It’s on you.

That is where it starts. That is where it ends.

It’s on you and what you want, and how hard you are willing to hustle, and how relentless you are going to be when they tell you to give up. 

Because people will tell you to give up.

They’ll look at you with crooked faces. They won’t understand your drive. And they are going to look to bring you down because they don’t know any better. They haven’t had the guts to go for it themselves and so they will try to tell you no. Impossible. Not worth the time.

Forget them. In the nicest, sweetest way possible, forget them and all the little barriers and boundaries they try to place on this life of yours.

Wake up. It’s your life.

You owned it yesterday. You gleaned the freedom today. Stop acting like the world runs you. Like the magazines run you. Like all of the folks who never perked their ears to really listen to you have a say in what you are going to do with these footsteps of yours.

It’s yours. You’re free.  Are you gonna start running towards it?

Don’t wait. Don’t stand in the corner waiting for the direction to reveal itself. Just. Start. Sprinting.  Peace will flood in when it’s right. But you have to move to find the peace. Peace comes through footsteps, I promise.

Think about what stopped you yesterday. Who was that person? What were they afraid of? And why did they govern you for so long? You’ve got one chance. You’ve got one shot. The world won’t cry if you never use it. It’s on you. Don’t make the universe regret you.

Look around. Forget “the box.”

Forget what you “think” the world is all about. Forget this, forget that. Forget the status update. Forget the selfie.

Here is what the world is really all about: Humility. People. People helping other people. People trying to make this hard thing, this impossible thing, more graceful for others. That is where the joy is. That is where the peace is. That is the beauty of every thread of life: we were never designed to go this thing alone. We were born with spaces in our fingers and you were born to go out and find the ones who fits in your spaces Oh So Well. 

Strive to do good. Strive to be the best version of yourself. Reflect. Learn from the Yesterday that made you feel weak. Stop letting people bend and break your heart. Play the music louder. Scream if you need to. Walk away from that toxic person who never had your goodness at the forefront of their mind. Walk away. Your goodness will be at the forefront of any mind that loves you fiercely, boldly, with no sense of tomorrow. You deserve that. I deserve that. The best of it.  You’ve got to learn to want that for yourself.

Learn to stand in front of the mirror without cringing. Throw off the chains of your secrets; don’t let them prison up your mind any longer. Let it out. Say the damn things that you have needed to say. Make them good. Make them worth someone turning their head to listen to you.

You’ve got a voice.

Most people would kill to have one. So learn how to use it. Start. Start small, start slow, start however you want. But start. Don’t go to the ground never having used that voice of yours for something good, something worthy, something that thickened your skin & buckled your knees & ramshackled your heart.

Screw December 31st and the resolutions you’ve stacked away in the closet for the start of a New Year and 12 bells clanking at midnight. It Starts Now. It should have started five minutes ago. It starts with a single question that turns out to be the answer to everything:

 Are you worth it enough to start?

“Hey… it’s me. I hope you still know who ‘me’ is. I think you do, but its been a while. Almost six years.”

Five Years. Nine Months. Fourteen Days. But who’s counting, really?

“And normally I wouldn’t call you, because we haven’t talked… and you’ll think I am crazy for even trying. But the world just might end in an hour and I thought this might be the best time, or the only time, to catch up. You know… Before it all ends.

And nothing that I am saying right now is making much sense at all but I just called to ask how you are doing. It’s funny, I’ve been waiting to ask you that for nearly six years and it takes an 89-year-old preacher predicting that the world is going to end in an hour for me to actually find some kind of spine to call you up and just ask you.”

I play over what I will say in my head.

I am getting ready.

I am going to call you at 5p.m. today. 

December 21, 2012. 5:00p.m.

One hour before the world is destined to end a girl will find the courage to call a boy after six years. Before earthquakes tumble through hometowns and destroy playgrounds from childhood and take  down old oak trees that still play home to abandoned tree houses crooked up in their branches.

And I am going to ask, “How are you?”

How. Are. You.

Three anvils coming off the tongue.

“I feel kind of silly, just blubbering to your voicemail. But I have been telling myself for the last three months that the world would end today because, well, if I didn’t then I would probably never call. I wouldn’t search for a reason. And I think one of us has really needed to call the other. I could be wrong. But…but…”

For the first time in 22 years, my mouth will fail me when I finally call. Completely fail me. For I know I’ll want to say Ten Thousand Things all at once but I am already stuck with the task of saying them One by One.

“I don’t listen to the Beatles on Sunday anymore; that was kind of your thing. And my hair colour has changed three times since I last saw you but maybe you saw it on Facebook. Most people still keep in touch on Facebook. That’s how I find out about all our friends’ engagements and baby showers at least. Crazy; thought that might be us.

And I haven’t forgotten your birthday. I know I haven’t called or said anything but I never forgot it. To be honest, I still get these nervous rashes sometimes when someone even brings up your name…. I finally learned how to kayak.”

