Karhu on sisukas nainen.
Karhu on sisukas nainen.
My friend Chelsea, who is learning Finnish, told me that today. It means, they said, Bear is a woman with sisu. Sisu, per Chelsea, is doing the hard thing that needs doing because it needs doing.
Thank you, my Finnish ancestors, for getting it.
We moderns of my increasingly superannuated generation might refer to it as “touching the puppethead,” which is a They Might Be Giants reference. “Do the dumb things you gotta do. Touch the puppethead.”
Or, and Geralt of Rivia might express it,
Today is Sunday, and it’s a little before 3 o’clock (it’ll be after by the time I send this) and to be honest I am already dreading getting up to go trek through the icy wastes tomorrow to go get irradiated. I was feeling a little silly about my medical trauma, honestly—the oncology center I go to is full of nice, kind people who are very gentle with me, and the treatments are a little chilly and fraught but they don’t hurt. The side effects aren’t fun but I’m pretty sure my amygdala can’t make the connection between lying on a table and feeling sunburned in some of my pink bits hours later.
I’m always pretty mindful of the fact that lying in Medusa’s embrace is not unlike holding very, very still so the Alien Queen doesn’t notice you and rip your face off. It’s surreal and fraught to think about how potentially deadly she is.
Cancer treatment is a mind-bender.
And I would really like my life back. I’d like to stay up past 8 pm; I’d like to not have to schedule my entire week around being shot five times with a particle canon. And I’d really like to not have to go through this treatment while the endless surf of the ‘rona crashes around us, sucking the sand out from under my feet, requiring extra safety precautions and meaning that I can’t have a support human with me for any of this.
The thing that is saving my life provokes anxiety now.
That is suboptimal.
(One particular hell of doing this now is that, as some of you probably know, I have been marking my treatments with selfies. One reason for this is to try to demystify the process and encourage anybody else who might have to face it, which—statistically speaking—is 2/5ths of us over the course of our lifetimes. So if I can show people that this is survivable, more of them may seek screening and treatment, and approach it with better courage.
It’s not the one with your name on it you have to watch out for. It’s the five hundred thousand marked occupant.
Anyway, I kind of feel like every fucking day somebody will show up in my Twitter mentions in re those selfies, condescendingly telling me that I should be wearing a rated mask. I am becoming increasingly less polite to these folks, as it happens, because
I am. I am wearing two masks. The cloth one goes over the rated mask, keeps it clean, and helps it fit more closely. The cloth mask not only looks nicer: it can be laundered. So my (once again hard to find) KN-95s last longer and provide better protection.
In all of the selfies I post, I am standing in a damn parking lot.
It’s really fucking rude to police the behavior of strangers on the internet. Especially strangers who are dealing with treatment for a life-threatening illness. Who told these people it was any of their business?
I’ve also found myself having to set some pretty clear boundaries about pushy toxic positivity and people attempting to mansplain my own medical condition and its treatment to me (often incorrectly.) I’m trying not to be too rude, but you would think that folks would have enough theory of mind to put their need for reassurance on folks other than the one dealing intimately with the crisis.
Hah, who am I kidding, of course not.
But it’s not like anything is easy right now for any of us, of course. 2020 part III is only just getting rolling, we’re all traumatized as fuck, and if any of us aren’t behaving reactively 90% of the time it’s down to a lot of therapy and possibly some helpful medication.
So I’m anxious and stressed and overwhelmed and having a heck of a time focusing. I’ve actually put The Folded Sky aside for a while and am focusing on a fun side project because I don’t have the attention span or intellectual capacity for a Big Serious Book right now. If I were superstitious, I’d wonder if the White Space series was cursed—so far while trying to write these I’ve had the 2016 election (Ancestral Night), the pandemic (Machine, though at least I had the first draft done but then I was stuck editing a book about a hospital in crisis in early 2020. That was fine.), and now the cancer diagnosis.
Who knows what fresh hell Shipwreck Star will bring?
Anyway, I’m still here. Clinging to reasonable mental health by my fingernails. Watching a lot of waterfall loops and beaches on youtube while I work. Wedging a couple of hours of writing into my truncated day. Prioritizing exercise and sleep so my oncology nurse won’t look disappointed at me and read me self-care lecture #35b.
And there are some good things about the cancer diagnosis. More on that on the rock to follow.
Stay safe out there, folks.
Best,
Bear