certitude I might not even have at my command and won't know until I try and possibly fail right there in front of whoever it is or else beg off from the dinner or the outing or what have you and know that all I was really doing was inevitably queuing up even more worry/pity/incessant tell-me-how-you're-doing-in-full-detail-so-I-don't-have-to-worry-for-one-night private messages that I am going to have to deal with eventually anyway so dammit I might as well just square up and go wade through the needy grasping ocean of my support.

...And then I feel like an asshole. Because I've now gone and fully twisted the honest and well-meaning positivity of so many of the people around me into something to be dreaded and at times avoided, simply because a few among them are less than honest (with themselves as much as with me, make no mistake about that!) and to varying degrees insincere about how much they actually care, and I can always, always tell the difference.

There is nothing simple about being a cancer patient. I hope I'm able to convey at least a part of this overwhelming truth. Even the positive aspects of it can flip on a dime at times and weigh you down to the ground, by a combination of factors even my superhuman perception and lightning analytical abilities can't reliably see coming. And that's where dread begins, for me. I have ever relied on the aspects of my mind which are supernormal to sustain me through things that would bear another to the ground, but when the unique parts become the reason I can't just be obliviously grateful for a well-wish without an on-the-spot analysis of datapoint: eye contact/breathing rate/body language/phrasing; cross-check with emote veracity; cross-check with known habits; evaluate for total sincerity all unfolding within a single second...

Sometimes I don't want to see the wizard behind the curtain of another person's true feelings about a thing right then and there, in the moment. But I always do. I always do.

My superpower, and burden. Woe be I, and all that.

The blog is serving so much more of a purpose than I could have ever imagined back at the beginning, though, now. I am in the process of evaluating and slowly re-editing each of the posts toward the end of turning this journal into a more cohesive book about disaster, about cancer, about coping, personal philosophy and finding motivation when it's hardest. And it's all thank to you guys! You've taken a tough time in my life and singlehandedly turned this aspect of its inception into a pulsing, still-growing beacon of hope... hope of the possibility of turning this event into the springboard for the career as a writer and a motivational speaker that I've always wanted (or, in the latter case, that I had no idea I could possibly have wanted).

LATE-GAME DISCLAIMER: Obviously none of the observations I've made in this post actually apply to you. You do realize that, do you not? By the mere act of having taken the time to read this and any other blog posts to date, you're categorically not among the demographic I was describing and lamenting earlier in this post. In that light, my sincere thanks go out to every single one of you who has taken the time to read along, keep up with me here, and in so doing stand by my side without asking anything of me for the privilege of your company. Additionally, many people who are not reading this and have read none of my blog posts to date are also likewise not among the people I was discussing, because their sympathy was sincere, without a pre-packaged subtle selfish component.

In short, you're all amazing. Thank you, for taking the time out of your own lives to join me in this perfectly-balanced way for walks down the winding desert highway of my own. See you all again soon!

- Gabriel, Who Still Wonders 'Bout Dem Crumpets Like Hmm

Crumpets with faces. Because.