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.

12 - I Am Not At War

Well now! Hello there, all.

I will refrain from wasting too much of our precious time together by mouthing a bunch of empty observational platitudes and excuses for how terribly, terribly long it's been since my last post. The shortest version of the plain truth is just that for the majority of the latter of my chemo treatments, I didn't feel up writing at any length, and chose instead to rest as completely as possible and not to write lesser quality or quantity placeholders just to be posting things. But now we are back in step once again, and I am driven to use this opportunity to share with you guys some of my recent thoughts and feelings.

A fair warning and disclaimer, however: Some aspects of the following are most certainly going to qualify as a rant. The rest is undiluted personal philosophy. There are rough and unsanded edges to these emotions yet, and I am choosing to present them to you honestly-if-unvarnished, rather than polished-but-processed in form. Like most things to do with my core beliefs and the feelings stemming from them, there is fire in the sky above and steel in the earth below what I'm about to say, but please rest assured that neither is directed at anyone in particular. I have had months to turn these thoughts over but little time and less desire to actively drag them out into the light for deep-tissue examination... until today. Thus warned and armored (I sincerely hope) against taking offense, let us proceed steadily together into the present, and the future it promises.

To begin with, a bit of catchup and current events for those who haven't been following along with my personal page on Facebook and may not be aware of more recent developments during the long hiatus.

• Chemotherapy is completed! I have persevered through six full three-week cycles of chemo, and today marks three weeks to the day from my final infusion. I am officially done with chemo, and have begun to physically and mentally recover from its ill effects for the last time these past couple of days.
• I have one additional surgery upcoming, to have my surgical port removed from my chest now that I no longer need it to help infuse chemo drugs into my system. It looks like this:

• Oh, whoops. Sorry. Unrelated. I meant this:

• With chemo out of the way I have three weeks of radiation treatments to look forward to, which don't actually start for at least another week from tomorrow. So this isn't by any means the end of the road or its purpose-filled journey. We're getting there, though, steadily. Because we march without fear.

So! How I am feeling. This is the tricky part... because I have been having mixed feelings about the reactions of others as I have come closer and closer to what they (distinction deliberate) perceive as being the "end" of my treatment. I say tricky because... well, honestly, how does one justify criticizing caring support one is being freely given? I can think of few things more blatantly assholish in execution than a person who stiffly corrects another in the midst of being praised or wished well by that person. So I have not done so, fearing that my feelings on the matter were misdirected or refracted from some other stress... but as the time passes I have come to realize that the friction is coming from my never having made my own views and beliefs about my own situation fully and completely clear, and until I do I actually bear the responsibility for others not knowing them. And in lieu of knowing them, is it any wonder I am approached every day with the common views of cancer as an afflicting and malevolent force that strikes with ill luck and malicious intent? Yet these are not my views.

Let us start with a general overview of my present situation.

Between upcoming surgery, continuing to have to go into the hospital once every single day for a Lovenox injection, and the prospect of at least three additional weeks of treatment, I can't really afford to relax or celebrate just yet; I actually feel zero compulsion to do either, and would kindly prefer people stop pressuring me to (directly or indirectly). Trust me when I say nobody wants this all to be done with more than I do; this has been a long and difficult journey, and I will be quite relieved to remove my dust-choked boots at its properly earned, patiently sought-out end.

However.

Nobody else but me has to directly experience every new and unexpected obstacle, every bloodletting, every injection and surgery and procedure either, so I ask you to recognize the fact that the optimal mindset for me to continue to do so is not the one in which I am desperately wanting it all to be over as soon as possible. All that can accomplish is make me dread every remaining thing that must be done all the more, and I refuse to begin fearing any of this now just because the people around me grow (kindly, empathetically) weary of watching me struggle with it. When a new wrinkle comes up, when more blood must be drawn and I am just told a moment before the tray with needles and empty tubes arrives, when the bills aren't all going to be covered by my financial aid and I have to face the prospect of partial payments, endless phone calls, further financial burden on my caring already-taxed parents and ultimately finding crappy part-time work sooner instead of having months to rest and recover from all of this in actual health, worry-free, after my final treatments are completed... I cannot permit myself to carry a mindset that would demand or encourage that I react to new necessity by getting frustrated, irritated, angry, self-pitying, or any other negative vortex of wasted time and energy. And that is all I can be, from the moment I start to dread the next step, resent the treatment, or waste too much time bemoaning my own discomfort.

