carpe that diem divas
Much like Milhouse's dad Kirk Van Houten I am asking: Can I borrow a feeling?
Ever since I was eleven I’ve been on autopilot. Or at least, some part of me stopped engaging emotionally with the world around me. I vividly remember lying on my bed, a balmy Sunday afternoon in the north Brisbane suburb of Sandgate where I grew up right around the funky, shiny Y2K turn of the century, my legs up against the wall, watching them slide along the slates and thinking ‘I haven't felt anything in a month’ and wondering if my feelings would come back. Nothing majorly traumatic happened at this age I will say - I wasn't harmed or hurt or anything more than the standard trauma we all experience being raised by essentially two people making their best guess of any given childhood development scenario coupled with the resentment of knowing they threw the best years of their lives away not sleeping because they were keeping us alive and not living it up in Y2K mania.
They did and they didn’t come back (my feelings) and now that I am going through this slow moving, mundanely nice nightmare of a life since being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer (just in case are new here/ missed everything I have posted or you have never spoken to me) I am trying to feel everything or honestly, anything! I have been pretty clear about who I want to be through this - my absolute best self (v chill, low expectations) and to do that I want to be in tune with my values - open, honest and hopefully this will fuel my optimism. I want to feel all of the feelings, think all the thoughts and drink in the experiences of this dog of an existence and be open to every opportunity and evolution it has to offer. Which you know, I thought I was doing, simply by journaling and talking out of my butt when people talked to me about it. But then I got the news I needed my entire brain radiated to try and stop the monthly occurrence of new cancer spots to my brain and realised: I haven’t felt a fucking thing since I was eleven.
I got this wild news mere momes after I spoke to my therapist ( Kim, very lovely, very smart) and funnily enough we were focusing on how I have minimised my ~journey~ to make it easier for others to be around because I am also a huge people pleaser. Some other things I do are:
Explaining each new change or decline in positive language that makes it sound like it's going to plan: ‘Totally normal!’ ‘Expected!’
Minimising or downplaying the situation ‘Oh it doesn't hurt, there's no pain!’ (this is actually mostly true, I’m really lucky in this regard)
Dismissing or simply not mentioning the emotional impact ‘It is what is it diva!’
Avoid any regular conversation about how I feel about having cancer
I initially thought I learnt these behaviours from my Dad - certainly he does not openly talk about the day to day struggles of having a chronic health condition that has left him without his legs, but is still horse riding, driving a MANUAL car around town and in general acting as if nothing has changed and everything is fine.
But after speaking with Lovely Kim, she explained how it sounded more like a very strong coping mechanism I learnt in earlier childhood, reinforced by my role models and honed by analysing the behaviour around me like a young Kirk Van Hooty. Wild how revolutionary that very boring sentence is but that's psychology baby - basic facts blow my freakin mind.
Being the eldest out of six children, all of us being around 2 years apart and my essentially being a third, tiny parent in our house (not 100% true but a wee story I like to tell myself) I learnt from a young age that acting like a normal kid, like my siblings, would not get me anywhere when mum was literally drowning in children, working with her own mother full time and managing my Dads health and needed to get the fuck over myself and help the hell out. Also Dad was always at work and if not, at home drinking his way into a 9pm slumber or yelling at us for I guess being kids and not managing the household effectively? Anywhoozle, being emotional would not change my situation and in fact, the only thing that would help my situation was shutting that part of me down. We had a very loud, stressed out house given we had so many kids with a passion for screaming, both my parents worked full time and often late into the night and a lot of the time it did feel like Lord of the Flies.
I think my parents did a good job on me despite those challenges. It's always been important to me to know who I am, why I am and who I want to be in this lifetime and also: I've always genuinely liked myself. Yes, normal social and gendered conditioning re physical and behavioural highs and lows like any millennial born through the era of Spice Girls, 5ive, Britney & Xtina, but I've always at my core been stoked with who I am and who I want to be. I think that's more of Mum's influence than Dad’s. She would always praise my intellect, personality and way of looking at the world, would encourage me in anything I showed even a vague interest in and we always had great chit chats in the car when we were not screaming at each other - a trend that would start at 10 and continue to this very day.
Either way I've said it before and I'll say it 300 more times: I want to go through the messy work of feeling every part of this because I think it'll help me become the person I want to be so you know, worth trying especially if this is all there is, you know? Imagine getting to the end and realising you didn't try or feel or do because you were scared? That seems insanely wasteful to me.
The emotional stuff feels murky and hard however the ten rounds of radiation, to my entire brain, over ten days was certainly not. Selena my radiation doctor, was super keen to get me going and explained that I could and would experience fatigue, nausea, full hair loss including my brows and 300 other things including the potential for the radiation to turn on me the longer I live and give me the same symptoms the spots do. I was told on a Thursday and would start the following Tuesday.
When I was told, I completely shut down and could barely respond which, as a people pleaser? Totally against our code of conduct. So unprofessional. 1/10 behaviour. Howmstever, I also couldn't get warm for days, I couldn't cry or feel a danged thing, but then they put me on anti seizure meds (they make you VERY tired and VERY moody) and bumped my steroids up (imagine a fire crackling away minding its own business and then throwing kerosene and meth on it - this is what roids do to your emotions - you also can't stop eating sugar and all your weight goes to your face :)) then I got my period :) :) :) - anyway the point of this paragraph is to tell you the floodgates opened and I became a demonic pig hellbent on screaming and trying to kick a bird (???)
I have chronicled this time in my journal because apart from being tres dramatiqué I also get up to my old tricks and try to analyse and intellectualise my emotions which is a great way to not feel them - I'm pretty impressed with it though if I do say so myself - yes I love to toot my own horn, sue me! Also, during this time the only videos I could sleep to (OF COURSE! I am that gal, as IF that isn't obvious) were historical docs of Queen Victoria who was a prolific journaler and she absolutely seeped into my softly poaching brain and influenced me. What can I say we have a lot in common, least of all our round faces:
This was at a Violent Soho gig in Brisbane where someone kept doing coke farts and stinkin’ up the place. I wonder if this happened in QV’s day? SURELY IT DID, EVERYONE was on cocaine - even the children! It was medicine! They gave it to you for dinner! Wild times, but now, let’s dive into my own drug fuelled descent into madness and what I can only hope, enlightenment via Radiation Diaries.