I watch the numbers on the clock skip forward. Past five. Half Hour until the World Ends.

“I hope you are doing well. Really. I have only ever want the best for you but I think that wish got lost somewhere in the last few years. I hope you’ll know it now. I saw your Aunt Marge last month. She might have told you that though. I really should have called years ago; that fact is not lost on me.”

But a boy can cast a crazy spell on a girl’s fingers when it comes time to gather up bravery by the arm load and make those fingers crawl toward the keypad and tap out his number. An area code is suddenly heavy. The number itself is nearly impossible to dial.

“I haven’t decided if I want you to call me back when you get this. There will probably only be a few minutes left. So don’t bother. Or maybe bother. If you feel like it. But promise me, promise me, that you won’t say you miss me. Don’t find a way to plop that sentence into one of my seven inboxes either. Because suddenly you’ll be filling all my spaces again. And it won’t last ten seconds before you pull away and begin apologizing for the mess.”

This Muddy Mess called You & Me. Sometimes Us. Rarely We. Lately, these days, They & Them. Two People wandering far, far away from You & Me.

The minutes sprint towards 6:00p.m. I close my eyes. I wait.

“And please don’t call me back asking to know what happened to Us ten minutes before the world goes ending.”

6:00, 6:01, 6:02,

“I can tell you how it all began: We were young. We knew nothing at the time but everything in the moment. We tried. We fought. We stumbled. We didn’t know better. We wanted it to work. We wanted it so bad.“

6:03, 6:04, 6:05,

“Life got harder. Time taught us lessons. Pain. Jealousy. Foolishness. Resentment. Don’t you remember? They all showed up to throw a Bon Voyage party for the two of us.

You chose south. I needed north. You were moving. I was shaking.”

6:06, 6:07, 6:08,

“We really shouldn’t spend the last ten minutes before the world ends tying all the reasons behind our own ending to red balloons. Letting them go. Watching them float up to the Solar System. We’d be left with only one reason.”

6:09, 6:10.

“We both needed exits. And they needed to be graceful. I would not cry this time. You would not call. We’d grow bigger someday. But we had to learn to do it on our own.”

Silence. Nothing. No ground shaking. No world crumbling.

I was going to call you at 5p.m. today.

An hour before the world ended and I was going to call you. 

I was going to ask, “How are you?”

I am sorry I never called. I am still wondering how you are.

It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit their and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. And I'm going to figure out what that is. And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn't do or what they didn't know. I don't know. I guess there could always be someone to blame. It's just different. Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it's okay to feel things. I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. I feel infinite.

I received a letter the other day.

It was the kind of letter that is painful to read because it stirred up old feelings and made me believe, for a mere moment or two, that I was right back in the muds of my yesterday. That, at any moment, I could be vulnerable to pulling the thread that would lead to my unraveling once again.

I stood still, I put the phone in my pocket, I breathed in to read:

“I’m tired of feeling like this but cannot seem to break the cycle of blah. Part of me does not want to get better because I don’t want to get better just to fall apart again. How can I even begin to find something else to define me, when I feel so empty right now? Not that I expect you to answer or know the answers. I’ve had enough disappointment to know that no one has any answers. It’s just kind of a relief to be able to tell someone, and talk about it. That’s all I want to do anymore–talk about how upset I am. How angry I am. Am I even a good person anymore?”

He dumped his feelings upon the page.

I felt like I showed up to clean up the wreckage with just a bucket and a mop. But more than his stories and pains and his questions hitched to a prayer for answers, I felt my own emotions rushing back. I began nodding my head. I sucked back the tears. And I thought, “Goodness, I never had the courage to admit I felt this way. Ever.”

Instead, when my own life carried the same echoes of his print on the page, I ushered myself into a life of writing letters to others and I covered my wounds with thin lined paper. I never faced the reality or taught myself this truth (this truth would have changed everything from the beginning): Loneliness is quite capable of swallowing us whole. And Loneliness will think to do a lot of things but it will never think to spit us back up until we look around and realise that we have never been Alone.

Alone & Loneliness–they are two different things. One is thick and the other is a myth. We have never been alone, not a day in our lives. What kind of devil hissed this lie in our ears? Yes, we have felt tender. Yes, we have felt defeated. But no, we have never been alone so much as we have refused to let the others in.

Anyone who knows me–knows the heart of me, and the bone of me, and the bends of my smile–knows why I really started writing.

It was not some strange aficionado for stationery. Never a day in my life have I ached to bring the art form of letter writing back to fullness. It wasn’t a racing heart for cursive & curves on a page. It was a fear that I was very much alone in this world. It was a fear that I might never feel whole again. It was fear that not a single soul needed my footprints, my input, my laughter. It was a crippling belief that I would live and die and I would never have made noise in this world.

I fell apart and the writing just happened. And even in the scripting of hundreds of these letters, the falling-apart-ness never felt so robust, like it was going to be the end of me every single day.