I must instead be calm and flexible, like water.

Each test and treatment I am going through is something that must be done to minimize the risk of cancer resurgence in my near future, and I am committed to that. I elect this path. I accept these tests, this treatment.

I accept that cancer has happened to me, and that this is all a part of it.

And as well-meaning as the concern is that's come from some of you, that which comes from a place of "wishing it had never occurred" or "wishing you didn't have to go through this" is not useful to me, and can only tempt me into uselessly, negatively beginning to wish the same. Not once through this whole process have I ever fallen to wringing my hands and crying "woe is me," and I do not intend to start now. I apologize for the blunt necessity of having to state any such a thing, but I will speak my mind on this:

Stop asking me to regret this. I freely accept the cards that life has dealt me.

And do not expect me to share your fear of it. I play each hand steadfastly.

I can handle this. I remain unafraid. Shuffle, cut, and deal again. I'm still right here, staring the dealer unflinchingly in the eye.

But it grows more difficult to uphold that when I keep having to pause my own in-progress mental programs to address someone else's worries and concerns for how I can possibly be facing all of this, or the prospect of even more weeks of treatment, or how soon I get to ring the silly bell at the hospital to indicate that it is "over." Don't you understand that it will never truly be over? I'll be on watch for signs and symptoms of cancer for the rest of my life. And I am square with that. It doesn't trouble me to know that I have unique dangers in my future. It isn't out of my way to be uncommonly watchful and self-aware physically as well as mentally and emotionally. What I mean to say is, I DO NOT FEEL I HAVE BEEN DEALT WITH UNFAIRLY. To even begin to allow thoughts of that weak color and shallow depth is to have accepted the selfish fallacy that Life somehow owes me or anyone particular conduct based on arbitrarily assigned values, and I do not believe that either. I have already been given statistically uncommon advantage in that I was born in modern America; I have access to resources and treatment I would not in somewhere around eighty percent of the rest of the world. To say, to even think that I somehow didn't "deserve" to get cancer would be the same as to arrogantly proclaim that I did "deserve" to be born a white American, or to have good parents who are still together, or to be of particular intellect, or literally any other single factor over which I had no say and have no control. I cannot logically and reasoningly decry one thing as unfair to me without implying both that I think "fair" exists, and that it defines every other thing I have been dealt in my life's cards, and I. Will. Not. Commit. That. Fallacy.

You don't get to take credit for only one side of the coin. I will not fall into the traps of common thinking, of entitlement in ways no person can logically be entitled. "I think, therefore I inherently deserve" is not something I support in any form. I will not sink into the archaic lazy notion that a man's worth is defined by anything other than the works he has done with the life he was given. However long it lasts. Whatever takes it in the end.

As a great billionaire vigilante once said, "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me."

I do not view this experience the way I have come to realize it is commonly seen and viewed. I am not "battling" cancer. I am not "fighting" anything. I understand the use of those metaphors to others in situations similar to my own and believe me when I say I would never speak against them; every single person walking this long road through treatment has exactly my equal right to choose and follow and utilize whatever metaphor works best for them to describe their own situation in the manner which helps them to rise and face the next day. I just have a much different view of my own personal circumstances, that's all. I cannot proclaim myself a "warrior" with a straight face, as I am not personally doing any of the fighting. Chemotherapy drugs are, coursing through my system and poisoning cancer cells by the millions. Radiation blasts will be actively killing scattered cancer cells that survived the initial chemo deluge. Both of which were administered by doctors and nurses looking out for my health and well-being. Who went through a solid decade of school and training, taught by uncountable mentors and professionals in the medical field. Do you understand what I am saying? If this is a war, then it is a war being fought by proxies. I am not either of the armies on the field, here. I am the battlefield itself. This war is being fought and won by mercenaries, by the service professionals who are taking pay to provide the forces and tools with which cancer can be defeated and removed from the battlefield.

There are warriors here. I simply am not one of them. I am the owner of the land, the interested party who hires the warriors to fight on my behalf. I am involved. I am vested. I am central and self-valuing. But I am not the hero holding the sword. Not in this scenario. And anyone who wants to make me out to be, you are dramatizing my situation in a way you think will make me feel better, or braver, but I can now calmly tell you in reply, "Thank you for your consideration and the gift of its metaphor, but I do not require such. I know what I am, and feel proud of it already. I do not need to claim glory I do not deserve in order to face this situation without fear. For that, I can do already."

