Fear 11-7-21

Last night at the Grand Hyatt / mtg tomorrow with Dr Golden about the Big Surg

Feeling spaced out and detached. I have a sense of detaching from the Regular world. I am so grateful that we are all having this conversation now about capitalism all the time, because that is the weird bit: it is my productivity that I am aware most of losing. I can still be present in an intimate setting, but I will be vulnerable. Maybe vulnerability and sickness are the opposite of productivity in our culture. Productivity as the measure of health feels off the mark, doesn’t it? I want health and wellbeing to be measured by hours spent enthralled or in outpourings and influxes of love.

Of course since I have been my own co-Boss with Eli, pulling away from my job is mercifully easy for me (though quite difficult for Eli to be sure). The harder thing is the pulling away from emotional steadiness as something even to strive for as a mother or a wife or coworker. I seldom achieve it anyway, of course, as I am prone to being overcome by my emotions. But right now, I am so afraid to leave my daughters in the lurch and yet cannot perform as I wish I could and the effect is something like a psychic finger trap. The more I agonize and struggle, the worse it gets.

Pulling away, getting quiet, curling up, detaching – these are all related to the process I have observed in cancer death as well. So there is a way in which the paralysis of pre-surgical anxiety mirrors the process of dying. Cancer death (as with most slow or natural death, I’d imagine) seems to be a process of diminishing energetic volume. We take up less and less space in the world until the aperture closes entirely, and we are gone. So I sense now a preamble or rehearsal of that death experience as well. It is scary, but it is also okay. That’s my report. I do not wish to die soon, even though I occasionally have my fleeting fantasy that death would be a nice and simple thing. My therapists assure me that these thoughts are normal, and not cause for alarm. I don’t let them hang around.

It’s my family that I don’t wish to leave behind. This is the BIG, hot energetic lifeline: my love for both my blood family and my chosen family. Sacred to me. Family and nature and art and intimacy are where I worship. I can see that I’ve done well to choose them, because their pull is as mighty as it comes. I would surely be dead already if my directive passion in life were money or status or hoarding something inanimate. Worshiping something that can’t love you back will kill you.

So the primary fear at the moment, yes, is that the cancer will keep coming back and back and will gain a momentum of some microscopic, unimaginable power. No matter what, though, when I return to some kind of life after surgery, that fear will abate as I reenter (to any extent) the currents of the healthy. Even if the cancer comes back again, even if it kills me, today I have faith that I will get a reprieve once more from being concerned with it. I will return to other considerations. I will return to my girls with all my emotions and my mess of love and adoration and caring.

Surgery-wise, I am not so scared today in this moment of writing. I have been in weeks past. I have walked through my fears and probably will again as it approaches. It’s okay. I can walk through it. I have so much love to fill me up.