And so, when this letter arrived in my mailbox the other week, that same familiar helplessness curled into my knees like a little boy gasping for his mothers closeness. For a second I almost felt as though I was standing naked in the middle of the post office. Wanting to cry. And curl. And surrender.

In the moment when the tears are dripping down your cheeks and you feel hollow and sucked dry, you are not alone. I know it feels otherwise. Trust me, I know it feels otherwise.

But Aloneness is something you need to admit. You need to talk of it. You need to speak it out into the air before it grows claws & legs & fangs on the inside and silences us into thinking that never a soul has tread on this lonely soil before. Every single one of us– short or stout, blue-eyed or kissed by the hollow of hazel– can tell stories of Loneliness. I know we’ve got so many of them. We could build cities out of stories of loneliness. There would be bridges and fountains and libraries and cafes made with the bold stackings of Loneliness.

The first step is to unravel it. To admit it. To go no more seconds, no more minutes, no more hours, thinking you are called to harbouring emptiness alone. It’s not true. It is simply not true.

And hey, if you ever just need to let the loneliness drip out of you, you have my address.

Xz

Things end.

We grow up knowing this. Anything that is good surely cannot last forever. Anything worthwhile and special to us relies on the fact that it has some kind of ending point. An expiration date.

We can convince ourselves that good byes don’t exist and that we can hold time in the palm of our hand and dictate when it will stop and when it will go. But be warned, a sad reality awaits around the corner when another ending comes to sit at our feet.

We need to live with the ending in mind. If I have learned anything this past year, more valuable than the medical consent forms I signed or the inner processes that I was taught in a doctors office, it is that when we keep the ending in the picture the story line becomes all the more sweeter.

When we keep the ending in mind, we start to think “why not.”

When we keep the ending in mind, we start to say “we should.”

When we keep the ending in mind, we forget the “I will find time later,” or the pushing of people to the back burner.

When we keep the ending in mind, every moment becomes special.

When we keep the ending in mind, we remember that these days are not to be played with, they are to be treasured and used.

Now I dont ask you to treat your life like a story book with your thumb placed on the last page, but I do encourage you to look at the people all around you, today and tomorrow and think about how much you value their presence. What would life be like without them? Would you be the same person? Have they taught you something that you would not have learned otherwise? Do they know this?

We should always be mindful of the fact that we cannot slap timers on peoples’ backs and expect them to stay forever. Life does not work that way. Some endings come when we least expect them. Some endings are known from the beginning.

Either way there is no excuse. There is no excuse for not telling someone how much they mean to us. There is no excuse for not making time for the people that we love. There is no excuse for not building relationships that make saying good bye so hard to do. I have decided that I would much rather have a memorable experience, one that I can hold close to my heart rather than one that I held back from because I knew it would end too soon.

Keep the ending in mind, not because it makes life seem cruel but because it’s there. But don't let the ending get in the way of starting something or letting something grow. The ending should remind us that this moment is sweet and once in a life time. This moment will never be duplicated. We should never take the time we have been given and the people that we have been blessed with for granted.

Forget the clock on the wall.

Go hug your friends. Call your family. Let people know how you really feel.

Things end. Don’t let the fact hinder you, let it remind you of what is really and truly important.

This post is dedicated to Freya. Today we found our ending point but have already forged a new beginning. Let the world be your playground. You are ready.  

There once was a little boy who genuinely believed he could read the whole entire set of the World Book Encyclopedia. From A to Z. He would sit curled up in a fort he had made, with Volumes D and E longing to be read, planted deeply in the heart of the Congo as it jumped off the pages to take shelter in the mind of this little boy.

He wanted to know everything. The way the world worked. Why the stars only came out only at night. Every event of Buz Aldren's life. The customs and cultures of each country on the map hanging outside his bedroom. Perhaps if he could know everything, that could make up for all the things he could not know just yet.

How he would grow up.

Where he would go to university.

How the world might decide to open its arms up to him.

If he could let his mind dance along the pages of an encyclopedia, then it might never long to stray into the crevices of the facts that he could not yet hold in the palm of his hand.

We are in an age and era where we can literally know anything and everything with the click of a mouse and touch of the scroll bar. How that little boy's heart would have fluttered if he had Google at that age. Knowledge is at our very fingertips, the possibilities are absolutely endless.

But when it comes to our futures and our plans, that is something we cannot type into Google and find it waiting for us somewhere amidst the 63,490,402 results. Sometimes life makes us wait. We want to kick and scream, but no matter our rant, life will still make us wait.

I am in a state of limbo right now. You know the kind? Where you are hanging between the chapter of your life that you have precariously been writing for so long but you can see the second, even more eventful, chapter looming on the horizon. I can almost say for certain where I am going next year, but am not positive enough where I am ready to scream it out.