And once more, let me disclaim here: By no means am I saying that any other person who is themselves surviving cancer is in any way incorrect in stating that they are battling it. My views are mine alone, and pertain only to my own situation. I would never restrict the belief of another to view their own personal struggle, battle, or journey in whatever way they saw fit. The act of naming a thing is an inborn privilege of the sentient; it gives us leverage. It gives us structure. And through both together, we gain power over the thing. I myself named cancer in my last post, calling it the physical depression, a metaphorical manifestation of the dark shadows that had haunted my mind; I gave it a name, that I might call it without fear. I will not ever take that power away from any other. I speak only of myself in this missive.

So... that's one point of view I hold. Here's another.

There is no evil enemy here. There is only cancer, doing what cancer does. Cancer manifests, it grows, it consumes and converts, it takes over and spreads. Humans do the same, merely on a different scale. We grow, we fight, we kill and eat, we spread and multiply. We change and sometimes ruin the things and places we touch as we do so; we are, as a species, in the process of polluting areas of the surface of our own planet steadily to such a degree that they have become unable to support us any longer. How is that any different on a fundamental level from the mindless cancer which multiplies and eats and spreads blindly until it has accidentally killed its own host? But we are sentient beings, carbon-based life that wants to live and will fight for the right to do so against anything standing in our way. We can think, unlike cancer. We can change and moderate and grow according to thought and reason, instead of pure instinct and blind desire of the moment. We can be greater. Cancer cannot. That is cancer's doom, the combination of predatory genetic destiny too similar to our own, and intellectual inability to rise above that and attain a higher purpose for its own existence than simply "Because I must." So yes, I count myself greater than cancer. But I am not so small-minded and arrogantly narrow of vision to believe that makes cancer itself, which is by definition an intentionless mass of unthinking cells, some kind of evil villain. It's just... nature. I had as well hate the ocean for being capable of drowning me.

I will kill the cancer within me if it be within the power of the medical mercenaries I can hire to do so, to save my own life and protect my self-determined right to live and mate and create and persist. But I will not hate the cancer to do so. There is no hate without fear, and I do not fear death. It is the last part of life, an irrevocable part of the whole and inevitable in its inclusion. I cannot glorify life, and still fear death; to do so is to lie to oneself about what life is. Temporary. Finite. Valuable because of its limited duration. Cancer is not sentient; it does not want, so far as any human definition of the word can apprehend. It has no greater goals or dreams, other than the carbon-based life imperative to continue to exist. The very same imperative that I follow. So I will fight it for the use of my brain's locomotive carbon flesh-and-bone-and-blood machine, but I will not deceive myself into thinking I don't understand its simple motive in the profound manner which is reserved only to those with firsthand recognition. I also exist, and in so doing wish to continue to. I will not hate that which I understand so well. I cannot hate that which I also am.

And above all else, I do not need to hate in order to fight, to win, to kill in defense of my own life with a clear conscience. That is melodrama. A villain is not required for there to be a fight with every bit of meaning and honor possible in one that has a genuine bad guy. To believe so is to fool yourself, justifying an unsure position by personifying its elements to suit your desires of the moment. One of the greatest arrogances I believe we carry as a species lies within this sphere: to misuse our amazing scientific, biologic, genetic gift of perceiving the infinite beauty and majesty of the universe around us in order to twist those perceptions away from truth and into the lies which suit our own desires. I won't do it.

Cancer's not a villain. It's not a roving shadowcasting terror. It's not a demon come to earth. It's not even actually my own depression given form; that's just a melodramatic parallel I drew toward the purpose of explaining how I was able to initially react to my diagnosis without fear or surprise. It's just a nothing versus my sentience, a mindless amoeba devouring what it can, knowing nothing of me or itself or anything beyond spreading itself the one way it is designed to do. I will stop it because that is my prerogative, as the being in the situation with greater understanding. But I will not hate it for being what it is. The moment I do, by the principle of the two-sided coin I do likewise invite the earth itself to drown me in its oceans, to crush me under one of its mountains, to choke the life from me by taking my oxygenated atmosphere away. The day I hate a parasite for being what it is before my species has evolved beyond its own remaining parasitism, I drown my soul in an ocean of my own hypocrisy. And I am better than that.

