...(re)cycling thoughts, assessing damage...

so at the risk of boring my own self, as i've been on this topic multiple times over multiple months, i find myself still extracting lessons from brain-tumor land, still discovering that as far as i've come there's still ways to go even when the last time i realized i came a long way and didn't think i could go any further. these moments, these realizations (if that's even the right word, emergences maybe, these flashes of clarity) are not linear. there's no logical progression or footpath to follow. There are triggers but they're not absolute, they're not guarantees.

over drinks the other night w/ a dear friend, an old friend, a friend who knows me from the life of pre-brain tumor says how i look different lately, how my teeth can actually be seen when i smile, that i look like myself. i know what she means b/c i do feel diff lately for a variety of reasons (most of them creative). it was a tacit reminder of how large a chunk was extracted from me, not merely from my cavernous sinus (brain tumor joke for those in the know about the vagaries of the skullbase tumor) but me, my identity, who i was/am, how i feel, how i relate to people, spanning years.

the other night we (re)watched a film, one of those ten-best, seminal life-long films that not only shaped who i was but who i wanted to be, a film that was always a litmus test for a relationship's possibility -this is a film widely-regarded by any and all who have any connection whatsoever to cinema as capital G great but for me, this time, nothing. it meant nothing to me. it felt like a relic from a bygone era. stripped of all meaning, it sat there making points and jokes - and sputtering around, empty and irrelevant.

3 years ago this week mm and i and maxwell got in a van and headed out of boston after 2.5 long months of living in a hotel-room and getting proton beam radiation treatment. i recall a moment driving out of town along the charles river thinking "okay, now time to deal w/ X" (X here referring to a situation w/ a once-dear friend who said the absolute wrong-est thing to us at the absolute worst possible moment imaginable). But we didn't deal w/ X 3 yrs ago - somehow rearriving in portland and just managing day-to-day life was impossible enough, disorienting and alienating, like deep-space exploration - and we still haven't. It isn't punitive, it isn't rational, it just is. For the longest time I've placed most of the blame for X in the hands of the once-dear friend. Yesterday for the first time since X occurred I found myself getting angry at the brain tumor itself, recognizing my skullbase chondrosarcoma tumor - and all it subtracted - as the true villain. This is not some excusing of the friend's misdeed as much as it is channeling my emotion(s) to the appropriate place, recognizing the breadth of repercussion(s), seeing the great swaths of destruction in the wake of the explosion, dust and fragment still raining down, swirls of smoke beginning to lift. from this vantage, X was only a sliver. from this vantage, X was collateral damage...

all by way of saying: it's taken me nearly four years to get to this damage-inventory state. four years ago at about this time, i was having blurred vision, excruciating headaches. nearly four years ago at this time i was diagnosed. just look how far i've come, i find myself screaming to myself. moments later, i'll feel and scream the converse - that i'm only just now emerging from a cocoon that i was unwillingly (but self-defensively) forced to seek shelter in. Being in there for so long it became home (and part of it always will be) but slowly, steadily i feel myself returning to a different home, a welcome, familiar place...