But this week has been a lesson for me (oh life, how cute and funny you are for using instances like this one to teach me lessons… NOT!). This week was one in which I was supposed to learn FOR CERTAIN where I would be going next year. But like that awful brat in the toy store who lets out blood curdling screams over every shiny gadget that he thinks is vital to his life, we cannot always get what we want. At least not when we want it. 

It’s good that it happened this way.

It is good when things transpire that keep us in check and remind us to “pump the brakes” and be patient. We need to be reminded every once in a while that life is not as simple as typing our questions into a search engine and pulling out an answer in .002 seconds. It reminds us that no matter how fast-paced and high-speed we can potentially make every aspect of our lives, the real stuff will still make us wait like a little child on Christmas Eve.

And for me, that is reason enough to believe that this life is not about knowing every little thing that we possibly can. It is not all about insisting on reading several volumes of the Encyclopedia. Because we live, and I mean really live, in the unknown. In What Is Not Yet Certain. And How It Makes Us Feel.

So I need to become a little more patient. I need to realise that life is still happening even when all plans are not set and ready. If it was not this, then it would be something else.

But that little boy, the one that I left sitting in his fortress, made of sheets and couch cushions, for this entire entry (and I sure he doesn’t even notice), I think he and I are thinking the same thing right now. Isn’t it grand and isn’t it exciting to have something to wait for, to have something to look forward to.

If Mr. Forrest Gump is right, and if life really is a box of chocolates, well then throw out the map on the box because I am ready and waiting to see what is going to happen next…

There will be them days when all that will seem reliable is a chunky cable knit sweater hanging in your closet that, to your own knowledge, has never let you down before.

On them days, pull the wool over your head, push up the cowl neck, and invest all your faith in stitching and a chunky sweater.

There will be them days when you wish you could pull sentences from the sky, make words out of treasures you’ve found while sifting through the Lost & Found bin, to tell a person how you really feel. But all that will come out are fragments.

Incomplete.

Sentences.

You.

Don’t.

Know.

How.

To.

Complete.

On them days, find a sweet rhythm in the stuttering and the stammering. Simply delight in the person who makes the simplest syllables–I miss you, I love you, I need you– the hardest to recite. Maybe even say this: You Make All the Letters In My Alphabet Shake. The Q’s Quiver. The R’s Rattle. (they’ll find you truly poetic then.)

There will be them days when the only adoration you get is from a John Mayer song that he recorded seven years ago about sons. And you’ll think to yourself, Wouldn’t it be lovely to be the boy who puts the colors inside of the world? On them days, keep your earphones plugged in until the end of the song, until Mr. Mayer tells you straight, “boys would be gone without warmth from a woman’s good, good heart.”

There will be them days where the Missing gets thick.

Thicker than molasses. Thicker than the chocolate current that took Augustus Gloop down in Wonka’s headquarters. You’ll curse songs on the radio that bring the Girl You Thought to Miss back. Your bones will ache for conversations where her name sits beside more than just some past tensed verbs.

On them days, let the Missing keep you.  People will tell you not to look at old photographs or cry over love letters;  I say, get yo’ salty groove on but promise to let it go at the end of the night. For your own good. For the doors that need to close before God props open that window people always talk about. We are human beings… looking back undoubtedly gets laced somewhere in our DNA, even if it seems to hold the nutritional value of chewing gum.

There will be them days when all you will wish for is someone who knows your name.

You’ll grow tired of being The Guy on the Train. The Young Gentleman in the Cafe. On them days, give people a good mystery. Find that girl with the notepad and glasses. Sit down right on her lap, swipe a hand across her cheek and put a pencil between your teeth. And then get up. And walk off the train.

Give people a reason to write you into story lines and poems that gets recited in the underground coffee shops of Sydney. Make her wonder if your name is Ryan, Matthew, Hayden, Alexander. Anything but the letters your mother stacked alongside one another to call you home when the street lights came on.

There will be them days when you wish to be anything but.

Anything but here. Anything but the guy whose skin you woke up inside. And you’ll only dream of curling up in balls & corners, waiting for the night to take you back to bed again.

On them days, breathe. Recognise that you’re human. Handhold a latte that’s sweeter than your usual pick. Purse it between two hands and just feel. Whatever it is. However raw or painful or distracting it wants to be. Just let it wash over you. Don’t try to even push it out the way.

There will be them days when all you have the strength to do is sit–square in the middle of the kitchen table that still holds your initials from childhood– and pair spoonfuls of peanut butter with a carton of vanilla bean ice cream. One more bite, that’s it. Just one more bite.

On them days, go for creamy instead of chunky. Go until the gentle reminder pushes its way inward: Food won’t heal you. Food won’t fix you. Put the Big Spoon down, Little One. I love you too much to watch this pain.

There will be them days when you’ll scrape the paint right off of your fingers. Freckles of Gold and Blue falling to the floor of the car. And you’ll look down at your hands in discouragement. What do you want of me? The question will sit in your throat. What am I here for?