I am not at war.

I am on a journey.

And I am glad to be back here, walking with you once more.

- Gabriel, He Who Would Rather Be Truthful, Than Justified

11 - The Silent Surrender

Hey there, Walking Buddy. Come here a moment, and sit down before we walk on any further just yet.

Sometimes it's nice to just sit and talk for awhile.

I want to bring you where I've been spending time lately, to stand by me on the shore in my mind where I have been visiting whenever no one else was around, trickling sand out of my fist and contemplating the minuscule crystals of it as they fall. Listening to the quiet waves.

By the way, did you know that THIS IS WHAT SAND LOOKS LIKE when magnified?
On the beach, we crush between our toes a hundred thousand tiny gems. Beauty unseen, unsung.

I've been thinking existential thoughts about what Life truly is, and how all it seems to be remains limited by our ability to perceive. It's all very high-handed and theoretical, and I am terribly certain I haven't the philosophical background to even know exactly what it is I'm thinking about, even as I am thinking it. I may actually be just sitting here thinking thoughts meant to seem deep, perhaps looking to impress myself; my subconscious may be angling for a promotion or something. It's hard to be sure. Should you be curious, however, here are my thoughts of the past few days as clearly as I can explain them:

Life isn't really about anything that we don't deliberately make it about. For most of us on the average day, that tends to lazily mean our lives end up being about the casual, everyday problems and situations we encounter on that day... the day is bad because the car wouldn't start, because we ran late for work and the traffic lights betwixt there and here were not aligned to our passage in fortunate fashion. It's all reactive. And that's not necessarily a bad thing all the time! We live our lives reacting only to the things which concern us, when what we are truly doing is conserving mental and physical energy: always keeping a stockpile in case something really difficult should arise unexpectedly. But in approaching Life this way, we are unintentionally allowing Life to decide what our days will be, rather than our own wills, our own desires, our own spirits.

We look at others who choose to tackle Life head-on, and by and large (I know this was true for me personally, for a long time, at least) we think Good lord, what an exhausting prospect, living that way. We look at the overachievers and shake our heads. We look upon driven people and privately admit that we find the idea of facing Life, spending that extra energy without an immediate threat motivating the expenditure, without the comfortable blameless simplicity of reactivity powering the decision (a person can never be blamed for something they only reacted to, after all, not in the same way they can for something they willfully made happen), it all seems frankly just illogical at first glance. And I think that we are wrong to think so; examined more closely, it is intensely logical to face one's Life actively rather than reactively.

Why not face Life with a cocky grin, body and mind at the ready?

One of my personal beliefs is that a life spent only in conservation of energy is a life spent living in mild, lukewarm fear. A life spent wasting that energy, going to sleep every night with the majority of it unspent and ready to recharge from 92% back to full capacity, and with it the lion's share of the potential inherent in that life lies unspent in tandem. Living in casual fear of the rainy day, the one bad phone call, the angry customer at work. Always saving and stockpiling your strength and potential toward the fear of that moment coming and finding you tired. Not incapable, mind you, not exhausted and unable... merely already a bit tired.

And therein lies the trap of thinking and living in this way, in my opinion. We do not prepare against the idea of being already exhausted when disaster strikes; whether we want to admit it or not, the majority of us live relatively calm lives, touched daily by neither extreme exhaustion nor terrible disaster in any form. And in that realization lies the sad truth: we prepare every single day, limit ourselves, and look upon those who are living better and more actively with sheeplike incomprehension of the wolf, not because we are afraid of demons, but of imps... small, weak things. The woes we hold ourselves back every day to be utterly ready to defend against and defeat the moment they arise are more rawr than roar, and when we bow to the mere possibility of their coming we make ourselves much the same. This is the ultimate reward for living reactively. You become as small or large as the demons you regularly fight, and most of us instinctively choose only the smallest of demons to focus upon every day.

And in this way, we become less than we could be.

And talk about irony! In always holding back, always minimizing controllable risk in case of the worst even as our perception of what "worst" should mean invisibly shrinks within our minds, we only ever grow less capable of handling anything large if and when it should arise! Like a bodybuilder who never lifts heavier weights, but only ever continues to lift the same 5lb. dumbbells all day, every day. Sure, he's fit as hell to handle those 5lb. weights, but then along comes a bit of 200lb. cancer sauntering into the gym, into the life of someone you're close to and know well and love, and all of a sudden you're a wreck! Because you were not ready. You allowed Life to lull you. You have allowed Life to dictate for you, as though you haven't the brainpower to handle those duties daily yourself when the truth is you only just couldn't be bothered to use it when you didn't have to. You have failed to train yourself, and now you're being deployed directly to war. Good luck surviving, hero.