On them days, take out a piece of paper and write it down. All The Places Your Hands Have Been. The letters they’ve written. The wrists they’ve touched. The wounds they’ve bandaged. The children they’ve held. The stories they’ve grasped in their Tiny Palms.

And marvel… just marvel at the good Two Hands can bring to a world in need.

Then place those Hands of Yours upon your hips. Pull up the cowl of your chunky wool sweater once again. Go outside. And face the world.

“I have feelings for her,” he said. “They’re real.”

The smoke from the bonfire hissed and tangled with my hair as I watched him wring his hands in circular motion, as if his mama had just told him to wash them good. Soap. Water. No skimping. Germs, they be a killer.

The flames cackled. We sat face to face. The pockets of people around us all cloaked in heavy conversation. Laughter. Their voices buzzed by concoctions of vodka & rum & fruity summer cocktails.

“So what do I do?”

It occurs to me that this feeling doesn’t overwhelm him so often. That it is not every day that he lets the good girl in to take up cushion space in his heart. He’s nervous for the first time in a very long time. His steps have become more careful. His heart takes to guarding. His speech turns to stumbling. Ah, the seeds of someone who might just be madly in love by morning if only they’d let themselves go.

“You tell her,” I say back.

You tell her.

Not in a text. Not even on the phone. You tell her when, and only when, you can see the green in her pupils. The birthmark on her neck. You tell her when your palms are sweaty and your words don’t feel like they hold an ounce of eloquence. You tell her, even when the whole thing could collapse at any moment on any one of your syllables. She might reject you. She might turn away. But you need to say it all the same.

You don’t go back.

To being just friends. To holding it inside. A smart girl will know that a friendship doesn’t work when one of the two is willing to give up worlds & go extra miles & endure sleepless nights for the other.That’s not friendship. That’s blaring, stupid love and it is completely & utterly worth it when two walk towards it with open hands. So even if she turns you down, you don’t sink back into “friendship.” You know those feelings ain’t packing bags. Ain’t hitchhiking to Nebraska. You tell her and risk the whole of it all.  & if it isn’t her, some good girl is gonna love you better.

You hold her.

Her hand. The small of the back when Michael Buble is on and she’s dancing on the toes of your dress shoes in the middle of the living room. You get all wrapped in the scent of her hair. You hold that same hair back on those rare but wild nights. You already know the kind. Yes, you do, because you were crazy to think there wouldn’t be a night with too much tequila and banter. You hold her. All the parts of her. The secrets she has saved for you. The dreams. The fears.The Gold & the Glue to a story that becomes glittered with Us & We. Never again just you & her.

You stay.

When dishes break. When snot is on the sofa. When the honeymoon period ends. The finances grow frail. When Life gets unruly, as she always often does, you suck in, breathe deep and you work it out. You man up & work it out.

You recognise.

That what you feel is very good. That we– the fleshy messes that we are– were made for these kinds of feelings. The Overwhelming. The Anxiety. The Goodness of Falling in Love. In Finding a Someone Who Soon Becomes Your Only One.You let the feelings own you for a little while, break you down to dust for a girl who weakens your knees in the very best way. You recognise. Not everyone has this. Most people want this. They might be lying if they tell you different. You recognise that it is good, very good. The Best Stuff in Life.

You be good to her.

That’s it. That’s all. If ever you need a starting point, a middle grounds, a point of punctuation, it. is. this: You be good to her. Always & always.

On your mark, get set... 
A million miles past the finish line
My heels lift, at this imaginary starting line. 
The trigger slips; my heart was racing well before its time. 

Time's running out, it's always running out on me, 
As the road up ahead disappears. 

Though it's all been said, and this empty dictionary is all that's left, 
I'll try to change the world in a single word. 
My hands are shaking, ready or not. 
Invisible ink well it's all I've got. 
So I'll concentrate and pick from these barren trees. 

'Cause time's running out, it's always running out on me, 
Every road I discover disappears under my feet - 
Some call it reckless, some call it breathing. 

Have I said too much, or not enough? 
Is it overkill or is it giving up, 
Just to measure out the distance of an echo's reach? 
If it's all broken mirrors and a chance roll of the dice, 
Then I'll risk for a glimpse of accidental light. 

'Cause time's running out, it's always running out on me, 
And every road I've discovered disappears under my feet - 
I call it breathing.
 

Bright and early,
Through the curtains,
The sun comes pouring in.
Filling glasses up with diamonds
Tiring where I've been
It's all trigger and effect.
Dominoes at their best.

In the end I'm told it taught me everything I know.
That the wreckage left behind, will somehow make me grow.
But why couldn't I have been safe from the start?
Soundly asleep.

The warmth of blankets makes me nervous.
I'd rather catch a cold.
Like sparks and matches, blink, you'll miss it,
The futures up in smoke.
Though dust has settled,
I smell the ashes buried in my clothes.
It's all trigger and effect, I know...
Dominoes at their best.

In the end I'm told it taught me everything I know.
When the fire took our home, I lost part of my soul.