He who doesn't train his mind, dulls his mind. Now think of how many dullards you know.

People throughout my life have asked me variations of questions that all boil down to the essence of "Why do you bother to think that deeply about -insert concept here-? It's a simple idea - he likes her. She doesn't feel the same way. End of story." To which I am invariably driven to explain that no, the situation involves humans, so out of all the things it could possibly be I can assure you simple is not one of them. He likes her, yes. She holds back, yes. But she also likes him. She is just more afraid of X than she is allured by Y at this juncture, and with a clear broad-spectrum understanding of those factors, one can realize that this situation isn't remotely simple, it's the opening act to a tale of intriguing romantic potential. Almost as frequent is a half-impressed, half-incredulous "Wow, it must be exhausting to live that way." Most of these comments are in response to some conversation wherein I have attempted to explain how I see some particular thing or came to the piece of advice I just offered, which inevitably leads to a request for more explanation, and can sometimes organically lead to an admission that yes, I actually see everything around me as a multi-floored deep sub-basement of conceptual layers and likely causality broken down by individual issue and separate concept, all the time. My answer to these questions and observations is always the same: "I chose to live this way when I chose to believe that I was made to do great and unique things, and I will need to be sharpened to a razor-edge to have the greatest chance of success." Unless I don't know the person all that well, in which case I often give them a no-less-true-but-not-the-whole-truth answer of, "It isn't exactly a choice for me. I see what I see, and am who I am as a result of that."

This isn't entirely a choice for me, so please don't mistake what I said above as an arrogant admonishment to anyone else with a subtext of "if you were all weird like me, automatically no one would ever be afraid of anything, ever," because that's absolutely not true. But there is a degree of choice in everything that I do. Where I keep my focus. What I turn the laser of my perception upon, and how long I keep it there. What lengths I will go to in order to self-improve. What I see is what I do not control, and that is what can give me ideas of what to do... but what I actually do remains my own demesne, completely within my sphere of choice and control. Every split road. Every flip of the coin.

It is our choices which make us who we are.

I may not be able to turn off seeing each aspect of the world in multilayered data readout detail all the time, but I could have chosen to shut myself away and deny all distracting sources of that chaotic information, and recoiled from those I could not eliminate entirely. It was not remotely pleasant when it first came crashing in on me around puberty, let me tell you, realizing that I must see and hear everything that everyone wasn't bothering to say aloud, all the time. I could very well have chosen to be and remain a complete shut-in all through high school and college; in fact, I struggled with the temptation to do so for years (some might even say I lost that struggle, but they would be wrong. I quite deliberately forced myself out of that shell regularly to always try and attack my weakest points, training-style). I could have chosen to be so insecurely proud of my own nerdy differences and odd perceptions that I defiantly refused to believe I needed to learn any extrovert skills that the people who picked on me and looked down on me utilized so effortlessly every day, while secretly inside gnawing myself to the bone in envy at their easy ability to connect the way I never could. These were all choices I had, which everyone has. There is nothing different in how I faced these than in how anyone else would or does or is right now somewhere, and nothing special or rare in my repertoire which allowed me to make the choices I did instead of those. I merely realized that I would rather charge at Life and make of myself what I will, than let it tell me who I am and what I can and cannot be.

Because BRING IT ON THAT'S WHY

To go out into crowds despite the crushing overwhelming fear it brought every time.

To ask the intriguing pretty girl on a goddamn date instead of waiting for the perfect moment that never comes until is made.

To learn to dance instead of believing that I just never would be able to be good at something like that (I was passable, if you're curious, with great potential for more when I lost interest).

To stare into the eyes of someone physically superior to me and actually mentally cow him for ten critical seconds until he disengages, unsure of the power of something he saw in my gaze.

This is why I exhaust so easily in crowds. Every person is a multitude of complex signals all at once; en masse, they are overwhelming to the finite (but ever-expanding) capacity of my mind. But it is also why it was so imperative that I learn to extend that time I can survive in them anyway, because needing to enter and survive and remain fully operational within crowds for a time would not always be my choice.