From the ground up I'll keep building houses into homes.
If trust is a ribbon,
Then patience ties it in a perfect bow.

Xxz

There is a dreadful routine to chemotherapy. It is a predictable poison. After my first few rounds of treatment, the newness faded away to reveal an awful realness. Contrary to what I hoped, chemotherapy was not an extracurricular activity. It was a full-time job.

My life has become synced to a chemotherapy calendar. Each month means a new treatment (a 28-day cycle, which I can do from home, with doctor’s visits throughout). Instead of November, my calendar read: Round Two. (I’m currently in the middle of my seventh round).

I have become an expert at predicting when side effects and symptoms will set in. It’s a ghoulish monthly party — and the guests arrive on time: nausea, vomiting, chills, exhaustion, fever, mouth sores, pain, infections, and emergency hospitalisations.

The Clockwork of Chemotherapy

Despite the “clockwork” of this cycle (start chemo — wait for symptoms — get sick — go to the hospital), at the start of every new round I convince myself that the outcome will be different. This time, I am going to be stronger than my treatment. This time, my mind will outwit my body.This time. 

But over the course of the past ten months, not once have I “won” this secret battle with myself.

The same goes for my current round of chemotherapy. The first day of this treatment started off badly. I went to the movies with some friends. I realised the instant we pulled up to the theatre that I had forgotten my anti-nausea medicine. But it was a Friday night and I hadn’t been out with friends for weeks so I decided to go anyway. Before the movie had even begun, I had already raced twice to the bathroom to vomit. I threw-up five more times, barely making it to the rubbish bin — not to mention the end credits. My friends offered, and even insisted, to take me home, but I refused. Reeling from nausea and exhaustion, I sat through all 124 minutes of We Bought a Zoo as if my life depended on Matt Damon and his sappy-but-kind-of-charming narrative about a farm of animals.

Why? I needed to feel like I could “tough it out.” I wanted to “beat” the symptoms; to take them to war.

Toughing It Out: The Battle Language of Cancer

Where does this mentality come from?

The cancer world is awash in battle language. Like mantras, our culture repeats these war-like phrases over and over. A few weeks after my diagnosis I even saw a poster that said: Fuck Cancer. Pithy! Cancer books love to traffic in this take-no-prisoners language. They talk about cancer “warriors” engaged in a battle for health and they encourage patients to visualise chemotherapy as a sea of soldiers entering the blood stream to fight off the enemy disease. In a lot of ways, it’s an attractive line of thinking. It’s the hero’s journey mixed with the glorification of war. It’s the us-versus-them theme — except in this case it’s us-versus-us. Cancer is one’s own civil war.

My reaction to challenges has always been to fight hard for what I want. I have always prided myself as a “doer.” In this way I’m probably like a lot of my peers: I like to compete. I like to push myself. I like to win. When I started treatment, it seemed like a no-brainer: I was going to take on cancer like I’d taken on everything else before this.

But as much as I “battle,” I haven’t outwitted chemotherapy and its punitive, punctual side effects. As I write this, I am deep-in-the-bone tired, nauseated, and I haven’t left my bed in two full days. It is difficult not to equate sickness or weakness with a feeling of failure. 

Shedding the ‘Win-Lose’ Mentality

Today, as I finish the last day of this most recent round of treatment, I can officially say that I’ve “lost” once again — but I haven’t lost in the spiritual or medical sense. Instead, I’ve lost in the Manichean world of “win-lose” thinking. And I’m glad I did. I am realising that “beating” cancer isn’t about winning or losing. I wish it were, but it just isn’t.

I’ve decided to take my new “fight” to the win-lose mentality itself. The battle I’ve been waging in the past months has been centered on fear and anger about not being able to do what I once could. In short: feeling entirely unproductive. And for someone who defines himself by doing, this can seem like a pretty bad fate.

Today, instead of pursuing the impossible defeat of mostly unavoidable side effects and symptoms, I’ve decided that my challenge will be to develop a new brand of acceptance: a strong acceptance, a muscular acceptance, but still: acceptance.

Acceptance is not supposed to be part of the lexicon of successful people. Or so we are often told. But I’ve learned that you can’t fight your way out of every problem. The solution to some challenges is not to charge full speed ahead. If this approach feels counter-intuitive, (which it often does), I try to remind myself that chemotherapy, too, is illogical on its face: you are poisoned in order to be cured.

I realise now that the experience of having cancer is more of a tricky balancing act between being proactive about your medical condition, while simultaneously accepting and surrendering yourself to the fact that — for the time being — you can’t change your reality as quickly as you’d like to. Acceptance is not giving up — far from it. But like a prisoner in handcuffs, the best way out may be patience. Trying to wriggle your way out only wastes precious energy. And it can make you go mad.