This is why I spent twelve years of my life trying desperately to convince myself and anyone who interacted with me that I was emotionless, immune to feeling whenever I chose; when left open to others, the cursed volume of each individual, all their feelings, all the clashing subtext of every action with its cause, weighed heavily. Bore me down. Yet this is also why I can speak to you as I am right now.

Why I can see that which others cannot easily see.

Why I can understand the pain and grief and stress and hidden tension of another without having to converse with crude and inadequate vocal sounds.

It is what made me weak.

It is what makes me great.

We live our lives actively, and risk exhaustion, failure, blame and ultimately flirt with inescapable regret and the grief of loss at every turn, but start to become greater one failure at a time. Or else we live our lives passively, only ever reacting when forced, always hiding from the shadow of spending energy for no guaranteed gain in return, and grow fat, content, small in desire and thus easy to satiate more days than not.

That is the choice you have. The choice I have.

Remain small, and grow fat on your own self-created excess. Lazy. Content often, but seldom truly happy. And always, always afraid of being sad, hurting inside, of losing what little you amass. Hide from it. Circumvent it at every turn. Prevent it wherever possible. Protect yourself so avidly, that you remain what you are and little more for as much of ever as fate, called chance, allots you.

Or else flex your mind and shatter the chains with which you have bound yourself. Break free and demand of Life things you have only dreamed of being worthy of, and then become worthy of them. Risk failure and shame at every turn. Skirt disaster and loss, and fall into both sometimes anyway. Value things highly, knowing damn well that you will lose them all in the end. Record every bruise, collect and examine every rivulet of blood that pours from your wounds with shaking hands... and you will take wounds.

But roar in defiance as you do. Give as good as you get.

Do it all in the name of never submitting to the fear that would encapsulate you in a warm but small and simple Life if you would just lull into relaxing, into being partially afraid of statistically nothing, all of the time.

All you have to do is not think, every time there is a chance to where Life will gladly hand you something lukewarm and unremarkable but still a thing you can have if you just don't elect to raise your hand or leave your cushy seat. But the thesis which draws all of this together, the one thing that you must remember is that Life is not your friend. It isn't your ally. It will never help you, nor even consider you individually at all. Oftentimes it will be cruel to you in its indifference, and at times it will be your enemy. You are the grain of sand beneath Life's feet, gem though you may be up close to yourself and to the sandgrains you touch, lost in the endless of miles of beach along with all of the rest of us! The things it tosses you are not hand-picked, they are not truly even for you, and there is no luck or fate that you do not make for yourself using the abilities you were born and built to craft and wield. Those who live carelessly, striving only for ease and the lowest common denominator, they are living on scraps and leavings, and many of them actually consider those scraps to be fate smiling on them when it turns out not to be awful.

And they delude themselves. For we were given the power to make ourselves into greater minds and beings by our own will alone, and I personally believe that to elect not to live in honor of those capabilities of growth, expansion, of a horizon that forever moves back at pace with you to always extend your potential... to not do so daily would be to spit at the feet of whatever you consider to be your creator. Thanks for the boundless capability, but I am satisfied with reality television. With thinking as little as possible whenever convenient. With teaching those around me over time that I will complain and fight you if you should bring the greater-weight training dumbbells of complexity and intrigue into my day.

This is how we choose how remarkable we will ultimately be, or fail to ever become. Not with a bang, but with silence and wordless assent in the face of Life's whims. And to that, I defiantly say:

So yeah. That's what I was thinking about recently. What have you been thinking about recently, Walking Buddy? Tell me below, won't you? I want to sit on the ocean shore in your mind, since you've been so kind as to humor me and join me in mine.

I want to tell you next about the first night I spent in the hospital, that longest, darkest night of my Life to date. But we can do that next time, can we not? This is probably enough realization and heavy pseudo-philosophy for one day. For now, let's nap awhile.

The tumbleweeds, I feel confident betting, will wait patiently for us.

- Gabriel, Space Cowboy of the Mind

10 - From Bad Old to Bad News, and Rising Above Despair

"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."

Don't worry. It's just me. Didn't mean to wait quite this long between posts, and I know I weigh a bit less and have a lot less hair now... I probably would make a sight walking out of the fog in the quiet hours of the morning, were these walks we were going on less metaphorical.

I am no real stranger to the dark and the mists, you'll find.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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