Day 1

No matter what I do — skip breakfast, set multiple alarms or go to sleep early the night before — I always seem to arrive at the hospital exactly 30 minutes late for my appointments. Today is Monday, and it’s the first of five straight days I’ll go to the hospital to receive outpatient chemotherapy injections. Then I get three weeks off. Then another week of chemo. And so on. My doctors say this will be my routine for the next year.

My 30-minute lateness buffer has become so consistent, I’m almost proud of it. I am on time, but it’s my time. Maybe I’m secretly hoping that if I show up late enough I’ll just be let off the hook, told I can take the day off. I set out for the hospital by cab; it’s the only way I can travel, for now, because with my weak immune system, public transportation is still off limits. 

“Your eyes look red,” Abby says when I finally arrive. She’s one of my favourite nurses.

I’m just tired, I begin to tell her, which is true. I haven’t been sleeping so well lately, a mix of restlessness and staying up late watching movies. Then all of a sudden I find myself tearing up. Then full-on crying.

The crying surprises me, but I’ve been feeling down ever since I learned I would need to start chemotherapy again. My doctors say new research shows that for patients with high-risk leukemia, preventive chemo may be beneficial after a bone marrow transplant.

An attendant comes to the room to tell me that they are ready for me in the infusion suite. “I’m sorry,” I tell Abby as I start to cry again. “I’m just really tired.”

Day 2

I’m standing on a street corner in the middle of the city. I’m not feeling the effects of yesterday’s chemo, but I have a sore throat coming on. The sun is pounding down on my head. I’m feeling a little dizzy from the brightness outside, and I wish I had brought some sunglasses. (This week I have about a quarter-inch of new hair, evenly growing in.) It’s just past 9 a.m., and someone’s trying to hail a cab on each corner of the street. Welcome to Sydney. I sit down on the curb to rest. Finally I get a cab. The driver seems nice, an older man with a slight Jamaican accent.

As we speed up George Street, I catch a glimpse of a young woman cycling on a bike path. She’s about my age, tan, her blond ponytail moving in the wind. Someday I’ll ride a bike, too. When I’m well enough. But for some reason I find myself thinking about how silly I would look in a bike helmet. A sick, skinny guy with bony elbows and peach fuzz for hair – and a ridiculous oversize helmet.

“Hel-lo, anyone there?” the taxi driver says. We’ve arrived, and I have been lost in my thoughts. “Anyone home?” he repeats. I have this running joke in my head that when strangers ask me how I’m doing, I’ll unload a monologue about my latest cytogenetic report. But the driver is just trying to be nice. I know he doesn’t actually want me to tell him about how chemo can make a person fuzzy and scatterbrained. Or that I’ve become quasi-narcoleptic in public. “I’m just tired,” I say.

Day 3

It’s my third day of “Chemo Week.” I’m dragging a little today, but I have something to look forward to: There’s going to be a television crew filming my appointment for a project about young cancer patients.

It’s a strange thought to consider how you may look on camera when you’re receiving an injection. My arms are sore from the previous days’ injections, but I don’t want to ask to have the injection in my stomach because I feel self-conscious about baring my midriff on camera.

Having a film crew in the infusion suite is a self-conscious affair. The crew members are careful to respect the confidentiality of the setting, but I’m worried I’m creating a scene in a place where there are usually no cameras. At least there’s hope the project will be real and raw and tell true stories. One thing they’ll never relay to the audience, though, is the unmistakable smell of the hospital.

I feel the sharp pinch of the needle in the fleshy part of my left underarm. It burns for a few minutes, and then the stinging sensation is gone. I’m free to go home.

Day 4

I wake up feeling as if I’ve been hit by a truck. My sore throat is worse, and now I have a runny nose and a cough. The delayed effects of chemo are setting in. As someone with a compromised immune system, I go through a priority checklist in my head whenever I notice any symptoms. Not all symptoms are an emergency, but none can be dismissed outright. A fever higher than 38 is an instant ticket to urgent care, so I’m checking my temperature regularly now.

At the hospital, my nurse notices that my breathing is laboured, and I’m sent downstairs for a chest X-ray. It could be a problem with my lungs, a possible side effect of chemo, but it also could be nothing. I change into the robe they give me. The last time I had to wear one of these, I was in a hospital bed in the bone marrow transplant unit. I am not fond of robes.

In the X-ray waiting room, the TVs are blasting “The View.” There is a skinny boy, no older than 7, sitting across from me. A man who must be his father sits next to him. You can’t always tell the patients from the caregivers in a hospital. He looks like a relatively healthy boy. Then I see a small scar on his head, almost unnoticeable beneath short hair. He’s sticking his tongue out at his father. I hope it’s nothing too serious, but still, not a fun place for a boy to be on a sunny spring day.

Day 5

For whatever reason, the waiting room is packed today. I recognise a handful of the patients from previous visits, but you never know everyone at the hospital. There are always new faces. One girl, about my age, I’ve seen before. She is a fellow cancer patient with a different form of leukemia. I am shocked by how much her appearance has changed since I saw her last. Her face is gaunt, and she looks weak. She tells me she has just learned that her disease may have returned. She’s waiting to find out more.

We both say the F-word at almost the same time. I don’t swear very often, but it just comes out. There’s a pause, and then we both break into a burst of laughter at the strange harmony of this.

My name is called, and the girl offers to accompany me to the infusion suite down the hall. My injection is over in a few minutes, but as I’m getting up to leave I notice that she’s still seated, and that the nurse is setting her up for her treatment. I offer to stay, but she insists that she prefers to be alone. We exchange phone numbers. As I’m leaving the hospital, I kick myself for not insisting on staying with her. I wanted to give her a hug, at the very least. But there’s an unspoken no-contact rule between patients for fear of getting each other sick.

After five days of appointments, I’m ready to climb into bed.

I used to resent the battle metaphors associated with cancer. “Keep fighting,” people would say. “You’re going to win this war,” a friend would write in an e-mail.

I could appreciate the intent behind the word, but I just couldn’t identify. Most of the time, I didn’t feel like battling at all. I was just doing what I needed to do to have a shot at surviving. Many people told me I was brave. But I didn’t feel brave. I was simply following the orders of my doctors.

A battle, to me, suggested some kind of active combat, with weapons and soldiers by my side. But most of my cancer journey has been spent lying in a hospital bed in isolation, feeling alone and defenseless, hoping for the best. Some people like to visualise chemotherapy as a surge of soldiers entering the bloodstream to wage war on the cancer cells. But this never worked for me either.

Cancer is mostly an internal affliction. My cancer lived through my body and was completely invisible to me. It was difficult to fight an enemy that I couldn’t see, feel or touch. After finding out I had cancer, I didn’t feel like a fighter. I was scared and realised I knew almost nothing about a disease that had a big head start on me.

But last week, I woke up feeling frail, tired and seasick in my own bed. It was a dreary Friday morning, and it was the last day of my seventh round of chemotherapy. I simply could not conceive of getting out of bed and dragging myself to Prince Of Wales Private Hospital for my treatment. It wasn’t because of my physical symptoms. I’d been much sicker before. But after a year and a half of nonstop chemotherapy treatments and a bone-marrow transplant, — for the time being — my doctors were advising more chemotherapy to prevent a relapse.

The road ahead seemed never-ending. I had reached my limit: No more bone marrow biopsies. No more doctor visits. No more antinausea medication. I wanted to be done. For the first time since my diagnosis, I felt like giving up and quitting.

Then I surprised myself. I knew that realistically, I couldn’t abandon the chemotherapy because it was the only possible way to a cure. So I gave myself a pep talk using the very same battle metaphors that had annoyed me in the past. I imagined myself as a warrior in battle — both with my cancer and with myself. The image empowered me and motivated me to get out of bed and go to the hospital to receive the last injection of this round of chemo. During the cab ride, I told myself, over and over: “Don’t quit. Keep fighting.”

It worked, and it made me feel better. But this is the Catch-22 for a cancer patient: We must poison ourselves in the short term to hope for a cure in the long term, knowing full well we will get sicker before we get better. And the worst of it is knowing that certain types of chemotherapy can cause secondary cancers. But it’s a trade-off nearly every cancer patient accepts.

Sometimes getting through chemotherapy is all about ignoring the voice in your head that screams “stop.”

Put your dreams away for now
I won’t see you for some time
I am lost in my mind
I get lost in my mind

My mum once told me
You’re already home where you feel love
I am lost in my mind
I get lost in my mind

Oh my friend
Your wisdom is all that I need
Oh my lover
Don’t you worry ‘bout me
Don’t you worry
Don’t you worry
Don’t worry about me

How’s that bricklayin’ coming 
How’s your engine running
Is that bridge getting built
Are your hands getting filled

Won’t you tell me my lover
Cause there are stars up above
We can start moving forward

How’s that bricklayin’ coming 
How’s your engine running
Is that bridge getting built
Are your hands getting filled

Won’t you tell me my lover
Cause there are stars up above
We can start moving forward

Lost in my mind
Lost in my mind
Oh I get Lost in my mind
Lost, I get lost, I get lost in my mind
Lost in my mind
Yes I get lost in my mind
Lost, I get lost, I get lost
Oh I get lost
Oh I get

The summer sun will set she said

If you leave it up there long

Take its beams and moon-time dreams

Leave town and be gone

I guess you can call that truth

I will call it lie

I will think of times gone by 

When you and I were fine

I will hold those days up to my eye

Sometimes I don't know what you were thinking of

All I want is someone to love

Take your time and talk to him

It matters not at all

I will give you time enough 

To know him very well

I am locking down the house

Staring at the wall

All I want to do today is sleep like I once could

If you could give me that

That'd be good

Sometimes I don't know what you were thinking of

All I want is someone to love

All I want is someone to love

And you were pretty good to love

And you were pretty good to love